Posted on February 15, 2025, 10:13:56 PM by Jubal
The Exilian Romantasy Blurb Generator
Symbolic of your tale? Hit the button to find out!
The Exilian Romantasy Blurb Generator
By Jubal
This is not so much an article as a generator: I decided that with the advent of all the LLM slop I was actually somewhat wistful for the days of JavaScript generators - the sort of thing where you hit a button and it actually random-numbered through a bunch of possibilities that had been curated by an actual person. Is the result any better or worse than GPT? That's probably for you to decide. It's certainly less damaging to the environment.
And the topic of this generator? Well, it's been a running joke with some Exilian friends that there really are a lot of romance fantasy books with titles in the form "An X of Y and Z" these days. So many so, in fact, that one could almost... get the titles and blurbs to write themselves? As such, behold the EXILIAN ROMANTASY BLURB GENERATOR, your one stop engine for creating fantasy romance plot ideas.
Do post your favourites below and let us know if this created anything useful for you!
Without further ado, all that remains is for you to push the button and...
5 comments | Write Comment
...
Posted on December 31, 2024, 09:41:38 PM by Jubal
17 More Things We Came Up With Playing Word Association
17 More Things We Came Up With Playing Word Association
By Jubal
By Jubal
Yes, this is what it says on the tin. We've been playing literally the same Word Association game since 2008, it has over 37,000 words in it, and the combinations we come up with sometimes create some interesting concepts that we might not have thought of otherwise. In 2018 I wrote a list of 17 Things We Came Up With In Word Association, so we're well overdue another compilation of quirky and unusual ideas created by the word-jumbles of Exilian members. Various members contributed the original posts: definitions and writeups by yours truly. Do enjoy!
1) Pub Garden (of) Eden
This pub presumably serves the Hesperidean Cider famous from Failbetter Games' Fallen London... and wouldn't it make a lot of sense if Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden in part for drunk and disorderly behaviour? Theologians are currently discussing what the smoking rules were.
2) Stack Overflow Pipe
The most important part of any automated or human programming system is the Stack Overflow Pipe for exchange with the Grand Repository of Programming Knowledge And People Who Hate The Way You Didn't Search Enough For The Answer First. Unfortunately, attempts to redirect the stack overflow pipe into AI training have led mostly to the production of sewage-quality code.
3) Sourpuss (in) Boots
Puss in Boots is a much beloved character, but these days, audiences are surely looking for the gritty anti-hero take on the fairytale. Enter Sourpuss in Boots, an alley-cat whose best days are past him, whose boots are hob-nailed and probably have too many buckles, who wields a shiv instead of a rapier and who for some reason is still a hit with the femme felines. His adventures will include rat-slaying, dog-fighting, getting stuck up a hawthorn tree for the sake of making that trope spikier, and being a tragic dad to a tabby daughter-figure thrown out from a wealthy household and finding her way in the world. However, even if we do get Henry Cavill to do the voiceover, there will be no scene in the bath.
4) Robin Red Shift
It's like a regular robin, but it's actually green and is just always moving away from you at cosmic speeds. Probably runs on the same technology as Father Christmas' sleigh, probably not often found in gardens as you'd need a very large one to be able to see it before it left again at red-shift speed. May or may not be associated with Batman.
5) Woolly Hat-Trick
If a hat-trick is a three-goal achievement, a woolly hat-trick is a three goal achievement specifically in ice hockey. Canada, get on this one!
6) Middle Earthshot
A grand endeavour to make the world more mythic and heroic OR more hobbity in some way, maybe with an award attached. Options could include ensuring global access to strawberries, throwing blockchains into a volcano, or crying in a very manly yet gentle fashion. Weird American tech bros with Tolkien-named companies for some reason probably wouldn't like the outcomes of this prize.
7) Tone Police Force
They're out there, they're probably self appointed, and they're really mad about what you're saying on the internet especially if it's literally your own life you're talking about in your own words. Actual cops don't always get on with the Tone Police because the latter set a very unrealistic expectation for exceptionally speedy response times.
8) Forge-master-mind
This idea actually has something to it. Who else but the forgemastermind to plan out how the fires of technology allow the Great Scheme to advance? If you need a secondary (or even primary) villain for a narrative of TTRPG, the forgemastermind can calculate the trajectories of automated catapults, plan maps of molten metal through a dungeon, and bait the protagonists with a mix of evil and fiendish technology in a way that definitely doesn't leave enormous potential for on-the-nose commentary and subversion of a wide range of topical issues.
(But no, the Forgemastermind did not build the cybertruck. She has standards, people. Standards.)
9) Milky Waypoint
Yup, you're here, out on the ol' spiral arm. This may be Directions are available to other stops on your journey, spacefarer! See also, Simak's Way Station.
10) Daylight Savings Bank
Welcome to the Daylight Savings Bank. It's probably where the days we lost shfting to the Gregorian calendar got stored, and it's definitely where a chunk of your sleep goes once a year. What interest do they get on our stolen time while they're storing it? Do the chronological profits get stored somewhere, and what would they do with them?
An honourable mention goes to the Savings Bank Vole, who presumably operates the Daylight Savings bank from a small burrow somewhere in rural England, near the burrow that TH White's King Arthur is residing in to await his return.
11) Mole(dy) Warp Storm
Wormholes, clearly, are created by very large worms indeed on a cosmic level. But where there are worms, there are things that want to eat the worms: and so, burrowing through the fabric of space-time, the moldy-warp storm brews, getting ever more intense as the enormous eight dimensional cosmic mole gets ever closer and ready to find its wormhole-making prey.
It may be the end of all we know, but at least the end of all we know will be kind of cute.
12) Acid Rain Main
Probably like regular rain man, except if he actually made a lot of justifiably extremely snarky comments about the poor representation and treatment of neurodiversity in films and other popular media.
13) Pillow Fight Club
The first rule of Pillow fight club: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay pillow fight!
The second rule of Pillow club was not recorded over the sound of people hitting each other with pillows.
14) Branch Line Dancing
A dance that's kind of like line dancing but the lines split off all over the place and end up in side-rooms you didn't expect to be used for this dance. The dance ends whenever the dancemaster calls "Beeching".
15) Lion's Share (and) Subscribe
To the winner, the spoils – and far too much of social media works on that principle, with exponential curves such that most things barely get scene and a few things go utterly, swampingly viral. Getting the lion's share and subscribe accelerates a creator and their content up the exponential curve, but at what cost?
16) Hobbit Hole Golf
Given that Tolkien's explanation for golf was that it was invented when Bullroarer Took hit a goblin's head off with a club so hard that it bounced down a nearby hole, this is actually already essentially a thing. It could also be a solution for the endless problem in the Anglosphere of golf courses taking up prime land that could be otherwise be used for better things if we put hobbit holes under all the courses, but golfers may occasionally find their buggy tires get let down by halflings suspicious of newfangled Sarumanic machinery.
17) Solar Flare Gun
If a flare gun could knock out most of the electronics in a vast radius and indeed cook a noticeable chunk of the earth's surface, this is that flare gun! When you really need to signal distress to someone not on this planet, and are willing to gamble a lot of lives of people actually on this planet to do so, this is the technology you need.
Notably, "control" was the next word picked after "Solar Flare Gun", which was, let's be honest, probably sensible.
And that's another 17 randomly constructed concepts from the collective thoughts of Exilian! Let us know if you liked reading this, and we may leave it less than six years before doing another set. Happy New Year to all you out there, and best wishes for our next roll round the sun.
...
Posted on December 31, 2024, 12:23:04 AM by Jubal
This Dungeon Could Have Been An Encounter
This Dungeon Could Have Been An Encounter
By Jubal
Dare you enter? We have *checks notes* some rooms with orcs and stuff.
Some dungeons, in short, are just too long for the purpose they were given. Especially in certain computer RPGs, they can become a hack-fest where numerous rooms of generic enemies just need to be plodded through in order to gain experience, loot, or some singular end-point encounter or item. There are of course ways to spruce up that experience – better pathing design that interlocks between levels, more complex intra-dungeon ecology and politics, more of a mixture of puzzles and story encounters to break up dungeoneering – but this isn't an article about how to do dungeons better per se.
This, instead, is an article that seeks to pose an alternative question, which is whether a dungeon always needs to be there in the first place. Time spent dungeoneering in a game is subject to narrative opportunity cost the same as anything else in a game: in general, that time shouldn't just be expended as a way to jump through hoops, and combat and puzzles ideally shouldn't just be "plot locks" that need to be passed through to get to the next bit of actual story.
So when should your dungeon just be an encounter? There are various parameters to consider.
First, consider how much story your dungeon needs to tell. This is perhaps the most important element for RPGs. The dungeon – whether as part of a wider core plot, or on its own terms – has a story to tell, and everything in the dungeon should help tell that story. That can include a variety of types of content or encounter, but it should all fit with the wider theming.
If the whole point of the dungeon is to have an enemy encounter at the end, could you just... skip the dungeon? Even if the enemy has a mighty fortress, you could give the player a stealth mission, entry point, or catching a villain unawares if that avoids a slog through thirty arbitrary rooms full of guards who inexplicably don't attempt to attack the player en masse or do anything else useful.
A real smallish castle's floor plan. Not actually many rooms per level!
The same might be true of finding a special item: sometimes items might be behind many many guards and traps, but sometimes it's a case of finding and talking to the right person, or items can be guarded in ways that aren't a single dungeon location. They could for example be moved around regularly, making the problem more a case of identifying who has the item and making the environment much more dynamic. They could equally kept in a location that is singular but hard to access. In general, if something is kept very high up a mountain or in the bottom of a mine, it may well not have a very wide sprawling base of operations because it's really hard to supply such a place.
If a game has exploring and dungeoneering as a core gameplay element in and of itself, that's a good reason per se to spend more time in dungeons. But – and this is where a lot of games falter – dungeoneering isn't the same as combat. Dungeoneering includes puzzles, survival, tactics, navigation, and other such challenges and toolkits. For many people, much of the time, a sequence of combat encounters per se won't necessarily be highly rewarding.
Yet another room like this containing d6 bugbears! My favourite!
This can also be used narratively: if you want a dungeon's ending to be a unique villain or encounter, having the dungeon build up to that can be important for introducing suspense and explaining who the villain is, or exploring the world in which they function. But if that's explained elsewhere, the dungeon might not need to be present – or might be able to be boiled down to a much smaller sequence of encounters and explorations.
Sometimes, then, the dungeon isn't the solution. Avoiding them becoming the universal gateway to plot elements can remove quite a bit of drudgery for players, and provide some elbow room to spend more time on other parts of the plot. Rather than building everything into a static location, having encounters in different locations linked with overland travel & encounters or having an environment where the players' targets are fluid and mobile can help change the pace of game design. The result might be more variation in play – keeping your villains, protagonists, and players alike more engaged with the story.
I hope you found these thoughts useful! Let me know if this inspired you, or if you hated it and think we actually need more dungeons, or if you are stuck in a room with d6 hobgoblins and need help from an itinerant bard. Until then, have fun designing new worlds - whether or not you're heading down a dungeon door.
...
Posted on December 23, 2024, 08:10:12 PM by Jubal
Two Cows in Medieval Europe
By Jubal
Welcome to a reprise of our Two Cows series, which takes the Two Cows theory and applies it. The core principle is to explain various philosophies by means of what happens to someone with two cows - often with a somewhat whimsical twist along the way. This time, welcome to the medieval world, with the European middle ages explained in the neatest, most bovine way possible!
We also have previous editions for Ancient Greece and the Byzantine Empire which you can peruse! For now, nonetheless, please enjoy discovering what a cow-centric world has in store for monks, peasants, and realms alike in the middle ages...
BENEDICTINES
You have two cows. You turn them into books.
BURGUNDY
You have two cows. They are on two different patches of land owned by different people, which you spend years trying to acquire and then join up so you can finally have your cows in the same damn place. By the time you finally succeed, the cows are on their last legs. You never get any milk.
CATHARISM
You have two cows. One embodies good, the other evil. The Albigensian crusade takes both and executes you.
CARTHUSIANS
You have two cows. You sternly forbid them to moo.
COURTLY ROMANCE
You have two cows. You leave them to find love and/or the holy grail. Your scheming relative betrays you and gets the milk.
DOMINICANS
You have two cows. You condemn them for heresy and beg for milk.
ENGLAND
You have two cows. One of them is in France for some reason.
FEUDALISM
Your lord grants you two cows in exchange for military service. You avoid providing the military service and/or steal your neighbour's cows. You keep a fortified cowshed so nobody can take your milk away.
FRANCE
You have two cows. You put them in very fancy armour. It turns out not to be longbow-proof.
FRANCISCANS
You have two cows. You give them up to the church and beg for milk.
IBERIA
You have two cows. Several other people have claims on both your cows for reasons of religion, history, etc. You have claims on several other people's cows for reasons of history, religion, etc. In the chaos nobody gets any milk.
ITALIAN CITIES
You have two cows. The commune gets one, the popolo gets the other, and you elect a cowherd from somewhere down the valley to tell you who gets the milk.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
You have forty cows. Each one has a different cowherd, and most of the cowherds hate you. You spend most of your time failing to persuade them to give you any milk.
MANORIALISM
You have two cows. You spend half your time tending your lord's cows. Your lord gets the milk from his cows, and half your milk as well.
NORMANDY
You have no cows. You go literally anywhere there's a break in someone else's fence and steal their milk, their cows, and their farmhouse for good measure.
THE PAPACY
You have two cows. You got them by promising people they would go to heaven if they gave you their cows. You keep doing this. Your divine right to all the milk goes unquestioned.
POLAND
You have two cows. You have to promise the Sejm half the milk to be allowed to keep them.
SCOTLAND
You have two cows. They get stolen by the bastard sassenachs.
SICILY
You have two cows. One of them is a camel. Someone from Germany, France, or Italy gets the milk for obscure dynastic reasons.
THE TEMPLARS
You have two cows: people donated them to you for things you didn't have a lot of hand in doing. The King of France takes them away and executes you.
THE TEUTONIC ORDER
You promised that you would take two cows from the pagans. There are no pagans. You try to take cows from everyone just in case they are a pagan. You end up with no cows and no milk.
VENICE
You have two boats. You put other people's cows on them, take them away, and get them to pay you for the privilege. You have no idea how to actually herd cows. You take everyone's milk in the end anyway.
...
Posted on December 09, 2024, 09:05:19 PM by Jubal
Realms of Myth: Asturias
Realms of Myth: Asturias
By Jubal
Some of the northernmost regions of Spain, Asturias and Cantabria, nestle along the northern coastline, with an especially distinct mythology that offers a lot of possibilities for an interested game designer or writer. In this second entry in our Realms of Myth series, I'm taking a look at this region as a potential basis for a setting, and giving an initial showcase of some of its myths and legends.
These are the regions of Spain that were the furthest from Umayyad power centres when the Muslim caliphate captured most of the peninsula in the 710s, and Muslim rule was never fully established in the north. As the last Visigothic kings lost their territory, a Visigothic nobleman called Pelagius or Pelayo established a principality in the rugged Asturian mountains which ultimately became the progenitor polity of Castile, Leon, and eventually Spain as we know it.
Landscape
Covadonga, site of Pelayo's most famous victory.
Using northern Spanish mythos in a fictional work I think does demand that you have a similar sort of mountainous terrain, and there's a few important things to remember about that and its effects. Mountains in fiction are often played as having primarily isolating effects, and this has a lot of utility: they can be areas where localities have very specific local traditions, where it's easy to be introducing characters or players to a new situation even if their general knowledge of the world as a whole is pretty good. However good someone's common knowledge is, the likelihood they'll know about a particular mountain village's festival giving flowers to the Xanas is pretty much nil, and the likelihood those villagers will practice their religion and ideals in the exact way characters have come to expect is also lowered.
Mountains can also intensify connections by funnelling trade and travel down mountain passes, and they do so in many parts of the world with thriving trade cities at the intersections of important routes. But there's a reason they don't do this much in Asturias – there's nothing on the other side. The open and famously choppy Bay of Biscay is as important as the mountains, a wild sea with relatively few major ports historically. This creates a situation where often all that's over the mountains is even more isolated fishing communities. As such, one should be really emphasising that remoteness.
A rugged mountain region can also be a great place of natural beauty: crags, hidden waterfalls and forest glades are good sorts of spaces that can bring nature and humanity closer. These sorts of prominent natural landmark features are good as ways to tie particular stories and creatures directly into a landscape, and tell your audience about a landscape in ways that are evocative but also immediately plot-relevant.
Culture and plot points
A bison from the cave at Altamira.
The sense of remoteness and beauty can also be important in some religious contexts: monastic institutions often get founded in places far from the earthly world and temptations of larger cities, and treasures or relics from more vulnerable lowland places often end up in mountainous regions when the lowlands get invaded, finding security in the relative isolation. The converse part of this, as mentioned earlier, is the often very localised way that some religious practices can turn in isolation: they're a good place for forming and hiding mysterious local cults just as much as isolated bastions of true religion – and indeed those things might be exactly the same thing when viewed from different perspectives.
There's also a sense of ancientness about the cultural landscape in somewhere like Asturias: because herding is so core to the economy, more than arable, and because of the low population density, this means that the hilltops don't get ploughed over and old caves don't always get visited and repurposed. As such, it's a great area for presenting bits of past cultures, stone age paintings and old barrow-mounds for burials and so on. The most notable real example in Asturias is Altamira, the first cave to have seriously had a prehistoric theory advanced for its origin (which was contested at the time in the late 19th century: modern ideas of cave-men and cave art would have been alien to audiences as recently as the 1870s). It's an oddity of fantasy that it's actually surprisingly rare to come across a world's equivalent of a stone age, in part because Great Ancient Civilisations are such a core trope in many fantasy worlds that there's little room for the more real-world cave paintings and worked flints that show the most ancient parts of our past. This could be a good sort of setting to make use of that, and in a world with magic but a sense of low remoteness, cave art in a flickering fire and mysterious don't necessarily need to come with some far greater lost society to be meaningful.
Monsters
The Musgoso, protector of shepherds, and the fey Xanas are some of the more helpful Asturian creatures.
A gentler fairytale is El Musgoso, a shepherd giant – perhaps literally a shepherd of shepherds, who watches over herdsmen in the woods and fields as a quiet protector spirit. The Anjana or Xana is another famous example of a good aligned fey creature from the region, one that may bewitch humans with her beauty but who can heal the sick and act as nature's guardian against some of the fouler monsters. The Ayalgas are another female spirit, loyal guardians of ancient treasure – although, in some tales, they may secretly hope someone does steal the treasure without killing them, thus freeing them by leaving them with nothing to guard.
There are some larger foes such as the draconic Cuélebre, a huge lizard with bat-wings that can in many tales only be fought at certain times of year, and which will eventually take itself away to an isle across the sea but for now guards treasure and maidens that it captures. There's also cyclopes, the Ojáncanu and the more specifically nautical/shipwreck themed Pataricu. One interesting feature of these is that that the Ojáncanu is brutally physically strong, able to defeat a bull or bear with ease, and indeed can only be defeated by the Xanas with their stronger magic – but the Xanas can be captured by the Cuelebre, thus creating a rather different staged requirement for defeating the cyclops. The requirement to fight the foe at specific times of year could be interesting to use, perhaps by creating a necessity to survive until the time at which the creature is vulnerable and avoid it destroying any preparations in the meantime.
The final category is creatures that work with the landscape and represent natural or cultural features. The Guestia, a procession of the dead that can be consulted for auguries, is a good specific localised sort of thing to include, as might more trickery-focused local spirits such as the mischevious faun/devil like Diañu Burlón or the Sumiciu, little folk who are responsible for things getting lost around the house. More nature-focused would be the Nuberu, a dwarf or group of dwarfs with ragged beards and huge hats that are a personification of the region's frequent storms. Their counterparts the Ventolins are meanwhile responsible for gentle breezes and pleasant dreams. These aren't necessarily creatures to be fought, but rather ways in which the landscape can be made to more directly communicate with human and sapient major characters in a tale. Characters might need to petition such forces, or find those who can keep them in balance, or simply gain vital information from them in some way – the Nuberu may have little love for humans, but they could be provoked into revealing information as a taunt for example.
Conclusions
The remoteness and isolation of Asturias, and the ability of the mountains to hide settlements, fugitives, and artefacts alike, is the key force behind most of its myths. The specific way that the mountains back onto the sea, and the wooded, cave-riddled hillsides, give an environment that is especially well suited to connect closely to the mysterious and the sacred. Myths here tend to be tied to time, weather, space and in particularly localised ways.
This localisation also means a type of story that is suited to those sorts of environments. Monsters tend to be the sort that need specific rituals or the attention of other mythic beings rather than those that will be slain simply by a hero's great force of arms. Asturias is a land that resists power and hides what must be hidden, without regard to whether the seeker of refuge means good or ill. Whether the art of ancient worlds, the relics of a church, or the mysteries of the dead's processions and the cuelebre's hoard, there's much to be found in the hills – if the hills will tell you where to seek it.
I sourced the information for this piece largely from some booklets I had from a childhood visit to the region, though there are numerous Spanish-language sites online about the mythology and its background. Some of this folklore may be far more recent than other parts, and the sense of a unified 'regional' mythos may be particularly modern compared to a world where valleys and crags divided local settlements and their cultures so much. If anyone has more information about these creatures and this landscape, please do chime in below in the comments - and let us know if there's somewhere else you think our Realms of Myth series should go next.
This article is part of a series. You can also read Part 1, on the myths of Somalia.