City of Spires part 3: Crungon Walo Wide

'The Ruin' is a fragmentary Old English poem in the Exeter Book, written by an unknown Saxon poet contemplating the ruins of a Roman city. Fittingly enough, 'The Ruin' has itself been ruined, its pages partly destroyed by some ancient fire. But what remains is pretty powerful stuff.

At the start of the pandemic, as the death tolls soared and the lockdowns began, two lines from 'The Ruin' became absolutely lodged in my head.

Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas

swylt eall fornom secgrofa wera

[Slaughter ranged widely, plague days came,

Death took all the brave men away.]

The subject matter is bleak, but the verse is wonderful. (Read the first line out loud, slowly. Notice the way the first three words reach out and fall back like dying men, and the way the word 'woldagas' looms up suddenly, like Death on his pale horse rising up over the horizon.) It's an excellent early example of the 'aesthetics of ruin' I described here, mingling awe at the achievements of the ancients with sorrow at the obviously catastrophic nature of their fall. As the year has gone on, it's also become a bit of a touchstone for me in relation to the 'City of Spires' campaign.

In a response to my 'aesthetics of ruin' post, Arnold K described 'Starfighter Samwise' as 'the ruiniest thing I've ever written'. Well, City of Spires is the ruiniest thing I've ever run. It's set in a ruined city built on top of another ruined city. The population is a remnant of a remnant. The trade routes are fading ruts in the desert. The priests are all dead and the local religion consists of things that people vaguely remember hearing about in sermons from their childhood. The clockwork machines are rusting and broken. The irrigation networks have collapsed from lack of maintenance and the wells are choked with sand. There are very few real villains: just a whole lot of badly damaged people groping their way through the wreckage of their lives, with figures who initially seem terrifying repeatedly turning out to be pitiable upon closer examination. If ATWC is about evil, then City of Spires has mostly ended up being about loss. 

(One of the most effective moments in the campaign so far came with the PCs barricaded inside a ruined house, while the Weeping Lady, a blind, flying monster who haunted the city by night, scratched and clawed at the timbers. As she scratched, she kept calling out in some ancient tongue, and at last the group's scholar was able to translate her words: 'Who's there? Is anyone there? What's happening? What's happened to me?' The party's shift from seeing her as a terrible threat to just a poor, maimed, lost thing hiding in the night was very gratifying to see, even if they remain rightly wary of her capacity for extreme and indiscriminate violence.) 

As well as giving the campaign a consistent aesthetic register - rust, ash, tarnished metal, rags, rubble, malnutrition, sand - the ruination of the setting has made it much easier to work with, actual-play-wise. In true post-apocalyptic style, the armed forces of the various factions are closer to street gangs than armies. The clockwork machines are all damaged and malfunctioning. No-one has much in the way of magic, or technology, or resources, or control over anything outside their own respective patches of turf. Everything is so smashed and broken that even a handful of opportunistic lunatics like the PCs are regularly able to make a real difference. 

It's also made the hexcrawl elements I mentioned in my last post much easier to run. In a setting where everyone is just barely scraping by at the bottom of the pyramid of human needs, strengths and weaknesses tend to be obvious, and the objectives of each faction are usually of an extremely straightforward and easily legible kind. We need food. We need protection. We need to destroy our rivals. We have a field. We have a castle. We have a well. Everything is stripped down to its most elemental forms, which makes it much easier for the PCs to interact with them. Complexity can be reserved for those rare groups and individuals who have managed to drag themselves a few rungs up above the daily struggle for bare survival. 

Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas / swylt eall fornom secgrofa wera. If you want to make a setting easier to game in, hit it with a dose of the old crungon. Take all the brave men away. Turn your PCs loose in the wreckage. The setting's loss may well turn out to be the campaign's gain. 

How Walter Scott almost invented RPGs 200 years early

I recently read Walter Scott's autobiography - an unfinished fragment that I found bundled in with my grandfather's edition of Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott. Scott's fiction isn't much read these days: he wrote in an age that considered length to be a virtue in novels, and modern readers often find his works maddeningly slow as a result. But his influence is hard to overstate, and even today, when most people think of 'the Crusades' or 'the Middle Ages', what they imagine is likely to owe at least as much to Scott's novels as to actual medieval history. Fantasy fiction, in particular, owes an enormous debt to Scott, and to the fictional world of knights and kings and barons that he first popularised two hundred years ago. (The basic line of inheritance runs Walter Scott -> George MacDonald -> William Morris -> Lewis and Tolkien -> everyone else.) I was thus intrigued to discover that, as well as laying the groundwork for the subsequent invention of fantasy fiction, Scott seems to have come surprisingly close to inventing the RPG.

Scott as a young man, by Henry Raeburn.

Scott suffered a childhood illness that left him lame in one leg, excluding him from participation in the ordinary sports of the day. Instead, like many physically infirm boys before and since, he immersed himself in reading, especially in old stories of chivalric adventure. His best friend, John Irving, shared his passion for such stories. Here's how Scott describes their favourite pastime:

My greatest intimate, from the days of my school-tide, was Mr. John Irving, now a Writer to the Signet. We lived near each other, and by joint agreement were wont, each of us, to compose a romance for the other's amusement. These legends, in which the martial and the miraculous always predominated, we rehearsed to each other during our walks, which were usually directed to the most solitary spots about Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags. We naturally sought seclusion, for we were conscious no small degree of ridicule would have attended our amusement, if the nature of it had become known. Whole holidays were spent in this singular pastime, which continued for two or three years, and had, I believe, no small effect in directing the turn of my imagination to the chivalrous and romantic in poetry and prose.

This is essentially the same social context from which innumerable D&D campaigns were born two centuries later: nerdy, socially awkward teenage boys sneaking off to tell one another interminable stories of war and magic and adventure, taking turns as narrators, riffing off one another's ideas, and spending entire holidays developing the larger-than-life exploits of the imaginary heroes they created together, all while hiding from their peers from fear of ridicule. (Yeah, I know, D&D is cool now. But it certainly wasn't when I was a kid.) But it gets better: Scott's health worsened, and he spent several months stuck at home. Here's how he passed the time:

My only refuge was reading and playing at chess. To the romances and poetry, which I chiefly delighted in, I had always added the study of history, especially as connected with military events. I was encouraged in this latter study by a tolerable acquaintance with geography, and by the opportunities I had enjoyed while with Mr. MacFait to learn the meaning of the more ordinary terms of fortification. While, therefore, I lay in this dreary and silent solitude, I fell upon the resource of illustrating the battles I read of by the childish expedient of arranging shells, and seeds, and peebles [sic], so as to represent encountering armies. Diminutive cross-bows were contrived to mimic artillery, and with the assistance of a friendly carpenter I contrived to model a fortress, which, like that of Uncle Toby, represented whatever place happened to be uppermost in my imagination.

Just as Scott and Irving's story-telling sounds as though it was only a character sheet away from D&D, so Scott's re-enactment of historical battles on the floor of his own bedroom sounds as though it was only a few dice away from wargaming. The pieces were, quite literally, all there: he'd even been playing chess, itself a gamified representation of the clash between two armies. All it would have taken was for Irving to drop round one day for a visit, and for one of them to have the idea of using Scott's seed-and-pebble armies to reenact a battle from their shared stories rather than a battle from history, and for the other to glance at the nearby chess board and suggest making the battle a game rather than a predetermined narrative, and bam: fantasy RPGs and tabletop wargaming would both have been born in the 1780s.

But that's not what happened. Scott's health rallied, and his social skills improved, and he learned how to dress himself properly and stop being such a nerd all the time, and he ended up becoming a successful lawyer and novelist instead. The tiny crossbows and seashell armies and cooperative romance-writing were left behind - but not before they had instilled in him a fascination for tales of medieval adventure and daring-do that would lead him to write novels like Ivanhoe, The Monastery, and The Talisman. These novels became, in turn, the grandfathers of modern fantasy fiction, and thus the great-grandfathers of the modern fantasy RPG.

What I found most interesting about these anecdotes was their familiarity. It's hardly a surprise to discover that bookish, socially awkward, and physically infirm teenage boys have always gravitated towards fantasies of power and magic and violence, and towards idealised figures of masculine heroism with extremely strict honour codes: that was as true of Scott in the 1780s as it was of me in the 1990s, and doubtless for all the same reasons. But until I read this autobiography I would have guessed that the specific form taken by these fantasies - the knights and castles and wizards and whatnot - were more historically local, a matter of grabbing onto whatever available cultural bric-a-brac happened to fit the specifications. I was thus somewhat surprised to discover that the causality actually ran the other way around, and modern adventure stories about knights and wizards were first popularised by a man who did so because he fell in love with them during his own days as a nerdy teenager in search of escapist fantasy.

It couldn't have happened any earlier, within a cultural context in which the institutions of feudal chivalry was still held in deadly earnest: that culture first had to wax, and wane, and fall away, and become available for re-discovery and re-appropriation as a fantasy rather than a reality. Scott was a child of the Gothic revival, not of actual medieval Gothic culture. But Scott's autobiography suggests that once it was possible, at least part of its appeal stemmed from the fact that it was what we might now call 'gameable': much more easily adapted than, say, Classical mythology to improvised co-operative storytelling, or to refighting battles on your bedroom floor. And the much-remarked-upon dominance of medieval fantasy in RPGs and computer games - the fact that forms that could theoretically do anything keep gravitating back towards the same imaginative landscape of knights and wizards and castles that Scott half-excavated and half-created two hundred years ago - may have something to do with the fact that it was a landscape that was created for something very close to gaming in the first place.

I mean, tell me this doesn't sound like a scene from a D&D scenario:

"Lo, Warrior! now, the cross of red 

Points to the grave of the mighty dead; 

Within it burns a wonderous light, 

To chase the spirits that love the night: 

The lamp shall burn unquenchably, 

Until the eternal doom shall be.' 

Slow moved the Monk to the broad flag-stone, 

Which the bloody cross was traced upon: 

He pointed to a secret nook; 

A bar from thence the warrior took; 

And the Monk made a sign with his withered hand, 

The grave's huge portal to expand. 

With beating heart, to the task he went; 

His sinewy frame o'er the grave-stone bent; 

With bar of iron heaved amain, 

Till the toil-drops fell from his brows like rain. 

It was by dint of passing strength, 

That he moved the massy stone at length. 

I would you had been there to see 

How the light broke forth so gloriously; 

Streamed upward to the chancel roof, 

And through the galleries far aloof! 

No earthly flame blazed e'er so bright: 

It shone like heaven's own blessed light; 

And, issuing from the tomb, 

Shewed the Monk's cowl, and visage pale; 

Danced on the dark-brow'd Warrior's mail, 

And kissed his waving plume. 

Before their eyes the wizard lay, 

As if he had not been dead a day; 

His hoary beard in silver roll'd, 

He seemed some seventy winter old; 

A palmer's amice wrapped him round, 

With a wrought Spanish baldric bound, 

Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea; 

His left hand held his Book of Might; 

A silver cross was in his right; 

The lamp was placed beside his knee: 

High and majestic was his look, 

At which the fellest fiends had shook; 

And all unruffled was his face-- 

They trusted his soul had gotten grace. 

Poetry and compression

I like poetry. That's probably pretty obvious. I'm going to use this post to write about some of the things that I value about it. There 's some token RPG stuff at the end, but don't hold your breath.

The text I'm going to use is the first four lines of Geoffrey Hill's historical sonnet, 'Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings':

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

These lines are dense with meaning. Let's take them one at a time.

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,

'The possessed sea' here must be the English Channel, the sea which the Plantagenet kings laid claim to both sides of. So it's 'possessed' in the sense that it's owned (by them). But 'possessed' can also refer to spirit possession, especially by evil or demonic spirits. This sea does seem to behave like a thing possessed, as we'll see in the next line. But it's not enough to say that there's a double meaning, here: the phrase is not simply a compressed way of saying 'the sea which the kings owned, which also behaved as though it was possessed'. By using a single word here that can be understood in two ways, the line also opens up the possibility that the meanings are inter-related: that it is because the sea is possessed (by the Plantagenet kings) that it behaves as though it is possessed (by demons). As I'll try to demonstrate, this technique of using language to suggest not just two things at once, but two things at once and the relationship between them, is fundamental to this piece of poetry.

Let's move on.

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,

What are these 'ruinous arms'? Weapons, most obviously: it was under the Plantagenets that gunpowder weaponry first came into use in Britain. Such weapons may be 'ruinous' both in the sense that they are capable of causing ruin, and in the sense that they have been ruined themselves. Then again, though, these 'ruinous arms' might also be actual human arms: the kind of body parts you might expect to wash up on beaches after battles in which 'ruinous' weapons have been 'fired'. The same double-meaning of 'ruinous' can apply in either case: these arms could be 'ruinous' in the sense that they've been ruined by injury and mutilation, or 'ruinous' in the sense that they have brought ruin down on others. Or both.

The same ambiguity extends to the word 'fired', which can mean that these weapons have been fired (i.e. used to shoot at people), and/or that the weapons (or the arms) have been 'fired' in the sense that they have themselves been set fire to. Similarly, 'for good' can be read as meaning 'in the service of virtue' and/or 'once and for all', either of which could conceivably apply to any combination of previous readings. So the 'expanded-out' meaning of the line would be something like this:

'On the shores, the sea scattered guns (and perhaps severed limbs) which had been ruined and which had been the cause of ruin, which had been fired and then burned, the use and the destruction of which may have been in the service of virtue, but which was also permanent and conclusive'.

But, again, the double meanings go beyond simple compression. They suggest the way in which these wars have made human bodies and the weapons they wield almost interchangeable, all just so many 'arms' for the creation of ruin. They suggest the way in which the destruction of such 'ruinous' weapons and their wielders is already implicit in their usage - that he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword - and the way in which the pretense that all this violence has been conducted for a good reason may in fact have simply made it more final and permanent. What the line really communicates, I would suggest, is the way in which, under the Plantagenet kings, all of these meanings have become implicit within each other. 

OK. Line three.

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,

'Sound' here can mean both 'announce with noise' (as in 'sound off!') and 'test the depth of' (as in 'take the soundings'). These 'ruinous' guns have been fired to proclaim 'the constitution of just wars', but their use (and their destruction) have also tested its depths, its limits. 'Constitution' can mean both the law code which supposedly establishes the legal legitimacy of those wars - a law code which those guns and arms are at once being used to test and to declare - and 'constitution' in the sense of 'make-up': it is through the process of being 'sounded' by those guns, that we find out what 'just wars' are really made of. (Mutilated corpses, mostly, as the previous line implied.) And 'just wars' pivots in the same way as 'for good' in the previous line: the Plantagenet kings may insist that they are 'just wars' in the sense that they are morally and legally (constitutionally) validated, but those who suffer in them know that they are 'just wars', just so much violence and terror, blood and gunpowder, fire and death. The line communicates, through a kind of verbal montage, how easily the guns proclaiming the legal constitutions of the Plantagenets give way to the guns destroying the physical constitutions of their victims, demonstrating yet again that 'just wars' have a horrible habit of turning out to be 'just wars' in the end. 

Line four, and the end of the sentence:

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,
Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,
To sound the constitution of just wars,
Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. 

This line modifies everything that has come before it. 'Being fired, and for good' now has another possible referent: it could be the men rather than the arms who are 'fired', either in the sense of being physically burned or in the sense of being 'fired up', to 'sound (declare or test) the constitution of just wars'. In this case, the referent of 'understood' might be 'wars', and the meaning would be something like 'being fired up to do good, men understood (in their eloquent fashion) the just wars whose constitution they sounded', which sounds like the way in which the Plantagenet kings would probably like to describe themselves. (Indeed, in this reading, 'eloquent fashion' could refer to the symbolic eloquence of their court dress.) But if the 'men' are 'fired' in the sense of being burned, then their 'eloquent fashion' is probably the screaming of men being burned alive, and what they 'understood' about 'the constitution of just wars' would be something very different. And if it's still the 'arms' doing the sounding, as the first three lines implied, then the referent of 'understood' must be 'for whom': what these 'men' really understand, in their eloquent fashion, is for whom the 'possessed sea' has littered its 'shores' with weapons and corpses. And for whom did it do these things? Most obviously for the Plantagenet kings, its supposed owners: but perhaps also for God, casting up upon its beaches this mute evidence of violence, refusing to let it lie hidden. (This is a theme the rest of the poem takes up, but I'll spare you the last ten lines.)

What these lines do, brilliantly and insistently, is to simultaneously show us the royalist propaganda and the horrible realities underneath it. According to the party line, the sea belongs to the Plantagenets, and serves them: their wars are just, the weapons fired in them only inflict ruin in the service of virtue, and men, being fired up for goodness, eloquently understand the justice of the constitution which enables them. But at the same time, and in the same words, we can hear a very different story: the sea is demon-driven, the wars are just meaningless bloodshed which permanently ruin the people who fight in them, and men understand that the Plantagenets are to blame. In prose you could present those points in series, but you'd struggle to present them in parallel: to show the ruin already built into the artifices of state propaganda, demonstrating how the gun fired to announce a war-enabling constitution already implies the sad, mangled bodies washing up on the shores, or allowing us to hear, in the same words, the eloquence of court sycophants and the screams of burning men.

Yet even here we haven't finished, because poetry is an art of sound, and half the meaning here isn't really being carried by words at all. Look at the long vowel sounds in the first line:

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,

Long, open vowels in a line about the sea are always going to evoke the sound of water: here, I think, the ebb and flow of the tides, with the stacatto rattle of 'littered' marking the clatter of objects deposited on the beach at the point when the tide ceases to come in ('foooor', 'whoooom', 'seeeea') and starts to flow out ('ooon', 'booooth', 'shoooores'). Those long vowels continue into the second line ('aaarms', 'fiiired', 'gooood') as the arms continue to drift on the sea, only to shift quite quickly after 'sooound' - which here is probably the mournful boom of a far-off gun 'sounding off' - into the very different sound-patterns of the last two lines. 'The constitution of just wars, / Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood' asks to be read much more quickly: the oceanic drift of the sea has given way to a human voice speaking rapid legalese, the point of the poem being to make us understand how these two things connect. Or look at the work being done by the rhymes, which cut across the flow of the text to link together first 'shores' and 'wars' (as the Plantagenet kings do), then 'good' and 'understood' (because the question of what is understood to be good, and by whom, is at the heart of the whole poem). Or look at the way in which the pentameter rhythm, which in line one is all but inaudible, drowned in all those sea-sounds, gradually gathers itself into an unmistakable drumbeat by line four, as human eloquence asserts its ability to understand the sad, mute wreckage of the opening lines. Or...

...I mean, my point is, there is a lot going on in these four lines. 

As I've tried to emphasise, I feel strongly that the point of writing like this is not just to show off how clever you are, but to enable qualitatively different forms of communication than would otherwise be possible. Enormous amounts of work have been devoted, here, to allowing a handful of words to say lots of things at once: not just in the interests of concision, but in order to articulate the otherwise-inexpressible interconnectedness of things. It's a way of pushing back against the relentless linearity of text, its insistence on progressing only in one direction, as though a world of holistic experience could possibly be described adequately by addressing one object at a time. The prose commentary I've given here may express the same ideas as the four lines of verse it describes, but the actual lived experience of reading the two is completely different. Hill's verses linger in the ear, and the mind, and the heart in a way that my prose commentary cannot possibly emulate. 

This isn't the only way to write poetry, of course. Not all of it is quite this complicated. But all poetry has, at minimum, two interconnected levels of simultaneous communication going on, via form and content. The best poetry sometimes achieves the near-magical feat of apparently using words to push beyond language, creating effects which seem to defy the very possibility of paraphrase or explanation.

OK. Onto the token RPG bit.

The relationship between form and content in poetry is, I would suggest, analogous to the relationship between system and fiction in RPGs. In the same way that the most exquisite lines of poetry can sound utterly banal when reduced to their 'meaning', so many fantastic RPG sessions would sound boring and stupid if reduced to their 'story'. 'We went into a cave, and we killed some goblins, and then we killed some hobgoblins, and then we ran away from a troll, except for the wizard who fell down a pit' is hardly the stuff of epic drama, but could be wildly exciting and scary and tense and funny if played out at the table. What is missing in both cases is a sense of how form allows that content to be communicated in a qualitatively different fashion to the way it would be transmitted via ordinary prose narration. When your beloved PC has one hit point left, and your GM describes how the orc in front of you raises his axe to strike, you are going to feel the dread and anticipation as they pick up the d20 for an attack roll, in a way that would be difficult if not impossible to emulate precisely through the use of words alone. Stripping out those interactions, and pushing RPGs back towards straightforward collaborative storytelling, means losing those unique resources for generating meaning and emotional response. You might still be able to generate those things in other ways, but it will never be quite the same.

I also think that RPGs are, in their own odd way, very good at compressed transmission of meaning. Standard RPG concepts like 'the elf' and 'the orc' and 'the dungeon' persist precisely because they can mean lots of different things at once: so the dungeon, for example, is simultaneously a physical descent into the earth and a journey over the Frontier into a kind of mythic wilderness and a journey back into deep time and a symbolic descent into the subconscious and a spiritual journey into an Otherworld / Underworld realm, all communicated and understood so intuitively that encounters with wild tribes and walking corpses and dinosaurs and primordial slime-monsters all make equal amounts of intuitive sense once you've crossed its threshold. But whereas Hill had to work very very hard to make each of his lines transmit so many different meanings simultaneously, in RPGs the structure of the game does most of the work for you. You read a good entry in a monster manual and you think: I could use it like this. Or like this. Or like this. Or like this. I could construct a setting in which these creatures played this symbolic role. Or this one. Or this one. All those multiple meanings are already simultaneously present, in potentia, waiting for the process of actual play to call them into being.

A lot of clumsy RPG commentary attempts to assign single, fixed meanings to game elements, asserting that orcs mean this and dungeons mean that and if you think they mean something else then you are wrong. But it seems to me that it is precisely because of the ease with which they can pivot between multiple meanings, especially with the formal assistance provided by the interactions between system and fiction, that people keep coming back to them.

An elf, a dwarf, and a wizard walk into a dungeon.

Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. 

Cold, tired, scared, hungry, thirsty, and in pain: discomfort in D&D

Illustration to 'The Seafarer', by Jila Peacock.

It's almost Christmas time, and at Christmas I always find myself thinking of Old English poetry. Don't you?

Forþon him gelyfeð lyt,
se þe ah lifes wyn
gebiden in burgum,
bealosiþa hwon,
wlonc ond wingal,
hu ic werig oft
in brimlade
bidan sceolde.
Nap nihtscua,
norþan sniwde,
hrim hrusan bond,
hægl feol on eorþan,
corna caldast.

('Indeed he credits it little, the one who has the joys of life, dwells in the city, far from the terrible journey, proud and wanton with wine, how I, weary, often have had to endure in the sea-paths. The shadows of night darkened, it snowed from the north, frost bound the ground, hail fell on the earth, coldest of grains.' Full poem and translation here.)

What the author of the poem - presumably an Anglo-Saxon sailor of the tenth century - cannot forget about his time at sea is the terrible cold. 'Calde geþrungen / wæron mine fet', he writes: 'my feet were fettered with cold', either because they were so numb that he couldn't move them or because they were actually, physically frozen to the deck. He has been 'bihongen hrimgicelum' ('hung with icicles'), out on the 'iscealdne sæ' ('icecold sea'); he has heard the cry of the freezing tern, 'isigfeþera' (ice-feathered'), and the sound of the 'iscaldne wæg' ('icecold wave'). But he knows that the people who have 'lifes wyn' - the people who have 'won at life', as we might say today, the people who live in cities and have warm houses to sleep in and decent wine to drink - will hold his story 'lyt', or lightly, barely able to imagine what it was like on-board his ship when 'Nap nihtscua, norþan sniwde, hrim hrusan bond, hægl feol on eorþan'.

SO FUCKING COLD.

In D&D, a lot of attention gets devoted to spectacular bodily injury: getting whacked in the face with axes, splattered with acid, shot full of arrows, incinerated by fireballs, and whatnot. The lower-level discomforts of adventuring life - the cold, the pain, the hunger, the exhaustion, the constant anxiety, and so on - are more likely to get glossed over. To a certain extent, that's perfectly reasonable, because the PCs probably don't pay much attention to them either. Most of the characters in my current game, for example, started out as medieval serfs, and as such I assume that conditions which I would find almost unbearable probably strike them as being completely ordinary: for them, being wet and tired and cold and hungry is just what normal life is like. Besides, they're PCs, and PCs are crazy bastards almost by definition: the kind of Mungo Park types who will plunge into the most inhospitable terrain in the worst possible weather just to see what's on the other side of it, utterly undeterred by their expedition's 90% + death rates along the way.

Even so, however, I think there's something to be said for not ignoring these sorts of discomforts entirely. One thing that comes across very powerfully in a lot of military campaign memoirs is just how much time and attention soldiers on campaign devote to trying to stay warm, dry, and decently fed. Dry firewood, extra food, thick socks, decent blankets: for the footslogger on a long march, or the squaddies holed up in a muddy trench waiting for the next big push, these things are like gold dust. That tenth-century Saxon sailor, standing watch on the deck of a wooden ship, at night, in the North Sea, in winter, in the middle of a fucking hailstorm would probably have traded almost anything for a warmer coat and a genuinely waterproof pair of shoes. So if you're out there, in the wilderness, surrounded by potential enemies and looking for any kind of advantage that you can scrape together... well, that's the sort of thing that you can use. 

Mungo Park, last seen diving into the Niger River while the locals threw spears at him. He had forty-four followers. One survived.

In D&D terms, the easiest way to model this is through follower morale, doling out bonuses for PCs who take the trouble to keep their followers warm and dry and well-fed, and penalties for the reverse. This can also be applied to NPCs, which means that clever PCs can weaponise it: parties who can force their foes to fight them while cold and tired and hungry and miserable should be rewarded by giving their enemies penalties to morale. Reminding PCs that not everyone is like them, and that both their followers and their enemies would really prefer to have a warm meal and a decent night's sleep once in a while, can lead to some interesting situations, as the kind of mundane items which usually get ignored as irrelevant (looted tents, blankets, coats, shoes, and firewood, for example) can suddenly become the focus of intense attention. Which lucky hireling will be rewarded with the only really waterproof hat, for example? (And just how much will the others resent her for it?) Is it worth launching an attack on the bandit camp, despite the potential loss of life, simply in order to get hold of their supply of dry firewood? (After a week of marching miserably through heavy rain, your followers probably think it sounds like a great idea!)

This sort of thing should never become a requirement - most people play D&D for fantastical adventure, not because they want to fret about how to find enough blankets to outfit their adventuring party - but in moderation, I think it can be quite a good thing. It helps to emphasise that situations don't always have to be resolved through the D&D trinity of magic, gold, and violence: that in a world as horribly uncomfortable as most D&D settings, you'll often be able to build alliances just by providing people with food and warmth and shelter, and to cripple your enemies by taking those things away. It ties back to romantic fantasy ideas I've written about before, in which the contributions of 'ordinary' people (cooks, foragers, tailors) can actually make a much bigger contribution to the overall success of a mission or a campaign than some fucker who just grants everyone a +1 bonus to hit. (Ask soldiers in the field whether they'd rather have a 5% increase in weapon accuracy or a warm dry place to sleep at night and I'll bet the vast majority would pick the latter.) And, perhaps above all, it gives you a way to highlight how tough and remarkable and crazy the PCs are. If you depict a world in which most people care a great deal about staying warm and dry and fed, then when the PCs inevitably proceed to give no fucks about any of it, then... well... that demonstrates why they're the PCs, doesn't it?

Just make sure you come up with some good house rules for frostbite...

'The resonant steam-eagles': A hex description from 1844

So, following my post on a dungeon description from 1843, here's a hex description from 1844...

There's a lady - an earl's daughter; she is proud and she is noble;
And she treads the crimson carpet, and she breathes the perfumed air;
And a kingly blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble,
And the shadow of a monarch's crown, is softened in her hair.

She has halls and she has castles, and the resonant steam-eagles
Follow far on the directing of her floating dove-like hand -
With a thundrous vapour trailing, underneath the starry vigils,
So to mark upon the blasted heaven, the measure of her land.

- Elizabeth Barrett, 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship' (1844)

The borders of her land are marked upon the blasted heaven in thundrous vapour by steam-eagles. Don't tell me you can't get a hex out of that.

Here's one, which could easily be fitted into ATWC somewhere...

This hex is the domain of Lady Geraldine (or Lady Shahnoza, if it's in a Central Asian context), an impeccably bred and languidly bored young noblewoman whose power is maintained by her ownership of a flight of steam-eagles: flying steam-powered automata passed down to her from her distant ancestors. They maintain a continuous patrol of her borders, roaring through the air in a rumble of smoke and steam, and leaving long vapour trails in the sky behind them. Anyone who intrudes upon her territories without an appointment will be set upon by giant robot eagles and driven back beyond the borders. The eagles will initially just scream and threaten, but if defied or resisted they will escalate rapidly to the use of lethal force. Each eagle has a 20' wingspan, and their steel beaks and talons are very sharp.

Protected from the outside world by the sleepless vigilance of her automata, Lady Geraldine spends most of her time lounging around and waiting for something interesting to happen. She has seven official residences - four halls and three castles - each set in an elaborately landscaped estate; one is in a forest, one is by a lake, one is on a hilltop, and so on. Every few weeks she gets bored of the one she's living in and decides to move to another: she travels on the back of her personal steam-eagle (which she rides expertly), and is followed over the next several days by a baggage train of servants on horseback and on foot, bringing with them the extensive range of luxury goods which her aristocratic existence requires. The people of the surrounding area are taxed heavily in coin and coal for the privilege of her protection; they are deeply divided on whether the guardianship of the steam-eagles is worth the price demanded of them, but the question is ultimately moot, as the eagles won't let them leave. Only specially-appointed merchants are permitted to travel in and out of Lady Geraldine's domains, and they must keep rigorously to their assigned timetables in order to avoid an unfortunate run-in with their giant metal protectors.

Lady Geraldine herself is not a particularly cruel or evil person, but she's never known a time when she didn't have an army of steam-powered murder-birds waiting to kill anyone she points at, and this fact has rather warped her personality. She has an extremely high opinion of her own superior worth; she is not accustomed to being defied or disagreed with, and she takes criticism or rejection very badly. At the same time, however, a lifetime of never being challenged has left her a prey to ennui. The safe way to visit her domain is to apply well in advance, pay whatever toll she demands of you, keep your heads down, and agree with everything she says. More ambitious visitors could potentially earn lavish rewards by bringing her new ideas and experiences, things that might relieve her boredom and give her something more stimulating to do than just fret over the proper matching of perfumes and carpets; but any such novelties will need to be introduced with extraordinary tact, and without any hint of criticism of her current lifestyle or beliefs. Lady Geraldine's rooms have very large windows, and the steam-eagles are always perched just outside them, waiting for her order to strike.

Dungeon description, 1843 style

First off: in case you've not seen it already, Frog God Games are doing a new printing of Swords and Wizardry, with new art by Abigal Larson, Gennifer Bone, Jenna Fowler, and others. Pledge one dollar and you get the full-art pdf version. One dollar. Think of it as a way to pay them back for all those times you downloaded the free version of their rules for nothing.

You can find the kickstarter here.

Anyway. My reading for The Coach of Bones rolls on... slowly. Most recently, it has brought me (via a rather circuitous path) to the works of Theodosia Garrow, a minor poet who was born on the South Devon coast in 1816. Most of her work isn't very interesting, but in 1843 she published a long poem called 'The Doom of Cheynholme', and the first section of it caught my eye.

It is, very obviously, a description of a dungeon.

Seriously. You could print this out and hand it to your players and say 'This is a song you hear some old guy singing in the tavern one night', and that alone would suffice as an adventure set-up. It gives you a description of a dungeon (the ruins of Cheynholme Hall), its history (the seat of a dynasty of murderous lords who followed 'the ancient faith'), a reason to go there (they looted the surrounding countryside and some of their loot may still be in there), a bunch of things to watch out for while exploring it (snakes, poisonous swamps, marble statues which might contain the souls of the dead lords of Cheynholme), and some very ominous suggestions about what once happened there (are 'blood-cemented wall' and 'crime-stained roof' just poetic figures of speech, or are they horribly literal?). It's a bit long, but you could always just use stanzas 1, 3, and 6 if you wanted a shorter version.

Anyway. Here it is.

The Doom of Cheynholme (Theodosia Garrow, 1843)

Cheynholme Hall is a ruin lone
Dank with ivy, and furrowed by age;
     In the turrets tall
     Of its mouldering wall
The white owl maketh his hermitage;
And beside the edge of its broad hearth-stone,
(Whereon the sluggish mosses creep
In many a full and silken heap,
Like graves of household pleasures gone),
The dark-grey viper and her brood
Bask in the sunny solitude.

Cheynholme Park is a dismal swamp,
Nought remains of its forest wide,
Save four old trees, which side by side
Blacken and pine in the noxious damp;
Scarred, and stained, and shattered, and bare,
They stand like landmarks of despair
Pointing aloft through the heavy air;
The frog's dull croak, the bittern's shriek,
And the voice of the boughs that wearily creak,
And the rush of the dusky waterfowl,
Winging to rest on the reedy pool,
The plashing beat of the mournful rain,
And the wind with its childish moan of pain—
These are the only sounds that rise,
And with their slow monotonies,
Make such poor mockery of life,
     As shivers and wanes
     In a sick man's veins,
When the departing fever strife
Hath spared but enough of sense and breath
To shudder and gasp at approaching death!

Fierce, stern, haughty, and bold,
Were the lords of Cheynholme in days of old;
None had a sharper sword in fight
To strike for the wrong, and to vanquish the right;
None had higher and wilder blood
To spur them to evil—to blind them to good;
None could ravage, and burn, and kill,
For the ancient faith, with a hotter zeal;
None could wring with a steadier hand
The last slow mulct from the fainting land.
Brave—proud—reckless and bold—
Fit to be types of the barons of old—
Evermore thirsting for bloodshed and gold.


Now the cry of the poor grew strong and deep;
The hands that toil, and the eyes that weep,
And the mouths that fast, and dare not speak,
Sad day by day—chill week by week,
Rose at last, as the waves arise
When the tempest wakens their energies,
And head over head they bound and roar
'Gainst the black cliffs of the towering shore—
     So loud—so vain,
     Were the threats of pain,
The gasp of fear—the curse of hate,
And the bursting cry of the desolate,
Which rang thro' Cheynholme's large domain;
For the evil seed throve none the less
Within their ancient mansion pile;
Bearing the fruits of bitterness,—
     They sinned and died
     In pomp and pride,
Deaf as their marble forms which press
The tombs of Cheynholme's aged aisle,
And as their generations passed,
Each one more mighty than the last,
And, with a brow of harder pride,
Looked in the face of Heaven, and lied,
And revelled, and squandered, and slew amain.

The hearts of the lowly sank again,
They ceased to strive beneath the yoke,
Or wonder at their fate of woe,
Or pray against the want which broke
Their spirits with its torment slow;
But a dull, hopeless unbelief
Palsied the supplicating hand;
     They deemed the seal
     Of God's high will
Chartered those vultures of the land.
They thought it were a fruitless strife
To wrestle with the rooted sway,
Which, ivy-like, drained forth their life,
And flourished on their hopes' decay,—
So died into their parent soil,
Like dumb o'erlaboured beasts of toil!

But there is judgment for the strong,
And there is justice for the weak,
And there is unrepented wrong,
And crime so venomous—so long,
That its foul mass at last must break.
Dire and swift did vengeance fall
On Cheynholme's blood-cemented wall;
Root and branch, and budding spray
Were hewn from the ancient trunk away;
Their lofty name is borne by none;
Their hearths lie open to the sun;
Their rich domain of field and brake
Is blasted for their guilty sake,
And of their proud oaks' sylvan court
The fierce-eyed lightning makes his sport.
Listen! ye of the stony heart—
Listen! ye of the bloody hand;
For the ruthless deed shall have its meed,
And the crime-stained roof its kindling-brand.

In Memoriam Geoffrey Hill, 1932-2016

Geoffrey Hill, who was probably the single greatest living British poet, died yesterday at the age of 84. His death didn't come as a shock like the deaths of Bowie and Prince and Rickman and the rest, each of whom I'd naively assumed would be with us for a good few years yet. But their deaths, like the death of Muhammad Ali last month, were front-page news, whereas in most papers Hill will be lucky to get a paragraph, especially as it comes in the middle of the biggest British constitutional crisis in decades. I feel that if I don't take some note of his passing, barely anyone else will.

I was thinking about his poems just last night. Not that there's anything spooky about that: I think about his poems all the time. I was lying in the dark, holding my two-year-old son, waiting for him to go to sleep, and these words were twisting through my head. Over and over again:

They slew by night

upon the road

Medina's pride

Olmedo's flower

Shadows warned him

not to go

not to go

along that road

weep for your lord

Medina's pride

Olmedo's flower

there in that road

Hill was an old-fashioned poet, and he took old-fashioned things seriously: words, poems, morality, history, God. His poems were difficult, but their difficulty was never gratuitous: they were complex because the things that they were attempting to express were complex, too, and Hill was determined to find words that would do them justice. His works demanded careful attention, but they also rewarded it, In an era when so much Anglophone poetry seems to lean towards either facile populism or willful obscurity, I fear it may be some time before we see his like again.

I know that most people reading this blog probably have no interest in poetry. But anyone who's interested in the power of words - and most gamers are, to some extent - could probably learn something from anyone capable of coming up with a line like 'Tumult recedes as though into the long rain'. Look at it. Say it out loud. Look at how nuanced the thought it's articulating is, and then listen to how it performs its own meanings through its own sonic structure. Writing like that is not easy. There are not a lot of people left who can write like that.

'Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, outclassed ancestors, I too concede, I am your staggeringly-gifted child.'

So, murmerous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the gas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered into the last dream of Offa the King.

Sir Gawain Goes Hexcrawling

I was preparing an extract from the 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for a class the other day when I suddenly realised that it's basically a description of a rather aimless D&D hexcrawl. Gawain is on a quest for the Green Chapel, but he doesn't know where it is except that it's 'somewhere in the wilderness of Wirral'; so all he can do is blunder about from hex to hex, fighting monsters and having random encounters, until finally he's reduced to praying for outright divine intervention. He even sleeps in his armour like a proper D&D character!

Here's the text. Original Middle English on the left. My (painfully literal) translation on the right. 

Middle English Text	Literal Modern Translation
He made non abode, Bot wyȝtly went hys way; Mony wylsum way he rode, Þe bok as I herde say.	He made no stop, But manfully went on his way; Many tiresome paths he rode, As I have heard the book say.
Now ridez þis renk þurȝ þe ryalme of Logres, Sir Gauan, on Godez halue, þaȝ hym no gomen þoȝt. Oft leudlez alone he lengez on nyȝtez Þer he fonde noȝt hym byfore þe fare þat he lyked. Hade he no fere bot his fole bi frythez and   dounez, Ne no gome bot God bi gate wyth to karp, Til þat he neȝed ful neghe into þe Norþe Walez.	Now rides this hero through the realm of Logres, Sir Gawain, on God’s behalf, though he thought it no game. Often alone and friendless he lodged at nights There he found not before him the fare that he liked. He had no friend but his foal by forests and downs, And no-one but God to talk with on the way, Until he had almost come into North Wales.
Alle þe iles of Anglesay on lyft half he haldez, And farez ouer þe fordez by þe forlondez, Ouer at þe Holy Hede, til he hade eft bonk In þe wyldrenesse of Wyrale; wonde þer bot lyte Þat auþer God oþer gome wyth goud hert louied. And ay he frayned, as he ferde, at frekez þat he met, If þay hade herde any karp of a knyȝt grene, In any grounde þeraboute, of þe grene chapel; And al nykked hym wyth nay, þat neuer in her lyue Þay seȝe neuer no segge þat watz of suche hwez of grene.	All the isles of Anglesey he kept on his left side And fared over the fords by the forelands Over at Holy Head, until he had landed In the wilderness of Wirral; there very few lived That loved either God or man with good heart.  And always as he fared, he asked the people that he met If they had heard any talk of a green knight Or of the green chapel in any place thereabout;  And all replied that, no, never in their lives Had they ever seen a man of such a hue Of green.
Þe knyȝt tok gates straunge In mony a bonk vnbene, His cher ful oft con chaunge Þat chapel er he myȝt sene.	The knight took strange roads On many a rough bank His mood often changed Before he saw that chapel.
Mony klyf he ouerclambe in contrayez straunge, Fer floten fro his frendez fremedly he rydez. At vche warþe oþer water þer þe wyȝe passed He fonde a foo hym byfore, bot ferly hit were, And þat so foule and so felle þat feȝt hym byhode. So mony meruayl bi mount þer þe mon fyndez, Hit were to tore for to telle of þe tenþe dole. Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez, and with wolues als, Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, þat woned in þe knarrez, Boþe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle, And etaynez, þat hym anelede of þe heȝe felle;	Many cliffs he climbed over in strange countries, Far asunder from his friends, lonely he rode. At each ford or water where the hero passed  It was strange if he found not a foe before him,  And that so foul and fell that he was forced to fight. So many marvels in the mountains there the man found, It would be tedious to tell of the tenth part. Sometimes with serpents he warred, and sometimes with wolves, Sometimes with wild men, that lived in the cliffs, Both with bulls and bears, and at other times with boars, And giants, that assailed him from the high fells;
Nade he ben duȝty and dryȝe, and Dryȝtyn had serued, Douteles he hade ben ded and dreped ful ofte. For werre wrathed hym not so much þat wynter nas wors, When þe colde cler water fro þe cloudez schadde, And fres er hit falle myȝt to þe fale erþe; Ner slayn wyth þe slete he sleped in his yrnes Mo nyȝtez þen innoghe in naked rokkez, Þer as claterande fro þe crest þe colde borne rennez, And henged heȝe ouer his hede in hard iisse-ikkles. Þus in peryl and payne and plytes ful harde Bi contray cayrez þis knyȝt, tyl Krystmasse euen, al one;	Had he not been doughty and stern, and served God, Doubtless he would often have been dead and slain. But war tried him not so much that winter was not worse, When the cold clear water fell from the clouds,  And froze before it could fall to the earth. Nearly slain by the sleet he slept in his irons More nights than enough on naked rocks, Where the cold burn ran clattering from the crest, And hung high over his head in hard icicles. Thus in peril and pain and plights full hard Through the country wanders this knight, until Christmas eve, Alone;
Þe knyȝt wel þat tyde To Mary made his mone, Þat ho hym red to ryde And wysse hym to sum wone.	The knight well that tide To Mary made his plea, That she would direct his riding And lead him to some home.

(Spoiler: She does! And that's when the real adventure begins...)

Two poems by Google Translate

On the Xortlaq, or Azerbaijanese Vampire

The death of the person who is difficult 
xortlamasının 
(xırtlamasının) 
is thought to be more common. 
I stayed in the eyes of the world. 
The fact that out of the grave, he died 
(presumed dead) 
is not enough to explain the burial. 

On the day of the burial

tombs of the people in some parts of Turkey and scary "vampire" and "xortlaq" 
believed in the existence of the creatures. 
The evils of his time, 
the people who deal with a break shot and gossip resurrected after death. 
Supposedly the grave at night, 
wandering around the shroud to the people who angers them tease each creature, 
fast run, 
horseback ride, 
weapons use, 
to beat a man loves a man miss, 
can attack the houses, 

the road can be cut.

(Source: Google translation of page 'Xortlaq', in the Azerbaijani Vikipediya. Some sentences removed and line breaks added; one instance of 'they' replaced with 'the', but text otherwise as per the original.)

The Ubir

The large-headed, long-tailed creature. 

Fire erupting from the mouth. 
As can remain dormant for days, even months, also wants 
to be able to fly. 
I do not fear anyone. 
Contagious disease that spreads around.
What if it finds space? 

Ubir opened the tomb of a dead beats nail. 
Wants to enter the picture. 
Wolf or wild dog, disguised as sheep fabrics. 
Gathered at a mountain, kidnapped people and places. 
For lack of a deceased one should be under fire. 

More Romania and Moldova, the Turkish topluluklarınca is used in the sense of the vampire. 
Fin Ugor similar soyleyislerle their people takes place. 
Live in a terrible human being captured. 
Ubir in someone who is starting to look like him, insatiable dinner. 
But it remains too weak to eat. 

Tatar people "in the eyes of the battlefield itself insatiable Ubir as" 
There is a saying. People get up at night to eat Ubırlı seeking 
transformed into a ball of fire in the chimney 
could not find the food to other people's interests and players. 
Ubir just can not get tired of fire, 
evil, greedy, devouring creature. In addition, Leslie fed. 
At any moment, cat, dog, 

or you can go dressed as a beautiful girl.

(Source: Google translation of page 'Ubir', in the Azerbaijani Vikipediya. Some sentences removed, with line breaks and one question mark added: text otherwise as per the original.)

D&D Monsters from improbable sources 1: Poems by eighteenth-century schoolboys

'Sudden deep-groan'd the yawning earth;

A ghastly Phantom rear'd his head!
Grim Tart'rus gave the monster birth;
On his torn breast the Vulture fed.

His eyeballs flash'd with livid fire:
The sad shrill shriek discordant broke!
The furies all the Fiend inspire!
His black lips trembling, thus he spoke...'

These lines come from a poem called The Fate of Lewellyn, or, The Druid's Sacrifice, written in 1777 by a seventeen-year-old British schoolboy. It demonstrates conclusively that seventeen-year-old boys have been the same throughout history, and are genetically programmed to think that monsters that look like they've escaped from the covers of old heavy metal albums are really, really cool.

Still, though... a black-lipped phantom with flaming eyeballs that bursts out of the earth with a vulture eating its guts is pretty fucking metal. I mean, was the vulture down there underground with it the whole time, or what? How did it breathe? No-one gives a fuck. There's something kinda charming about that.

So, with no further ado:

• Black-Lipped Phantom: AC 16, 4 HD, +4 to hit, 2 claws (1d8 damage) or 1 fire-blast (2d6 damage), saves 10, morale 12, special attacks: shriek, gut vulture. Regenerates 2 HP per round whilst underground.

The Black-Lipped Phantom is a demonic undead monster born from the spirits of those who die raging against their fates. Their rage is so intense that it traps their spirits in their bodies. Gradually their anger takes physical form within them, in the shape of a single huge black egg nestled deep in their guts. If, at this stage, someone digs up the corpse, pulls out the egg, and smashes it, then their spirit will chill the fuck out and proceed to the afterlife. If this doesn't happen, however, then the egg will hatch into a grotesque vulture-thing, made of anger and shadows, which tears ceaselessly at their regenerating guts in a constant enactment of their endless rage.

MY LIPS ARE BLACK WITH HATE

Black-Lipped Phantoms lurk under the ground in the soil where they were buried. (If no-one buried them, they dig themselves into the ground as soon as they become animate.) Animals can sense their presence and refuse to go anywhere near them unless forced. Whenever any living creature approaches their grave, they will 'swim' through the soil towards it (at normal human walking pace) and then burst up right in front of their victim, with a 5-in-6 chance of causing surprise. As they do so, they will emit a shriek of such ear-splitting volume that anyone who hears it must make a saving throw or be struck deaf for the next 1d6 hours. Also the vulture flies out of their guts and starts eating people: being made of shadows it can't be harmed in any way, ignores armour, and will happily rip away at its chosen victim for 1d2 damage per round. It cannot go more than 10' from the phantom (to which it remains attached by a tether made of entrails), and will vanish if the phantom is killed.

In combat, the phantom will attack either with its two claws (1d8 damage each) or by emitting blasts of livid fire from its eyeballs (2d6 damage, 15' range). As it fights, it will rage and gibber about how much it hates everything and how everyone deserves to die. If 'killed' it sinks into the soil and starts regenerating, but it (and its vulture) will remain comatose until it is fully regenerated. If dug up and burned during this time, it can be gotten rid of for good.

Despite their hatred of all life, Black-Lipped Phantoms have an overwhelming, irrational fear of teenage girls, and will not attack any party which contains one.