The Backpacker Capital: Escape
October 11, 2026, 08:55:26 AM
The Backpacker Capital: Escape
By indiekid
The White Temple, in all its holy strangeness.
Editor's note: this is the second part of a two-part article. You can read part one here, and find Exilian's general travel writing index here.
Northern Thailand is home to a number of different ethnic groups collectively known, to the outside world, as "hill tribes". They are distinct from other Thai peoples and largely disadvantaged as a result. They have historically lived in the mountainous borderlands of Thailand and its neighbours, though some have emigrated from as far afield as China. They number about one million in total and, though very diverse, have a few features in common: a semi-nomadic lifestyle; distinctive building techniques and a history of persecution and flight. The Yao people, for example, are native to Vietnam and southern China and were displaced during the Vietnam War (I'll spare you my rant about that). They are known to tourists for their long hair and colourful outfits. It was among these hill tribes that my hypothetical gap year back in 2011 would have taken place, and my base would have been the city of Chiang Rai – my base of operations for this, the second part of my tour of the North.
I stepped off the bus, looked around and breathed a sigh of relief: everything was refreshingly normal. After the strangeness of Chiang Mai and Pai it was nice to walk along a pavement towards a roundabout. This roundabout housed the centrepiece of the city: an elaborate golden clock. Around it I found a number of streets containing tea shops and jewellers - two of the city's specialties - but no hostel. By the time I found one I was hot and tired; I practically fell through the door into the small communal sitting and dining room. There was no one about, but my noisy entry had attracted attention. A door opened and Mekhala, the owner, appeared and, though a little surprised, asked me politely if I was a walk-in. I confirmed that I was and, in the course of our conversation, discovered that she had recently bought the hostel and moved in with her mother and young son. It was a neat and comfortable place and I settled down under the air conditioning to wait and see who else might be about.
It was not long before I made friends with two Swiss backpackers (they weren't travelling together - it was just good fortune) and we set out together to see Chiang Rai's famous sites. First up was the White Temple (Wat Rong Khun), a dazzling and over-the-top structure which was built upon a ruined 19th century temple at the end of the last century. It is the brainchild of the artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, who has put his own spin on Lanna architecture (see part 1) and is still adding to it. Although its layout is fairly typical, it has a number of controversial details. Sci-fi style statues stand guard outside and ghostly faces seem to screech out of the floor. Things get weirder as one approaches the inner sanctum, and this weirdness unfortunately detracts from the intricate and beautiful decorations. The interior walls - where no photographs are allowed - are covered in murals. These are no ordinary murals: the gods and goddesses are eclipsed by more modern characters. Superman is shown in the sky, along with an aeroplane. Spiderman and Black Panther are joined by other film and comic book characters. I found two skyscrapers to be suspiciously similar to the Twin Towers, and one had a black serpent, perhaps representing oil, coiled around it. Was the theory that even the likes of Disney would not dare sue a temple for copyright infringement? Was the overall message that religion trumps capitalism? The whole thing left a bad taste in the mouth.
A bench in the Blue Temple reserved for monks: whether this cat had been ordained was unclear.
My first solo trip out of Chiang Rai was to Chiang Saen, a small town about 60 kilometres further north. Due to its strategic location it was involved in the wars with the Burmese Empire, and was occupied by them from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. As a result it is home to some very atmospheric ruins, and there's a nice market as well. I enjoyed walking around the temples, which are interspersed with the modern town, and encountered very few tourists. They were all of a beautiful reddish stone and some were quite overgrown. Sunlight trickled through the leafy canopy overhead and picked out worn, smiling faces in the architecture. From the temples I moved on to the imposing city walls. I remember these being very "curvy", at the gateway at least, and the main road curved with them. I noticed drivers sounding their horns as they passed the temple there. I was sure this was a religious, or at least good-luck, tradition. I was reminded of the bus driver I'd met some months before, high up in the Andes. Whenever we passed a shrine to the Virgin Mary he would take his hands off the wheel and cross himself. This was not reassuring because the shrines were usually located immediately before terrifying hairpin bends.
Nature reclaiming the sacred in Chiang Saen.
It was an easy songthaew ride to the viewpoint where the sluggish brown rivers came together. A few long, thin boats plied the Mekong and a steady stream of (mostly Thai) tourists came off the main road to take photos. The contrasts between the three countries could not have been more striking. The Myanmar side was a pristine forest, broken only by a mansion-like building in the distance. I was standing in a gaudy and – as it seemed to me – tacky temple dominated by an enormous gold Buddha riding in a boat. On the Laos side, meanwhile, some glass-and-concrete skyscrapers were shooting up towards the sky. They were being built so quickly that a literal dust cloud was rising from them and blowing over the other two countries - the intended message was clear. I suspected, since Laos is such a poor country, that this display of dominance might have been bankrolled by China. When I'd had my fill of the temple, and its "loo with a view", I attempted to hitchhike towards Chiang Saen. I was moderately successful in that a car did stop, but it turned out to be a taxi. Although it wasn't quite the ride I'd expected it was still enjoyable, especially when the driver turned on my seat's massage feature (though, to be fair, this was not quite the Thai massage experience I had considered pursuing). From Chiang Saen I caught a bus back to Chiang Rai, but it's worth noting that my adventures on the Mekong were far from over: I would later rendezvous with it in its massive delta region, in Vietnam.
The boat of the Buddha: Phra Chiang Saen Si Phaendin temple.
I was delighted to be ticking so many good experiences off my Bingo card, and soon realised I could even cross off "Homestay". For those who don't know, homestays are an accommodation option where travellers stay with a local family in their home and usually have meals provided. It's a relaxed, intimate and relatively expensive accommodation option, one my budget doesn't usually allow. So it's a credit to Mekhala and her family that this was the environment I found in the hostel. One wet evening a number of delicious-looking plates of food started appearing on the table, and the small number of guests were soon invited to join the family for dinner. "There's nothing like a bit of rain," I wrote in my diary, "To bring a group of backpackers together." It was not just backpackers who were benefiting, however: on another evening several of Mekhala's friends came over, bringing with them a heap of board games. It had been a while since I'd last given Azul a whirl, and I was pleased to finally have a go at Seven Wonders: Duel.
When the rain stopped, Mekhala took the whole lot of us out onto Chiang Rai's walking street. We looked at the different stalls and I tried every type of toasted insect in sight. We passed the park where some of the decorations for the city's annual Flower Festival (which I'd missed) are stored. Mekhala had recently told us that one of the advantages of her new home was its proximity to her son's school. Only now did she mention that it was also very close to her favourite bar, a few blocks from the walking street. So we wound up there with beers in our hands listening to some live music. The band was a young and cool four-piece; they mostly played punk numbers but also did a good cover of John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads. The set was perfectly smooth, precise and well-rehearsed, but a part of me wanted to gently shake someone and point out that these things do not a "punk band" make. I think this cynicism was motivated by fatigue; I had, perhaps, been down one too many country roads by this point.
I was becoming jealous of the long-term volunteers in the hostel, most of whom would get on with their digital nomad roles once the breakfast was cooked and the beds made. I knew, however, that I couldn't settle down: I had yet to achieve my most important objective. I hope I won't sound preachy - or hypocritical - when I say that I want this article to be about the ethics of backpacking. It's not just over-tourism that can be damaging: various tourist activities cause problems, and Brits like me are experts in this field. Smart tourism companies have recognised this concern and now market themselves as "ethical", which they use to justify higher prices for their services. The problem, of course, is that the claims can't be verified, especially by a lone backpacker out on the road. The contrast with, say, a decade ago is most striking in the case of elephant experiences. Companies which once promoted themselves with the phrase "feeding the elephants!" now screech "NO feeding the elephants!" for the same reason. Riding is especially frowned upon, but one man who worked in the industry shared his mixed feelings with me. Is it really so bad if a trained mahout rides the animal in a traditional and, as far as possible, kind way for the tourists' sake? He believed the new attitude threatened livelihoods. I didn't know what to make of it, but I knew the story could get a lot worse. Instead of going into it I'll provide you with a link to an article, by a Bangkok journalist, on Thailand's least ethical form of tourism below.
I needed to get out into the sticks and meet some members of the hill tribes. I wanted to do so in a way that was ethical and did not break the bank. I did not want to be seen as a big, dumb tourist with more money than sense. Something, clearly, had to give. I reasoned that my best chance of success might lie with the nearby Hill Tribe Museum, which was also the public-facing part of a large NGO dedicated to improving the lives of the local tribespeople. It was a great place to visit in its own right, the collection of traditional clothing being particularly fine. The receptionist was a little surprised when I asked about tours because it was low season. They advised a tour was possible but I would have to source other backpackers myself if I wanted to share the cost - I failed in this. It was more expensive than those offered by tour companies by about 50%, and backpacker logic dictated that I should really think twice. I considered it more likely to be ethical and genuine so decided to go ahead, though I wished I could have discussed it with the Elders. When the morning of my tour came I laced up my battered shoes, shouldered my day pack and prepared to go, quite literally, against the flow.
The shrine at the entrance to the Lahu village.
I stepped gingerly into the wooden boat, strong hands guiding me down. I plonked myself on one of the many benches and Goja, my guide, joined me. The boat was a ruea hang yao or "long-tailed boat", shaped like a canoe and with capacity for about twenty people. Our pilot started the engine and we set off up the Kok river. It was a relaxing ride with greenery all around; the landscape was mostly flat but with some dramatic lumpy hills here and there. Goja, a member of the Lahu tribe, was initially not very confident with his English, but was still able to point out the interesting agricultural and religious buildings we passed (his confidence grew during the day and he would later tell me about his own life in Chiang Rai state). As we rounded one bend two more ruea hang yaos came into view. Both were lying relatively low in the water, full as they were with ageing Western tourists. We waved to each other as we passed and I felt very aware of my beard, which was by now long enough to flap about in the breeze.
We pulled up at a covered wooden jetty with a sign reading "Meet the Big Snake!". I was practically bundled out of the boat by a group of smiling men and asked which of the two big snakes I would like to drape around my shoulders. I replied, without thinking, that the biggest of the two would be the most appropriate. One man offered to take my camera and, while he prepared to take my photo, the others uncoiled the snake. It was long and elegant with beautiful white scales - I seem to remember it was a python. I couldn't really appreciate the sight, however, because I was preoccupied by the very big snake's very small box. In a trice the heavy creature was around my shoulders and the photo taken: irrefutable evidence that I was a dumb, grinning tourist. I sighed inwardly and told myself that I had done everything possible in advance to make this an ethical adventure. It was time to let go and try to enjoy the ride. The snake, however, had other ideas: perhaps mistaking my lower leg for a branch it fastened itself tightly and refused to budge. This led to a lot of hopping on my part and tugging on the part of the men. This hilarious scene was not, unfortunately, caught on camera. After this a chatty man showed me his collection of coins.
With my cheeks reddening I followed Goja away from the jetty and up into the village. He informed me that the first objective of our tour had been achieved: I had just "met the Karen". The Karen are, by population, the largest of the hill tribes and are native to Myanmar; many in Thailand are refugees. This gave me pause for thought: the tour was about meeting people and seeing their day-to-day lives - if those lives involved keeping coins and pet snakes then who was I to complain? What had I been expecting, a song and dance? Whirling ceremonial clothes with no ceremony? I'm pleased to say that the day became less tourist-centred from this point onwards, largely thanks to Goja's skills and social interactions with the people we met. I was, however, still reeling a bit when we reached our second destination: an elephant corral. It was a nice place by the river and seeing elephants is, as you'd expect, nice, but I don't have much to say about it. I noticed the elephants' ears were very red in the heat. Goja explained that, while these elephants were taking their turn with the tourists, their families were living their best lives up in the hills. I chose to believe this was true.
Goja and I continued on foot, steering well clear of the pretend "village" where members of the Kayan tribe are forced to sell handicrafts and smile for the cameras. The money from these operations invariably lines the pockets of unscrupulous business owners, leading to the phenomenon being dubbed the "human zoo". We turned off the tarmac onto a peaceful track by a paddy field and I instantly relaxed. We climbed up a valley, passing fields of pineapples, cashew nuts, lemongrass and chilies; some had workers tending them. We started to get brilliant views. It was very hot and sunny – I had expected rain. We took shelter in a little hut used by the farmers and Goja told me about life in his village, which was a little further into the hills than the one we were aiming for. He faced a daily challenge in taking three children to two different schools in the morning using only one motorbike. How he met this challenge I'll leave to your imagination.
In further pursuit of shade we veered from the main path and Goja part-hacked a way through forest towards an agricultural clearing. As a result of this shortcut we approached the Lahu village from below, accentuating a dramatic architectural feature I had been looking forward to: stilts. I was to eat my lunch in a bamboo building with a corrugated iron roof on concrete stilts (concrete replaced wood when the government imposed permanence on these semi-nomadic slash-and-burn farmers). We climbed a flight of steps to a veranda covered by a brightly coloured mat. There I was met by my hostess and her two children. I did not ask to take photos of them – a rule I had imposed on myself – but did do so inside and outside the house. A table was unhooked from a wall and I sat cross-legged while it was piled high with soup, rice, chicken and papaya. It was a delicious meal and very welcome after the morning's exertions. Goja took out his knife and started chopping at some of the bamboo he had collected on the climb, chatting to our hostess as he did so. He chose a natural intersection between segments of bamboo and chopped until he had made me a drinking cup, scoring the outside as decoration. He asked me if I'd like to have a go at making one and I said something about valuing my fingers.
We said goodbye to the family and made our way through the village. There was only one road and the houses were laid out in a way that looked unplanned. This didn't really matter because there was space for all the village motorbikes among the stilts, next to the washing lines and hammocks. It was deathly quiet: everyone, apart from our host family, was out working the fields. At the top of the hill we passed a shrine, complete with brazier for burning offerings. Though all the hill tribes have adopted religions like Buddhism and Christianity, their traditional "animist" beliefs are still very much alive. These beliefs involve protecting the village from malign spirits of the forest, hence the shrine's positioning at its entrance. It served as a defence but, it is believed, defences like these sometimes fail (I'm talking in general terms – I'm not sure exactly where the Lahu sit on this). A woman conceiving twins is considered evidence of this failure and, though now rarely banished, she can still find herself ostracised by the community. I wondered, not for the first time, if it was possible to be simultaneously angry at and sympathetic towards another culture.
We had now reached a forest of teak. Teak is a sought-after hardwood because it grows incredibly slowly, so even the oldest trees looked very small to me. We had a very beautiful, though sometimes scratchy, trek up there. We passed a web strung between two trees where a huge spider (possibly a Giant Golden Orb-Weaver) was gobbling something up. I was hot and sweaty by the time we reached a waterfall. It was very picturesque and something about its speed and the long cutting it had eroded in the rock funnelled cool air towards me. I paddled, though Goja encouraged me to actually swim. We walked down a path to where the pilot from our morning boat ride was waiting, this time at the wheel of a four-by-four.
We drove to our final destination: an Akha village. I watched women in nice headwear shelling some very pink peanuts. I was shown into a house and chatted as much as was possible with the residents. There was an opportunity to buy handicrafts but no one was much bothered about this. I reasoned that this might be an advantage of doing the tour alone, with a guide who was no stranger to the community. As we made to leave I caused some excitement among the children playing in the street, many of whom were wearing t-shirts emblazoned with Disney characters. We drove back towards Chiang Rai, stopping to take photos whenever I wanted. I took a cheesy one with Goja and, at the end of the tour, shook hands with both men. I had enjoyed myself immensely: the day had been everything I wanted and, as you've seen, more. It was well worth the investment and the best outing of my trip, pushing even the Andean paragliding into second place.
On Sunday I went to church. It consisted of two church buildings: a little one, the city's oldest, and a very big one where the congregation actually gathered. A number of different people stood up to take different parts of the service, and there was a good choir. The person who worked hardest, however, was the translator. Though unseen, he kept up a constant stream of live translation through my earpiece during the spoken sections. He looked tired when I met him at the end and expressed my thanks. A husband and wife invited me back home for lunch, and I gladly accepted. I had a happy stroll in their garden, which was looked over by yet another giant white buddha. Taking pity on me for the holes in my t-shirt, my hosts gave me a new one. It carried corporate branding and was left over from some conference or other. I was touched by the gift, and moved by the whole experience, but the day was tinged with sadness: my adventures in the North were coming to an end.
Chiang Rai's airport terminal was not very interesting. It was all concrete and the waiting area was as generic as they come. I was there because of an uncanny turn of good fortune - the thirtieth or fortieth, if you're keeping count. Two friends from my past lives were in Thailand at that moment, and I was flying back to Bangkok to meet them. I was, nevertheless, feeling tired and grumpy, and already forming a mental picture of the utopia-dystopia which I would one day christen the Backpacker Capital. In my pocket my fingers closed on my latest souvenir. The church service, though very enjoyable, had one alarming feature: communion had consisted of individually-wrapped bread wafers and one-use plastic shot glasses for the wine. I had kept my shot glass out of protest because I, apparently, cared about the environment.
Here, then, was the rub: I had only been able to save this shot glass from landfill by flying from the UK to Thailand via a large number of countries. I had tried to compensate for the carbon-spewing nature of my trip by minimising internal flights, yet here I was, waiting for one. There were alternatives, but my time in Thailand was severely limited. This was due to a visa issue - the very thing that had aborted my planned trip to Thailand back in 2011. If the same world that had twice denied me a long visit to Thailand was expecting me to spend 24 hours rattling back to Bangkok on a night bus, it had another thing coming. I found the greed of this statement repulsive: the world did not owe me anything. Despite this, it had given me a tremendous amount, far more than it had given others. This is my intended take-away of this article – all of them, in fact. If you're reading this, you know that this world gives. It gives and it gives and it gives. One way we can share this is by putting pen to paper, as I've done here. Thank you for reading and thank you, Jubal, for editing (and for the conversations about the wildlife and culture).
Links
As promised, here is the article about unethical tourism: https://www.thaienquirer.com/52358/opinion-spare-a-thought-for-thai-sex-workers-during-pride/
I also feel compelled, on this occasion, to link to some of the organisations which made my trip so special. Here is the cooking school in Chiang Mai: https://www.asiascenic.com/
The hostel in Chiang Rai: https://www.facebook.com/people/Together-Backpackers-Hostel/100091812953854/
The Hill Tribe Museum: https://www.pdacr.org/general-information-2/
Editor's Recommendation: the Irish Pub song. As this piece proves, there really is one wherever you go in the world.
Fifteen Less Common Warlock Patrons
September 23, 2026, 08:57:01 PM
Fifteen Less Common Warlock Patrons
By Jubal
The Warlock, as they appear in various popular D20-style role-playing games, is redefined from the general sense used in other media to mean a magic user who has a patron providing their magic.
A Warlock has a different relationship to their patron than the chosen of a god, and this matters. Their relationship is fundamentally contractual: they are not required to express devotion, nor have they been chosen for moral or cultural qualities, only as smart investments towards a goal of some kind that the patron is working towards.
In fifth edition D&D, warlocks can be engaged in their contract by heaven or hell (Fiend and Celestial), by beings from other planes (the Archfey for the Feywild and the Hexblade for the Shadowfell), they can tap into the aberrant power of Lovecraftian horror (Great Old One), or pick from two elemental themed patrons (Fathomless and Genie), and two undeath themed ones (Undying and Undead). Surely, though, there are plenty more beings out in the cosmos trying to get things done who might need a go-getting fool to lock into a bad contract?
Thus, this article gives a few other thoughts and possibilities on what sort of beings might offer you a power-for-service deal. You could do some of these with existing concepts - I've focused on ideas and plot hooks rather than stats, not least given I don't usually run D&D myself, and in some cases I've opted to read bits of lore the way I want (some versions of Slaads give them actually quite a lot of societal structure, whereas I like leaning into them being more ultra-chaotic). In any case, I hope you find these interesting - onto the examples...
A Wilderlord has little need to look human.
Most Warlock patrons offer power from some other element of being. The Wilderlord offers the power of the Prime Material Plane in all its own strangeness and majesty.
The Wilderlord's warlocks may have some things in common with druids, but druids have their own innate connection with nature. The warlock has someone else's connection with nature, and may not even particularly like cute fluffy animals, let alone horrifying crawling ones, but is still obliged to fight for them because power has a price and sometimes the price is seeing things from a giant centipede's point of view. The Wilderlord in representing nature does not of course have to represent it as an eco-warrior either: the beasts of the wild fight one another all the time, and the shifting realities of the world change. A Wilderlord of the woods might send a warlock to help trees that are encroaching on and drying up a swamp or vice versa, dragging the players not just into conflicts between humanity and nature but conflicts within nature itself.
2: The Mage Ascended
Your warlock patron could literally be a guy. Gods have statblocks in this game and they're not impossible for sufficiently epic-level parties to reach – so why wouldn't a mage so powerful they could just give power to random non-specialists do exactly that? They might be pursuing more traditional mage goals like obtaining magical items, or they might have much larger and longer-term plans in which you are just a small part.
There are good reasons why the Mage Ascended might choose to make a warlock rather than simply training wizardlings. For one thing, it gives them safeguards: training a wizard who actually understands their magic may be someone they see as more of a future threat, whereas if they contractually bind the warlock to not harm them then they might see that as a safer bet. They might, of course, eventually be willing to see their warlock as more of a potential partner in their schemes to save or revitalise the cosmic magical order – or they might see them as a pawn to be tossed aside, which may become more difficult than they'd realised given contracts work both ways.
What lurks in the shadows of the night? You do.
Several of the original warlock patrons could have some association with sleep: the Shadowfell for example has an obvious nightmare connotation, and the Feywild has a lot of the dreamlike qualities associated with ideas of Faerie. The Night's Oracle would, however, be a patron who leans into this role much more explicitly, one solely concerned with dreams. It has often been the bringer of prophecies to the slumbering minds of the material plane, but its domain is far wider and more fickle than the simplicity of the truth.
The Night's Oracle is as multifaceted as the minds of all beings that dream – which are many – and seeks through its realm of dreams to experience and imagine the physical realms that it can never reach. Empowering a warlock as its interface with the Waking World gives. It may act in contradictory ways, as it acts inquisitively but without much consideration for morality: it is unlikely to want mass death, but may act in ways to either quell or prompt darker dreams among the living as it tends the grand psychic gardens of the sleeping world. Curiously, it particularly dislikes psychic and control spells at least when it does not control them: it will give these to its warlocks as extensions of its own power, but in the hands of others it sees these as an encroachment on its own domain to be met with all possible resources as a threat.
4: The Greater Sheddu
A powerful good-aligned patron with a twist. Unlike a celestial, a Sheddu is tied to a particular site of worship: they are guardians of heaven on earth, not agents of heaven in its purest form. This gives them a very different priority order: reducing damage to their temple is paramount, and the warlock has been empowered as an additional agent to achieve that goal first and foremost. If the Sheddu's temple is a ruin, this might tie the player to a strange place or give them a specific responsibility for clearing out a dungeon. On the other hand, it might be at the centre of some great city, with the Sheddu maintaining its own staff of warlocks as agents alongside the temple staff.
Either way, the Sheddu has a good reason to want warlocks because unlike the Sheddu, the warlock isn't tied to a particular place. As roaming agents looking for information and eliminating evils and other threats, the Sheddu's warlocks are contractually tied to it and its temple, unlike Clerics or Paladins who are tied to the deity more directly. This might be a source of tension with followers of the deity whose temple it is: the Sheddu's warlock need not be a follower of that deity, and might well be contractually bound to defend the temple much more than they are to follow the god's teachings more widely.
5: The Forgotten Wind
What if there was a patron who didn't ask anything of their warlock – what if there was a patron who didn't even think in a conventional sense? Well, that might be boring, but let's try and add some interest to it. The Forgotten Wind is a powerful but not sentient concept: it selects people at seeming random, granting them powers at a price it does not set out because it has no concept of itself. The "terms of the contract" are well known in the cultures where the wind may be felt, passed down as tales through the generations: the wind provides power, but it also blows you in particular directions, to particular places. What you do with that it leaves up to you, but you cannot reject it. Wind doesn't think, but it does act in patterns, through annual cycles, blowing more or less strongly at particular times. The wind in particular encourages the warlock to keep moving, perhaps cyclically, perhaps driven bit by bit around the world, always with a sense of where they are going next but without a sense of why – because in the end there is no why, there is only the song of the wind.
Maybe a slaad will eat you, maybe it won't.
Maybe this is just a frog.
There are no rules.
The Slaad are beings from the Chaotic Neutral plane, beings of absolutely pure chaos that make very little sense indeed. This is pretty odd when you end up having a contract with one. Whilst you do have a binding pact with the Overslaad, you have no real idea what it says given the utterly chaotic nature of Slaadi language, and equally importantly the Slaad has basically no idea either. The things that may be required of you might be entirely at right angles to anything that anyone would deem logical: they may even be actively working to undermine logic itself by some means or other. Serve the overslaad. Be served by the overslaad. They're kind of the same thing from different angles, right? Go forth, warlock, and bring the world down about your ears because it was too round (or insufficiently round, the overslaad is not your boss except that it also is, it doesn't have to make sense, nothing makes sense) and needed to be messed up a bit.
The Overslaad being a rare example of a truly chaotic patron, it could be appropriate to factor in some mechanics to represent this. Something like "every time you pick spells, pick two and add them to a list, then you can cast a totally random selection every day" might be a pain at the table but could also be fun.
7: The Modron Lock
Converse to the Slaad, the Modrons are the computer-like pure logic creatures of the Lawful Neutral parts of the cosmos. What do the Modrons want? Order. But Modrons have a problem – prolonged exposure to the chaos of life outside Mechanus isn't very good for them, and indeed can drive some of them mad (as shown in Planescape: Torment). The solution, then, might be to hire someone, say by means of a binding contract that gives someone the power of Mechanus in exchange for being pressured to eliminate more chaotic elements that might threaten universal order.
The Modron patron is a way of really going in deep on what the contract nature of a Warlock's power means: they have absolutely no wish to do good or evil, they're not going to twist the contract at all, but they are going to enforce it absolutely, and expect you to do the same. It may be possible for you to wiggle around a contract more than with some patrons because Modrons struggle to even understand the concepts of untruth and imperfect communication, but they will expect any arbitration to be binding – on your soul if needs be.
8: The Archflumph
Flumphs, the curious good-aligned flying jellyfish aberrations, are perhaps hard to fit into many D&D campaigns particularly well. Their solitary, monastic lifestyles mean that they do not always interact with humans, often living deep in caves in the underdark or other secluded locations.
What if, though, one of these ancient flumph sages, these strange but good beings, wanted someone who could interact with the world for them? An asset, a follower, even a friend in the loneliness of whatever deep void they live in to contemplate existence? What if their years of contemplation have given them such incredible power that they could donate that power to others who could interact with the world on their behalf?
What if... the archflumph?
The Archflumph is a great idea for a good-aligned warlock patron because it immediately solves the question of why the powerful patron doesn't do a job themselves: they're not doing the job themselves because they're a weird enormous floating magic jellyfish, and the job requires talking to normal people who might react badly to an aberration turning up on their doorstep. Unlike a celestial patron, they're physical, fallible beings, and their lack of understanding of the world isn't based on a burning zeal, it's just based on the fact that they have literally been living under a rock. Possibly living under all the rock.
That doesn't mean that the Archflumph is going to be only setting you easy tasks – it doesn't understand how difficult anything is, and may think that a conversation is very difficult whereas hovering is a normal thing that everyone can do because it has not spent much time talking to anyone but certainly not to bipeds. Its inherently ponderous nature might make it hard to communicate with when you really do need an answer. Also, whilst it is undeniably on the side of good, it may take very particular philosophical views on what that means (a celestial as typically portrayed is unlikely to direct you to steal: an Archflumph that has decided that property rights should be a meaningless concept on the basis of its extensive personal theories of value that it came up with by reading obscure interplanar philosophy books in a cave for ninety years gives no such guarantees if it will help someone somewhere).
The archflumph is wisdom without practical knowledge, theory without application, the philosopher without the polis. You are the application, and that may be more than you thought you were bargaining for.
The Monk found inner peace. As you're not planning to, they have other ideas for you.
Much like the Mage Ascended, the Monk Ascended is a mortal who has ascended beyond the ken of the world in perfection of their craft. Unlike the Mage Ascended, whose goals are about understanding the outside, the Monk Ascended is all about spreading internal understanding. Why would they make a warlock rather than training a fellow monk? Well, because a monk is on a path to enlightenment: they're the goal. You, their Warlock, are a response to things that threaten that goal.
The patronage of the Monk Ascended may well not be given to one who the Monk expects to find personal inner peace and enlightenment – after all, those people are potential monks. Instead, the Monk might well think the warlock is a lost cause, and therefore best used as a tool to protect the inner peace of others. What if all the mental clutter and torment could be loaded onto one guy who, after all, actually signed up for it? Well, now the guy is you, your boss wants a universe at inner peace, and there's a lot of nasty things out there that really, really do not spark joy. Good luck!
10: The Witch in the Woods
The hag to end all hags, a Baba Yaga figure who can create forests and lakes on a whim, bound mostly by wrapping herself in her own fairy-tale rules and the pettiness of her cruelties. Children she eats, mortals she tricks: she will do a deal, of course. Her deals have costs, and the costs are rarely ones mortals know how to bear.
The Witch differs from something like the Wilderlord above in that while her domain is the wilds, her concerns are much more human; and she differs from a devil in that her concerns are smaller, pettier, more persona. You are not a concern in some great war, she doesn't want your soul, she just wants to mess with you and everyone else as much as possible. You need not worry about the Witch in the Woods ending the world: she is too busy giving nightmares to the goats, drawing the blood from old men at night, and passing pestilence to expecting mothers. You, too, are bound to these things, the little hurts. Was it worth it?
It could become so, for if you do well, she will make you the nightmare that your enemies will fear most: the one thing you have over her is that you can think bigger than she, with all her power, knows how to. But her actions now mark your soul too, and if you break the rules, it will be your own essence on the line.
Three weavers... with a job for you?
Many become warlocks to escape fate: the moment when a mighty being offers you a contract is often the moment of weakness, the point when you will accept their power and aid because you do not think you have an other option. But a warlock could be made to reinforce fate, equally. You got a single opt-out from the weavers who create the fabric of the wyrd: to pay for that one hitch in the fabric, you will spend your life ensuring that none can challenge the ordination of the future.
The weaver's warlock will especially be tasked against wizards, sorcerors, and other warlocks who seek to meddle with the cosmos and act against its will: their cause may be good or evil, but the will of fate is locked, and you are a part of its great chain. Those who escaped death shall die, those who escaped, and those who were never meant to face justice shall be freed. It is known, it is ordained: the weaving continues, always. You cannot see the tapestry, but the small threads you are handed are power immeasurable. You will see the weft and warp bound.
12: The Master of the Revels
The Master of the Revels is the greatest showman in the cosmic order, and in you it has found a new side-character for one of its great productions. It grants you powers, you agree to play the role: fame and fortune await, but the stage is a fickle business.
This works particularly well with some of the more personal and creepy side of Warlock spells – Charm Person, Friends, but also Puppet have an obvious connotation set here. Important to make sure the props are all in the right place, after all.
There's something about the Master of the Revels that could get too meta-plot but also could work very well narratively, in that the patron has an enormous incentive to get their warlock into high drama, high tension situations, and doesn't need a tactical reason why, because producing the drama is the whole point of the thing. The show must go on!
13: They Who Were Before
We've seen patrons displaced from the adventuring party by space or the planar cosmology. But what about time?
They Who Were Before – whether they were an ancient race of dinosaur people, or of giants, or Atlanteans, or the first dragons who were slain by the emergence of the gods and now haunt the world in spirit – need to very much be defined by their ancientness. They may or may not ultimately want to reclaim the world or get re-embodied, but in practice that's an enormous plot to dump on one character, so their more immediate goals might involve finding their old artefacts, preserving or cleansing their old tombs, or rebuilding the memory of them in the culture of today.
Their warlock might be a scholar, but equally they might pick someone who reminds them more of their cultural ideals: perhaps their scholar wanted to be a fighter but then was chosen for their contract precisely on the grounds that the ancient ones valued those martial traits. They might also have difficulty relating to what the world has become (and your contract might produce some difficult technicalities if they ask you to "make it like it used to be"...)
14: They Who Will Come After
A more sci-fi twist on the timeskipped patrons: they come from your world's distant future and are granting you cosmic warlock powers to help stop the doom of their timeline. They're willing to promise you whatever's needed to achieve that, as long as you help them create, or avoid creating, the timeline that they're in.
There could be twists on this: the patrons' idea of an ideal future for the world may not be your own, and you might have some difficult decisions to make if it isn't. Their goals might be pretty brutal – assassinating certain people in your present to avoid them giving birth to future fantasy dictators – or you might literally need to go stop a butterfly flapping its wings in a forest (and fight your way past a bunch of strangler vines to get there).
I think playing these guys as a bit sci-fi could work: you might be in a pseudo-medieval setting, and having your future patrons behave in a much more anachronistic military or scientific way could be fun.
A rightful ruler's power may take many forms...
We tend to think in quite capitalistic terms about warlock contracts – power granted by a negotiated legal framework wherein the patron is essentially your boss. Let's try a different framing. What if a polity or region – in the totally abstract sense – chose its leaders? If they accept the mantle of leadership, they are bound into a particular social role and all its requirements, they exchange the freedom of powerlessness for the burdens and responsibility of authority. In exchange they can have power, the sort of power no other member of their people can possess, perhaps the sort of power no-one else in the world can possess. They have, as it were a mandate to rule. That's a contract, in its own way. It's also quite like the royal farr of Persian legend, or the Chinese concept of Mandate of Heaven.
The Mandated warlock simply adds to a general sense of right-to-rule the ability to eldritch blast their disloyal subjects into next week. The charisma-focused casting of a Warlock makes particular sense here, where casting is not just about a relationship with the patron but also, because the patron is the polity, a collective relationship with the political entity as a whole. Of course, if they fail to rule well – if they breach the social contract – they risk losing the Mandate, leaving them very literally weakened and vulnerable to their enemies and the rise of a new ruler in their stead...
Anyway, those are my thoughts on some alternative warlock patrons. Please let me know in the comments if you make use of any of these ideas, especially the archflumph who I've not played a warlock of but would really like to now. And if you have more additions, thoughts, and comments, I'd love to hear those too!
The Backpacker Capital: Arrival
May 24, 2026, 11:31:37 AM
The Backpacker Capital: Arrival
By indiekid
The chedi (stupa) of Wat Chedi Luang.
A long way from here there is a city. The streets are clean and the weather is agreeable. Viewed from a distance, the city's skyline is uncluttered and pretty. This is thanks, in part, to its varied and interesting public buildings. Though some of these buildings may be the relics of a colonial past, this city has embraced them, made them its own and uses them to paint a bright future for itself. Many groups and societies meet in the city, including the Elders of Backpacking. It is they who keep an eye on world events and inform travellers of new risks or opportunities. Every year they compile bingo cards to guide the more competitive types to the most exciting destinations and experiences. There's time here for religion too: most visitors partake in yoga and mindfulness, but a few die-hards still pay homage to the Hippie movement of the twentieth century.
In the Backpacker Capital there is free WiFi on every street corner. Getting around is easy: the tuktuks carry up to five passengers, the motorbikes ten. Teleporters hover at intervals to whisk backpackers off to their next destination in a heartbeat. Drugs are readily available but technically illegal, so users can still get a kick out of breaking the rules. There are no hangovers, stomach bugs or bouts of homesickness. There are, of course, a lot of people behind the scenes keeping the place running smoothly. Visitors, however, rarely take much notice of them - except when on an organised tour to one of their quaint little villages. Did I mention that everyone speaks English? Even the crowds of drunken Brits give it a good shot.
This city, of course, does not exist. If it did, the backpackers of the world - fickle as they are - would swiftly label it as "too touristy" and drift off somewhere new. There are, however, a handful of cities worldwide which come close. Usually located where popular itineraries meet, these cities are so saturated in the travel "vibe" that it has formed a local sub-culture of its own. Examples from my own adventures include San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico and Edinburgh, Scotland. This article, meanwhile, is about Chiang Mai, Thailand. I, like many travellers, arrived by train from Bangkok. So find your berth, buckle up and wrap up warm against the vicious air conditioning: the North is calling, and I'm glad you've come along for the ride.
It was 3am and I couldn't get back to sleep. Dawn had yet to illuminate the misty hills through which the train rumbled, but I had my nose pressed up against the window even so. I had felt an excitement similar to this before - every time I approached a new destination, in fact. This time, however, it was personal. It was in this part of the world that I had almost had my first backpacking adventure many years previously. Due to visa issues I pivoted to India and, though I had a great time, Thailand remained lodged in my imagination. In the intervening years I had come to understand the positive impacts new places and people had on me personally. I had left some of them, Medellín, for example, so energised I felt I had been "modded". Would I have wound up a different person had those experiences not happened, had I turned right instead of left? In Chiang Mai I hoped to find the answers to some of these questions. I was expecting, to stick with the gaming analogy, to put on a new "skin" - one which had been waiting for me since I was eighteen years old.
At the station I took a songthaew into town. These are pickup trucks converted into buses by the addition of benches and an awning. The city centre was easily identifiable by the moat and impressive stone walls. These are arranged in a 1.6 kilometre square and enclose many of the city's sites. I had not booked accommodation but was fortunate to stumble across a nice family-run hostel which even did food. I was initially the only backpacker in my dorm so I essentially had my own room for the cost of £3 a night. It was the rainy (ie. low) season, which meant it was a bit too hot to do anything until the afternoon thunderstorm broke. When the storm passed I set off in search of the city's "walking streets".
A flag outside the where the pillar of Wat Chedi Luang is stored - this is all that women are allowed to see.
My plan for the next few days was to visit Chiang Mai's many temples. My first stop, however, was the Lanna Folklife Museum, which is housed in a beautiful building with interiors of teak. The Lanna culture dominates the area around Chiang Mai, but it's worth noting that Northern Thailand as a whole is very diverse. The Lanna practice Theravada Buddhism and, though there were many items of interest in the museum, it was their religious art which really made an impression on me. They make Buddha statues and statuettes in just about every material imaginable. They portray him with long facial features, especially the ears, and hands in one of the mudra positions, each of which has its own meaning. Thus prepared, I headed out to see the temples. Architecturally they had various things in common, such as snake-like nagas - semi-divine beings found in various Asian cultures, sometimes with human or bestial characteristics - undulating down their staircases, and steeply-curving wooden roofs over their porches (the latter proved to be useful shelters during the sudden rainstorms). Rather than go through the temples exhaustively I thought I'd focus on one of the most important.
Wat Chedi Luang stands on one of the old city's main North-South thoroughfares. It consists of a large ruined stupa surrounded by various buildings. These include shrines, museums and accommodation for the monks. There are candles burning and gongs for visitors to sound on the paths. The most important building, situated near the entrance, is relatively small but nicely decked out in green and white. It is possibly the most sacred place in the city because it houses its pillar: the Inthakhin Vihara. It was here that I came across a discriminatory regulation which will be depressingly familiar to students of religion. Women are not allowed to enter because they menstruate. I wondered, not for the first time, if it was possible to be simultaneously angry at and sympathetic towards another culture.
The beast-lined stairs to Wat Phra That Doi Suthep.
The highlight of my visit to Chiang Mai was my day in a cookery school. This was held in a one-storey building with several benches of cooking stations. There were about twelve of us booked onto the course and, thanks largely to the welcoming host, it was a very sociable day. I met several Americans, and an Irish couple, Callan and Cat, who had come over from Vietnam. We started in the garden where some of the ingredients are grown. I was bitten by a mosquito during the talk, so we were able to test the painkilling effect of the turmeric root in situ. Before returning to our woks we headed to the local market for more ingredients. Although we cooked a variety of dishes, with choices at each stage, there was a fairly consistent ratio to remember: one spoonful of palm sugar to two of fish sauce to three of oyster sauce. Behind the scenes, an army of staff did our washing up and, presumably, giggled at our poor - and sometimes hazardous - wok technique. I made spring rolls, Pad See Uw, Tom Yum Koong soup, Massaman Curry, Glass Noodle Salad and Mango Sticky Rice. For the latter two dishes the class thinned out dramatically: these were part of the full-day course and most attendees had only signed up for a half. I felt vindicated in my decision when someone later confided in me that their afternoon back at their hostel had consisted only of "collapsing into a food coma" - we were eating our creations as we went along. I actually took most of my food away in takeaway boxes (this is one reason a cookery class is significantly more budget-friendly than it first appears). I made some audio recordings on my phone and came away with a recipe book, which I still use.
I was having a great time in the Backpacker Capital, but it was clear that I couldn't leave without seeing the Backpacker Playground. Though a detour from my planned itinerary, the town of Pai held an irresistible lure. Sometimes described as a "beach town in the mountains", Pai boasts a combination of beautiful surroundings and a chilled-out vibe. The staff at my Chiang Mai hostel were kind enough to let me leave my big bag while I headed for the bus. I found, to my surprise, two minibuses instead of one large bus. The reason for this soon became apparent: the road, though good quality, was narrow in places and very steep. The journey took us around innumerable hair-pin bends which were - in the case of the unfortunate occupant of the back corner seat - literally vomit-inducing. It was with a sense of relief that I arrived in Pai and started exploring.
The town's main street wound its way past quirky bookshops and little cafes with backpackers lounging around outside. Across the river, the thickly-forested hills promised exciting motorbike adventures. Jutting above the trees was the big white Buddha of Wat Phra That Mae Yen (how are you getting on with these names, by the way?). I walked the two kilometres towards it and climbed the big white staircase. I joined the ten (ish) meter-tall statue in admiring the view of the sunset. The Buddha was portrayed seated with one hand in his lap and the other on his knee: the mudra which represents "calling the Earth to witness". I descended the steps and followed the road back; I remember the rice paddies looking very beautiful in the twilight.
I was unaware that my evening was about to get very interesting. I paused by the roadside to examine a big flying insect which was stuck on its back, and a motorbike pulled up alongside me. On it were two backpackers, both sensibly wearing helmets, who were more interested in me than the unfortunate insect. They were Callan and Cat, my friends from the cookery school! We had a brief catch up then agreed to meet at a bar. I returned to my simple hostel, smartened myself up as best I could, then headed out into the night. The bar, once located in its narrow alley, was nicely decorated with cushions and coloured lights. I joined Callan and Cat in listening to the live music, which included good covers of Darius' Colourblind and John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads. I drank a few Black Russians, the only cocktails on offer which weren't a huge dose of citrus and sugar. I felt a little out of place amongst the bar's uber-cool patrons, but still had a nice evening.
A distant Buddha statue watches over the Pai river.
The owner of the cafe helped me in my search for a taxi, but ended up taking me back to town himself. I paid a quick visit to some nice waterfalls then returned to the bus station. I had spent a mere 24 hours in Pai, and was aware that the aforementioned Elders would be most displeased with me. My plans, however, were taking me back to Chiang Mai for another bus north - as far north as was possible for me to go. I'm itching to tell you about it, but I can sense my editor's eyelids drooping, and maybe yours are too. Let's make this one a two-parter, shall we?
Editor's Note: Thanks go to John Geeson for helping with the bird identification in for this piece. Stay tuned for part two!
Exilian Interviews: Matthew James Jones
December 16, 2025, 04:47:25 PM
A Conversation With: Matthew James Jones
Your Interviewer: Jubal
Hi all and welcome back to our irregular series of Exilian interviews! This time we've got a two-section piece sitting down with Matthew James Jones – poet, war veteran, and author of Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures, a visceral fantasy-realism view of the war in Afghanistan – starting with a review by Jubal and then a Q&A with the author.
If you want to skip down the page to the interview itself, you can click here – if not, here goes!
Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures is a hell of a book, which I mean in at least two of the possible ways you can read that phrase. It's a book that you shouldn't steel yourself before reading, because there isn't any plausible amount of steel that can withstand a book that at times drops its turns on you with a written force borrowed from one of its titular drone strikes. You should read it when you're in the right place to read it, nonetheless: it's probably the book I've read this year that will stick hardest in the back of my mind, in a way that's a testament both to the writing and to how psychologically tricky the subject matter is.
To give the synopsis: this is a fantasy book about the war in Afghanistan, told from the perspective of a drone pilot - an experience that the author, Matthew James Jones, is writing from directly. The base Jones' fictional self lives on has a mix of real, fantastical, and luridly somewhere-between issues: but this is not a puzzle, or a setup for adventure, or even really a horror story. It doesn't want to comfort you with the structure of a genre tale: it is a story about the stories that people tell to make thin veneers between themselves and the hands they place on a computer keyboard in front of them, and a story about the breakdown of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are or ought to be.
To give the synopsis another way: this is a vivid walkthrough of someone's PTSD. Its core subject matter is the mental dissonance of war. Whilst I've never been to war, my brain locked onto enough of it that it hit me hard in the resonances.
To give the synopsis a third way: there are wars, and people hurt people and love and die and things smell and blood is sticky on your hands even if you never touched it directly, and some people out there are still desperate for good toilet roll. There's also a sasquatch. It doesn't go well for the sasquatch, either.
So to say I enjoyed, or loved, this work would feel almost wrong given how bleak its subject matter is: instead I was compelled by it. The book placed me at the next remove from the book's drone operators who watch humans being blown to bits on a screen: watching weirdly coldly as the characters, there in my little wood pulp entertainment medium with its ink words twitching along like supply trucks, took themselves onto the next page and then the next. My brain often wanted to turn it into a tale: one of those things where things will be resolved with, if not a victory, then a lesson, or a bittersweet hope. The testament to the book's power is that it held me in a space with none of those things, with no lock or key, and yet I could not leave it.
The thing with the way the book is written is not that that it's a book that is unrelentingly doom-laden, or depressing: people die, people joke, people live, in a suspension of doom, a veneer that is so fragile as to be transparent, and yet is clung to like some latter-day mental aegis. Nor, though, is it inherently hopeful: survival is not a victory, it is just survival. If there is to be hope, it has to come from something you do with the survival afterwards, after the last page has been closed, and that's entirely up to you. The writing neither allows the proper anaesthetic of nihilism to dull its sense of pain, nor the balm of hope to heal it. Those are high thoughts, and our protagonist is busy sneaking food to a sasquatch, exacting petty revenge on someone who deserves it, or hoping to take a slightly more comfortable dump. Or giving orders relating to blowing very real, human people to bloodstained pieces. That piece of comedically jarring dissonance is orchestrated throughout the book in continual, discordant flurries of notes and motion, giving you little chance to settle your mind and attempt something so futile as wrapping your head around what that situation might do to a brain.
I cried on page seventy-three: but that partly says something about the efforts my mind was taking to not fall into the midst of a book situation that I, unlike the title character and the author, to be frank probably would have ended up in worse shape from. It also says something about my particular feelings regarding owlbears. Given a character I have written a lot of and hold very close to my own heart as a writer is a gentle, curious, childish owlbear in particular, the impact of seeing a character likened to one amidst the pressures and terrors of drone warfare had an impact on me that was visceral enough that it's many weeks since I read that page and it's still sitting with me.
Another brutal cleverness in Jones' writing is in ripping the bandage off. Not ripping the bandage off to show the reader the sanitisation of war – we modern readers have known those lines rehearsed for a hundred years by now – but instead in ripping the bandage off the dehumanisation of its villains. As humans, we want the lines to be drawn well between our good guys and our bad guys, between our normal and abnormal: and when those lines are crossed by fictional villains, they are crossed in ways that are tempting, where we are shown the danger of using the ends to justify the means or the fantasy of doing a bad thing for justice or some other good cause. In Jones' book, he has people doing genuinely disgusting things, and then pushes you, face first, into the fact that those people are human, not as a cautionary tale, not as a setup for some grand revelation, just that people are out there, getting twisted up by the world, their minds not so many logic points away from your own. The horror is not the fear of being that person, but simply that you can understand them, simply that evil is human and that the horror becomes banal. The carpet is rolled up, what was swept under it lies bare, and oftentimes there will be nobody with the will or power or both to stop it.
And yet, the book did not leave me wallowing in depression either. There's sometimes a certain deathly pompous grandiosity to depressive feelings incited by books, and it can be easy for stories so rooted in the horror of war to disappear into a vast moral gulf lurking in the heart of a soul. This is not a book like that: it's a book of people who cope. It's often very funny, with side-boxes providing laconic humour or perspectives from other characters and with a very heavy sense of physicality throughout – there's a sense almost of slapstick at times, until it's again and again revealed that the theatre of war is not hosting a performance and the violations of the characters' humanity were real all along. The characters live around their absurdities, their pattered jargons and human quirks, and they duck behind them as cover only momentarily before the next day comes, and then the day after it. It eventually breaks most of them, in different ways, but coping can often, if not always, be done by a broken person: it's not a high bar to set, it's just a bar you get on with clearing.
I think I'll be processing this book for a long time to come – not until I've finished doing so, because I don't think I will, but until I come better to peace with the fact that I can't. What Matthew Jones has written is a spanner in the engines of a mind, an unprocessable, honest, painful fantasy that refuses to be dislodged, finessed, or rounded off.
There's a power in being stopped like that, caught in mental flight and brought tumbling to vivid, colourful, murderous, stinking and irrepressibly human earth: and this book has exactly that power.
Who knows? One day, a force like that might even stop a drone.
The Interview
Matt: Absolutely. Concern about the dehumanization of drone war is one of the major motors of the book. When I first got back from Afghanistan, I developed online training for junior officers on the ethics of drone war, still obligatory. About the necessity to say no to an unlawful order. About how, when you "strike" a villager, you lose the whole village. About generals who ordered the strike then refused to watch the mothers collect what remained of their sons in baskets.
Simple enough to find drone-porn on YouTube if one is so inclined. Perhaps you can even catch the banter of the drone operators, bloated with racial slurs and pre-judgement, rationalizing an unjust strike against a wedding convoy. Pause – the groom waves a white veil frantically as a flag of peace, his parents slaughtered.
Trigger warning? Who said that? Stop trying to stuff the world in a bottle – get better at feelings.
Y'all need to know how easy killing has gotten. Now they're delegating the hard parts to AI, like a kid who doesn't want to write his papers. But it was language they killed first, with their sanitized combat chat, which cancers through my novel, growing in strength, until human beings open their mouths, and the war speaks.
Jubal: Besides wanting to process your own experiences, what brought you to write this book in this particular way? Was it an instinctive approach for you, or did you do a lot of planning out how you were going to approach it?
Matt: Oh, my dude – don't get it twisted. Years of polishing my mask and cape have allowed me to appear like a fun, spontaneous person – this is a carefully cultivated illusion. Beneath the constant flow of crass jokes that I call charm, I'm mostly cyborg. One who leaks radiator fluid and calls it tears.
Which is my way of saying that "Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures" began as a spreadsheet, a systematic breakdown of scenes/character/foreshadowing/point of view, but then the characters came to life and burnt the script. There's six or seven moving threads here that comprise the sweater: love story; detective story; war story; mythic story; ghost story; and so forth. I wrote it for everyone.
The expository boxes emerged naturally, rendered as flash fiction. Because the civilians in my writing group got so swamped by the foreignness of the warzone, they stumbled over the jargon and slipped into the poo pond. After I got the grant from the Canadian Council for the Arts, I could afford to throw cheddar at the best editors I knew. So the text was folded and refolded, katana-steel.
Jubal: Did you have any pushback to the fantasy parts of the book? Did anyone think it was wrong in some way to add those fictitious elements into a recent, real war?
Matt: At one point, Random House was seriously considering the text, and they said, "Not so sure we can sell the Bigfoot – can you write this more like 'The Yellow Birds?'" For those who haven't read it, that's a pretty straightforward war/PTSD story, not so much play in form. I was more inspired by the time travelling in Slaughterhouse V. There is, actually, a precedent for fantasy and war stories blurring. Catch 22 does it well, frenetic. Those who've been to war understand how reality-bending it is, how surreal. How the mind crafts little escapes.
Q: A student, forced to buy the book: "Is the sasquatch real?"
A: Matt, in his crusty prof costume: "You know I made up all the characters, right? That characters in stories are just word-puppets?"
Wise editors understood: without the Sasquatch, it's a grisly drone story, painstakingly wrought, a too-tall glass of pain. Pretty sure you're gonna ask me later about hope, because everybody does, and part of that answer is here. Hope is a function of the imagination; I kept my book pure, and weird, because I believed in it.
We can call it artistic integrity, or we can call it stupidity, but only time will tell if I'm playing the long game well, or dying in obscurity.
Jubal: It's hard to explain "Predators, Reapers and Deadlier Creatures" to people without the term 'magical realism' – which it isn't in the strict sense, in that there's a particular post-colonial element to that genre. Still, there's a similar sense of fantasy as psychological fracture under the pressures of a system here. Was magical realism a genre you were explicitly drawing on?
Matt: Afghanistan was a particularly bizarre moment for post-colonialism. We knocked the Taliban out of power in the first year, launching their guerilla endurance campaign. But my book takes place in year ten, when coalition forces had spent a decade building roads and infrastructure, propping up the world's most corrupt government under Karzai, training the army and police. The rhetoric was: if we leave now, the Taliban will take back control, so we stayed.
Until we left. Now the Taliban are back whipping women's feet in the marketplace.
The rhetoric was also: we fight for women, which was pure self-delusion, comforting.
So for twenty years confused soldiers found themselves drawn into an unwanted act of post-colonial nation-building. We needed shovels, not rifles. You can't build with a Reaper, just destroy. In our rich-world hubris, we imposed democracy on a tribal society with a different background and values. So they bled us, and we bled them.
I think writers do turn to magic when they aren't allowed to tell the truth. I was always inspired by Salman Rushdie, his anti-colonialism, anti-fanaticism – the way he not only wrote stories, but lived them. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" comes to mind: the ghost arrives, beyond metaphor, to embody the haunting of ancestral wounds, unchained.
The world is boring, and broken, and unfair; writers use magic to topple structures of power to inspire people to make change. I can't actually throttle billionaires no matter how my fingers twitch. But watch, in text, how I can drag a Musk through word-tar, then douse him in feathers.
Magic is inherently democratic, James. No one can claim to own it; we are only fleeting conduits.
Jubal: Your book is written in the first person, where you as the author are also the narrating character, quite explicitly – but there's also that gap, or at least that sense of fantasy, where the story departs from "lived experience". I can't think of many other authors who've done that, except possibly Dante. How did that sense of the relationship between you and you develop, and was the book like that throughout drafting?
Matt: Fortunately, I have the world's most banal name. Maybe John Smith competes. As a writer, the common name has been a bane – making me hard to find and follow. Sure, I could have chosen a nom de plume but then I started paying for a website (www.matthewjamesjones.com) and the ship had sailed. So began my quest to redeem the name, or at least find its use.
Indeed, it isn't my name at all. It's everyone's name, the everyman. The question becomes: how can I play with the invisibility it offers? A whole legion of Joneses, marching in step with our identical uniforms? JONES emblazoned proudly on our chests?
At one point Jones says something to the Sasquatch like, "Use my uniform – the name will help you hide." Later, Jones is confronted by the Taser Rapist, wearing Jones's stolen uniform, and the security of his (our) common name: "Now we are brothers, look." The name Jones is also incorporated into one of the narrator's grief-poems, rhyming with drones, how on theme! So in these and other ways I integrated the name into the story itself.
Let's cut the armadillo. Books are always about the writer; characters are just shadows pulled from the unconscious, forced to dance. What seems like innovation here is just honesty, a unique flavour among illusions.
Jubal: Poetry is clearly important to you, both as the book protagonist and outside it. Do you find processing things through poetry functionally different, or used for different kinds of emotions, than you use for prose, or are they quite interchangeable systems for you?
Matt: Writing has been a lifeline through all of Dante's hells – but it's no substitute for therapy and professional help. Fortunately, my treatment was sponsored by the state. The problem with being a professional maze-maker is falling into your own traps. Substituting the realworld for an artificial reality where you're already king – no need to get your hands dirty with gritwork. For every writer and poet I've met who is well adjusted and hardworking, there are ten neurotic bastards out there, foaming at the mouth and snarling for scraps.
When I teach creative writing (either at universities in Paris, or through my monthly writing workshop) therapy emerges – it's not propaganda. Just a little sleight of hand where we pretend we're talking about your character's neurosis, how they got all tangled up from their childhood wounds, how they were ignored all the time as a kid so now they gotta shout at the top of their lungs – people aren't that complicated. Just wound-machines acting out our programming. So if you truly deepdive into writing character, you might just figure out your own armadillo by accident.
In terms of prose, call me unfaithful. The idea was always: start with poetry, and become a master of the line. Move to short stories and learn to rock a paragraph. Upgrade to novels and your unit of measurement becomes the chapter. It was always one path, no matter the divergence.
And now, post-book, I'm tinkering with even more diverse media, with all the enthusiasm of a soldier, post-deployment, splashing into Tinder. Somehow I find myself teaching Digital Narratives at a video-game school. Learning basic code and how to create choose-your-own-adventure stories that can run in a simple browser window, or on your phone.
It's not actually a question of medium; it's a question of audience. What are the migratory patterns of owlbears? Do they hibernate in the winter, or huddle penguin-like? Can they fly, or does the ground pull at them the same as us, capping their aerial forays to the summit of a fearsome jump? And where do I meet the bears like me, feathered?
Jubal: To move on a bit to the fantasy parts of it – you build up quite a lot of mythos of the sasquatches in particular. It would have been easier to write that character as an hallucinatory entity, but you're careful to make him embodied, physical to the narrative, existing with his own reality. Did you have any particular process or inspirations for how not only that character but also his surrounding culture came together?
Matt: I see this as a question of restraints. The sasquatch, with his limited education and vocabulary, can't waffle and riff, or fall into pits of reverie or cynicism like a Jones. It's always gotta be singsongy. It's always gotta be from the body. I wanted my most unreal nonreal character to be the most real: with pain, hunger, history, fleas.
Also catering to historic pairings like Don Quixote and Sancho, where one is rooted in a tower of the mind, and the other rutting in the stables, or dreaming of the next bottle of wine. Or, if you prefer, Asterix and Obelix. My French students at the Parisian Military Academy loved when I destroyed their favourite childhood heroes through the critic's lens. Asterix is only strong when he drinks the magic potion. Obelix, on the other hand, is a human juggernaut. On a whim, he destroys armies, sinks armadas, gets armadillofaced. The external world represents no threat to them: only a runaway Obelix can tank the story, so it becomes the fate of long-suffering Asterix to moderate his giant friend, and that's the struggle.
I tell my students that trying to live as pure intellectuals is like trying to win the marathon hopping on one foot. Alas, our bodies are stuck in these putrefying meatsacks, housing our emotional apparatus. That's why I started the Log Gym, which began with hoisting logs in the forest, just a few PTSD-riddled veterans, and expanded into a larger group of friends.
Let me point to the larger concerns of the body in the book (the strong body; the weak body; the beautiful body; the ugly body; the male body; the female body; the whole body; the dismembered body) like ripples in a pond, spreading.
Most important: those mythic sections, all about the Sasquatch gods and heroes, were hella fun to write. Somehow that mythic Sasquatch voice became one of the most powerful and important voices in the story. It's a voice that embodies home, and things lost. It's the voice of a humiliated god, forced to gnaw frogs in a bug-infested crawlspace. Voice of a lost wisdom, discarded traditions. Excavate the layers of the pyramid of suffering until you locate the base – the natural world.
Jubal: I have to ask about the owlbear (which I think you only mention in description). Was that a creature you particularly had a history with? Was there something particular to you about picking it over other beasts for that specific analogy and scene?
Matt: I always thought, once I'd shaken off the war trauma and the other stories bursting out of me, I'd write high fantasy: even ran a blog for a while, on my website, and the last post was "on imagination" featuring a furious owlbear, enhanced by moon-magic, and defending her chick-cubs.
So perhaps I have a strong association with the owlbear as a fierce protective mother, in the way of bears. Naturally a bear is not a monster, just an overgrown kitten. But fuse the bear with the long-seeing owl; throw in some brightly hued feathers, and now you have a proper force.
It was the Major, I think. The one whose "loneliness monster" was an owl-headed bear, shrieking behind a canary-cage. Because the more a creature loves its freedom, the tighter we cage it. And because the Major dreamed of being a mother, just not the kind of mother we might expect.
Like I said before, we told ourselves the war was to free women, but that was just a feel-good lie. Yet the Major fights for women, truly.
Jubal: There's a lot that's important and a lot that's darkly funny, but not a lot that's in any sense hopeful in "Predators, Reapers, and Deadlier Creatures," and indeed it might be jarring if there was – it feels more about remembrance and acknowledging, in its own way, what happened to the soldiers and victims of war. But how do you see the relationship between this and what does keep you going – what gives you hope?
Matt: Call it a tragicomedy, if it helps. Perhaps the book doesn't seem hopeful because the war was such a profound waste. But the love was real, that scene with the monsoon – "I felt one once." There was even a spark of love in that hellhole; did you see it? And true camaraderie, even among opposites, and the incongruous gentleness of one monster cleaning another's wounds.
Let's continue our theme of honesty – I am a veteran who served and saw terrible things. I got a big ol' list of friends who aren't around anymore, who fed themselves bullets. And still I poured myself into this book, both the light and the shadow, hoping I could catalyse a change. That I could push the rudder of culture the tiniest fraction of a millimetre, and get humans to think about drone war in a new way. Move culture first, then policy wonks implement protocols to curb the abuses of this still-emerging weapon.
I left home; I moved to France, descending into the writers' bohemia, to live a life of craft and words. And I hoped that people would read my work, not because I was famous, but because the writing was worthy.
There is always a hope-question and it always makes me feel misunderstood. In terms of hope, I'm the village idiot, staring at the cloudless sky with open mouth, wishing for a drop of rain.
Jubal: Finally, where can people get the book, and where can they find out more about your work?
Matt: Thanks for reading, James, and for caring enough to line up this Q&A. The best way to get a copy of the text is to find it on Amazon. Bezos is a vampire but it all started with an efficient book-distribution system.
To stay in touch, get news, and receive my sweet sweet freebies, join the mailing list. That's where I'll share my upcoming "choose-your-own-adventure" digital narrative, "Matt's Guide for Collapsed Men" which will take us to the pit and back. That one is free, pure clickbait, a reader magnet.
December's mailing-list spam, "The Fart that Ruined Christmas," is outrageous, written from the body. But what's that? You're a crackhead for images? Then Instagram's the best choice.
All owlbears welcome. All sasquatches and gnomes and gnolls and trolls and pangolins. I swing the doors open; follow my trail of breadcrumbs, all you creatures, and feast.
An Unexpected Bestiary: The Fifth Parchment
August 24, 2025, 10:40:48 PM
An Unexpected Bestiary: The Fifth Parchment
By Jubal
It's some years since I last shared an entry in the Unexpected Bestiary series, but here we are at long last with seven more strange but real creatures, with information about them and ideas for how you could use them in writing, RPGs, and any other storytelling or game design you might be doing. If you find this piece interesting and inspiring or have any alternative ideas and comments, please do comment and let me know, and hopefully there'll be less of a gap until I get to writing part six!
You can also read other parts in this series: parchments one, two, three, and four, and the Pangolin special. And with that, let's meet the first of our new arrivals, the worryingly named...
Hellbender
Photo by Evan Grimes: via Wikimedia commons.
The creature itself is rather less frightening than one might be led to imagine from the nomenclature: they're large salamanders from the eastern United States, growing up to 70cm in length and living largely in creeks in Appalachia. Their blotchy red-brown colour might have given rise to the association with devilry: their lifestyle of hiding around rocks and eating small fish and crayfish is probably rather less hell-fuelled.
Another interesting feature is that – again, despite their name – the hellbender is a good indication for water purity. After adults undergo their final metamorphosis, they have rather limited gill function and need fast-moving, oxygenated, clean water in order to be able to obtain enough oxygen to be healthy. They live in a mostly solitary way and defend particularly good spots for their lifestyle, making exceptions for mating where a female will visit a male's patch, lay some eggs which he will fertilise externally, and then leave: the males defend and raise the eggs and hatchlings for seven or eight months.
The combination of the name and habitat suggests some interesting possibilities for using the hellbender in fictional contexts. One could imagine these outcasts and refugees of hell actually being good indicators for e.g. holy water, being desperate to bathe in the purest substances possible to avoid the sight of their erstwhile fiendish predators. They'd make interesting pets and companions for tieflings for much the same reason. If given a bit more sapience and scaled up a bit, they might be more cognisant of the whole situation, living an almost monastic live in their solitary fresh-water hermitages and contemplating how the world might have been otherwise.
Ant-lion
Antlion photo by Scott Robinson. Via Wikimedia commons.
The classic ant-lion strategy is to dig a shallow pit, usually in very loose soil or sand and in a dry location, and sit just under the surface: when prey such as a hapless ant wanders above the pit, the creature pounces, using its huge jaws to grab the insect and drag it under the sand to eat it. They rapidly inject their prey with both venom and digestive enzymes, sealing its fate and causing it to start being digested before it even enters the ant-lion's body. The biggest difficulty for the ant-lion is not knowing how long it will have to wait, and they are certainly adapted to long periods without food, to the point where ant-lion larvae literally lack the facilities to poop: nothing is left unstored.
The typical thing to do with an ant-lion in fiction would just be to scale it up to make it a threat to characters. Whilst not mobile like the sand-worms of Arrakis, the similar principle of having areas of a sandy desert where huge beasts, torpid for years until something disturbs them, lurk and wait to kill below the surface would be an excellent monster for that kind of environment. You could also use the original creature in other ways, though: given their sandy hiding-holes, ant-lions are difficult and perhaps delicate to find, so if there was some need for them they could represent a particular challenge for characters whose knowledge of the land needs testing.
Cormorant
Cormorant on a branch: author's own photo.
Whilst they're not birds many modern city-dwellers think about a great deal, cormorants are still common and do have a long association with humans. Their fishing prowess has been utilised across Eurasia for both sport and hunting: they can be trained to wear a neck ring that stops them fully swallowing larger fish, causing them to then return the fish to their trainer. These days, the practice is particularly associated with eastern Asia where cormorant fishing is still done for food, but sport-fishing with cormorants was described in the west in the early seventeenth century by the traveller George Sandys.
There's no shortage of cormorant folklore and associations from around the world. They appear as far back as Homer – Hermes is likened to one in the Odyssey, and scholars have suggested that their presence in the cypress trees of Circe's island might give them an association with death. In early modern England, they were symbols of brooding, voracious greed, perhaps due to the way they tend to very visibly swallow fish whole and perhaps due to their black-clad perches looking down on the world – Milton has the devil sit like a cormorant on the Tree of Life. Even more atmospherically, Francis Meres wrote that "As great fishes devoure the small: so couetous cormorants eate vp the poore" and Shakespeare in Love's Labours Lost speaks of the "cormorant devouring time". There are more positive connotations available too, though – some have likened the cormorant's outstretched wing-drying pose (which you can see here) to a Christian cross and associated the cormorant with self-sacrifice.
As potential inclusions in fiction, they're fascinating and have no shortage of potential. There are really two angles on this: the physical cormorant, engaged in real life, and the cormorant as metaphor. If you go down the former route, cormorant fishing is a lively inclusion for any imagined world, and a real part of cultures both past and present. As companion to a more fishing village based ranger character, or a core part of life for local folk taking their boats out onto the deep river, the cormorant could add a very distinctive flavour to a world. Cormorants are often somewhat colonial, too, so e.g. "turn at the tree where the cormorants sit" might be a valid landmark in any more water-bound world.
Then there's the metaphorical cormorant: the cross-bound symbol of sacrifice, or the mysterious watcher of greed and death. The open-winged cormorant does make an excellent heraldic symbol, and the association with fishing might help link to ideas of the water and the sea, but also of recruiting and building connections (as with the Christian disciples' concept of "fishers of men"). On the darker side, the idea of the cormorant as the symbol of death and the all-consuming makes a really interesting from difference to giving that role to, say, the raven or the wolf. I love the idea of the time-eating cormorant – not chasing and snapping at it, like one might imagine a wolf doing, just waiting and watching, perched above the very cosmos on a tree both alive and dead, for the moment at the end of everything when it can gulp the very fabric of existence into its belly and fly up into the cypress trees from which none return.
Mexican Mole Lizard
Photo by caudatejake, via Wikimedia Commons.
One particularly grim urban legend about the mole lizards is that they attack people who are taking a dump, burrow inside them and shred them from the inside. Whilst this is an extremely specific method of attack for any creature, real or fictional, there's definitely a gross comedic horror to the idea of the animal that sees any brown stuff to burrow through as just another goal.
For using the Mole Lizards in fiction, there are various options. They're probably a bit too weird (and frankly, their faces are too cute) to be a good giant-scaled terror monster, but they could be good "this place is weird" creatures: just seeing one ambling through an underground environment or having someone use them to help dig tunnels or even send underground messages could be interesting possibilities. The toilet attack vector myth could work in a certain sort of comedy horror – it's something you can see being whispered among settlers in Fallout – so that's a possibility, and could be exacerbated if someone had trained or engineered them for greater aggression.
Treeshrew illustration by Joseph Wolf. Public domain.
The pen-tailed treeshrew, besides its distinctive quill-pen styled tail, has a very particular claim to fame. Specifically, it is possibly the most alcohol-fuelled creature in all creation. They drink the nectar from Bertam palms, which has one of the highest concentrations of alcohol in a natural food (similar to beer): given the amount they drink, they should be drunk about every three days on average, something that you'd expect to cause significant problems for their survivability.
However, that doesn't seem to happen, and getting hammered doesn't seem to have been selected against for this species. It's possible that the pen-tailed treeshrew has different ways to metabolise and use alcohol that humans don't – but what benefits the treeshrews derive from their lifestyle are entirely unclear.
There are a few interesting narrative options for the treeshrew. I sort of like the idea of them as the guiding mythic animal of – given the quill-pen look and alcohol combination – drunken poets, maybe bringing bardic luck or providing guidance gently swaying their way through unfamiliar landscapes or dreams. You can also of course just further hype up the alcohol tolerance and have the amusement of a small shrew drinking everyone under the table. Their environment is also notably interesting: natural rather than brewed alcohol sources, which you might find if you can follow treeshrews to their party trees, could have their uses for adventurers seeking the stuff for amusement or indeed medicinal purposes.
Hoatzin
Opisthocomus hoazin, image by Murray Foubister. via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the most interesting things about the hoatzin is that it seems to have managed to genetically re-trigger some features of ancient prehistoric bird species (a process known as atavism) – in particular, wing-claws, something seen on very early birds like archaeopteryx. For a while it was thought that the hoatzin might even be a close surviving relative of these early birds, but now it's known that they're well within modern bird categories and must have manage to re-trigger the genetic pathway towards claw usage. Wing-claws are mostly a feature of the baby hoatzin, allowing them to climb around the tree-tops before they can fly: adults often flap noisily around a nest site to distract predators while the babies clamber away, or even just drop down into the mangrove water, where they can also swim fine and then climb back up the trunk.
The bird's diet gives it a number of other issues – it mostly eats plant leaves, and has an unusually huge pre-stomach area, known as the crop, that helps digest all the plant fibre, as well as a lot of specialised gut bacteria for breaking down tough leaves. Its crop is, however, so large that it reduces space for chest muscles, which are generally quite important to birds on the grounds that they're what powers the wings. Not only that, but having a ton of digesting and decomposing plant matter passing through a lot of specialised gut bacteria all the time produces a number of other by-products – not least methane gas – which the hoatzin also needs to get rid of somehow. It does so by burping, frequently. Its diet makes it smell and taste absolutely foul, to the point where locals might take the eggs but almost never hunt an adult hoatzin except in dire need.
The hoatzin is a good reminder that as well as the animals that are useful to humans, there are always animals that people stay away from or don't use for what might seem to be their obvious purpose: hoatzin wouldn't be hard to hunt, but also wouldn't reward the effort. This deeply strange creature somehow managed to trade away a chunk of its flight capability and regain prehistoric characteristics in exchange for a life of show, noise, foul-smelling leaf digestion and constant burping: all that makes it an iconically visible part of its landscape and soundscape, but in a way that is primarily for scene-setting more than inviting human interaction.
That said, there's a lot that could be done by getting creative with interactions featuring the hoatzin. In general, for fantasy creature design, birds with wing-claws are definitely something that has all sorts of potential. Besides the possibility of using them for attack or defence, there's something weird, and thus interesting, about the idea of a bird climbing with claws, undermining the expectation of it flying. I think there might also be an interesting possibility for thinking about how hoatzin might be useful in fictional, folkloric, or even science-fictional terms: one could imagine trying to persuade someone that your area wasn't worth conquering by feeding them a meal of hoatzin as an example of how good the local food can be, or having someone try to actively collect the methane it burps (useful for lighter-than-air ballooning, though also highly flammable – a tempting target for some Amazonian balloonist gnomes).
Zokors
Zokor in the Altay mountains. Avustfel, via Wikimedia Commons.
They usually live up to half a metre under the surface, but can have 100 metre long tunnel networks, coming up to the surface to feed and then returning to their burrows. That's about twice as deep as a mole's tunnel network, but still only half as deep as a rabbit warren goes. The zokor burrows can occasionally go far deeper, up to nearly two and a half metres, but this is rare.
Because zokors are herbivores and undermine the roots of plants, they've often been seen as an agricultural pest in parts of China, and studies suggested that they decreased the biomass production compared to zokor-free regions. This led to an extermination campaign which did not have the intended consequences: meadows started having a loss of other species knocking on through the ecosystem, because whilst the zokors had been suppressing the quantity of biomass, they were also aerating the soil, changing which plants could grow healthily: their burrows also helped water move into the soil structure, which significantly reduced soil erosion problems. The zokor has generally been reclassified from a pest to an 'ecosystem engineer' – a category that also includes things like beavers, where their physical restructuring of the landscape helps support other parts of the environment.
Zokors appearing in fiction could have a range of functions – one of the primary ones being what friend of the site James Holloway calls the "not in Kansas anymore". If rather than having moles and rabbits, you have zokors digging up the crops, you have immediately taken your reader, player, etc into a space that is not conforming to standard fantasy Europe and its expected biosphere. This opens up some other possibilities: if one made the zokors bigger or the other characters smaller, one could for example even enter a zokor's burrow system. Because of that sense of the zokor being different, this would avoid players having the sort of Redwall-fuelled expectations of "oh we're in a rabbit burrow", allowing for a different sort of tone to be brought into a similar kind of scenario.
There's also, I think, something to be done with the idea of the zokor as an animal that engineers the world around it usefully. One could imagine the Central Asian steppe equivalent of hobbits or gnomes deciding to actively reorient the landscape or tend the steppes using a good understanding of how they support the meadows and high plateau grasslands. Might well-trained zokors even be used to tactically undermine an opponent's crops or even buildings en masse while keeping your own soil properly stable?
And that's everything for part five! Do let me know what you thought, especially if you do find uses for any of these creatures in your creative work (or to tackle obscure pub quiz questions) - and I'll see you all again when I finally write part six...
La Feria de las Flores
May 27, 2025, 09:24:56 PM
La Feria de las Flores
By indiekid
It was dark by the time my bus arrived in Medellín. My first impression was of lights twinkling on either side of the road, lights which reached higher and higher up the hillsides as we approached our destination. We were soon driving through what felt like an upturned bowl of stars, the mountain peaks out of sight. Little did I know that, beyond those mountains, hundreds of boxes of flowers were being packed and distributed. I did know, however, that the Feria de las Flores (Festival of the Flowers), Colombia's largest festival, was just a few days away. It was hard to miss it: every television in every city was inviting people to Medellín with a series of catchy adverts. The city's reputation, however, once centred on something very different: for two decades it was the seat of that most absolute of monarchs, Pablo Escobar.
I'm going to start with an apology: considering this is an article about a flower festival it's not particularly visual. For security I mostly kept my camera locked away, and the festival was a bit crowded for good photography anyway. I've discussed this with my editor, Jubal, and we've agreed to put the following video in as an introduction, and there's another one to watch at the end.
After a hot and cockroach-ey night at a bus station hotel I made my way south to the suburb of El Poblado. The mid-morning sun was warm and the streets a quiet, leafy green. The traffic noise was swiftly replaced by birdsong, including that of two squabbling parrots. An avocado salesman rumbled his cart from door to door and cried "Aguacate!" at intervals. I buzzed my way into my hostel and was met by the receptionist Claudia, who invited me to add my rucksack to the growing heap behind the desk. Claudia would become a fixture of my mornings in Medellín, keeping the backpackers in check accompanied by her little son and big dog. My bed was not yet ready so I joined some other backpackers for a cup of tea. I, at least, was drinking tea; they were mostly on lager, as they had been since the previous evening.
My first priority was food, so I asked Claudia where I could buy some groceries. She recommended a supermarket up the road, but I returned empty-handed. It was the trendiest and most modern supermarket I had seen for a long time; it even had self-service checkouts. To me it was just gringo products at gringo prices, so I asked Claudia where I'd find a "real" market. Surprised, she took the map she had given me earlier and added in a little circle on the very edge of the tourist area: Minorista Market. It was an easy bus ride away and I enjoyed trawling the dozens of stalls with the locals (Medellín is much more diverse than its rival, the capital Bogotá). Colombia is home to a huge variety of fruit; earlier in my trip I had encountered a fruit bowl as part of a tour and found myself unable to name any of the contents. It got me thinking that, when it comes to tropical fruit, we in the UK are limited to what can be easily refrigerated and transported. In the Minorista Market I was able to buy a variety of beautifully fresh produce. I also picked up some arepas, a kind of maize flatbread, but had to ask Claudia's help in cooking them.
It was time to start exploring. Medellín (population 2.5 million) is a long, thin city built along a river of the same name. It has a modern (but sometimes crowded) metro system which also hugs the river for much of its length. I rode it north to the Plaza Botero, home to the Rafael Uribe Uribe Palace of Culture. This imposing black and white cathedral-like building was designed by the Belgian architect Agustín Goovaerts in the 1920s, but not completed until 1982. The building's dome is off-centre as though it was intended to be twice as long; the story goes that the architect fell out with the local government during construction. Also in the plaza are sculptures by Colombia's most revered artist, Fernando Botero. Botero is widely known for making things "fat", and this is initially apparent in the human and animal figures on display in the plaza. I was told, however, that the exaggeration of certain body parts was actually Botero's ploy to draw attention to each sculpture's true focus: the bits he left in normal proportions. I'm not sure if, in image-conscious Colombia, this would have been much comfort to the models who sat for him. Its effectiveness, however, was evidenced in some of the paintings in the adjoining Museo de Antioquia. A painting of Christ, for example, shows him wearing the crown of thorns and bleeding where it has cut him. Thanks to the size of the head in comparison to the face, the blood seems to go on and on forever. It's as if Botero has given every human sin its own drop. His most famous painting, however, is of the 1993 killing of Pablo Escobar in Medellín, and you can see it by following the link below. For what it's worth, I was not personally taken with Botero and preferred the more varied and subtle style of his contemporary, Luis Alberto Acuna.
Botero's "La muerte de Pablo Escobar".
On the far side of the city centre the metro links up with a cable car network, which climbs the steep slopes on either side of the valley. It boasts some impressive murals at its stations. My journey up towards the Arví Park took me above zig-zagging streets of square brick houses. This, I realised, was what a regenerated favela, or shanty town, looks like. After ascending about 800 meters the route abruptly levelled off. All around was a beautiful and varied Andean forest. The cable car dipped and rose approximately level with the treetops; the overall sensation was one of flying (enhanced by the fact that I was the only passenger by this point). My ride ended at a very smart visitor centre, but I felt I was a bit pushed for time to actually venture into the park.
I was lucky to have a guide to Medellín in the form of John, a digital nomad from the USA. John, like many others, had made the city a semi-permanent home and knew all the good hostels and shared workspace facilities. For his work the city was perfect: modern, well outfitted with WiFi, cheap, diverse, interesting and with great weather (its nickname is the "City of Eternal Spring"). John knew when the rowdy football games were on and where the underground salsa bars were hidden. His speciality, however, was taking groups from the hostel to Carrera 70, the main party street of the city and the festival. It was lined with bars which spilled out in a mess of balloons and silletas, wooden frames holding great round signs made entirely of flowers (we'll return to them later). A stage was set up at the end of the street showcasing everything from punk music to Argentine tango.
I had promised myself a bit of a break from intensive backpacking while in Medellín. My two week stay was unstructured and I barely wrote in my diary. I chilled out, went to the concert hall and took part in a chain writing project here on Exilian. Most of my time, however, was spent at the Table. I have capitalised it here as it was a uniquely accommodating social space - for those who were confident with spoken English, at least (I was, once again, one of the weaker Spanish speakers). The atmosphere of the hostel was neatly summed up by a German friend of mine:
"Oh yes," he said, "As soon as I saw this was a 'party hostel' I knew there would be a lot of British people here."
I buried my head in my hands and hoped that the conversation would not turn to Brexit. We returned, instead, to one of our favourite topics: which of the Colombian lagers was most like urine (after a few days at the Table they all tasted equally bad). Another favourite topic was cocaine, which in Medellín flows in rivers. It was common, in the mornings, to see hung-over backpackers attempting to sell on their left-overs to avoid them "going to waste" ahead of an upcoming flight (Claudia took a dim view of this).
One night we all left the Table together and piled into taxis. We got held up at a roadblock where some police officers half-heartedly checked our passports (they did not discover that several of us had, sensibly, left them locked in the hostel). We then drove on to a popular night club, which had several busy rooms with DJs playing different versions of reggaeton music. I made many more backpacker friends in the club's large garden. There was a problem, however: everyone was very tall. This, combined with the background noise, meant that the conversation was going right over my head. Emboldened by lager and the sociable atmosphere I approached the only other short person in sight and engaged him in conversation. He was not particularly keen to chat: he turned out, in fact, to be the local drug dealer.
At about 4 am I left the club in pursuit of fried chicken. The streets of El Poblado were, as I had been promised, absolutely buzzing. I had no difficulty finding a food outlet and strolled happily down the main street, where the clubs had spilled out into a huge gathering of young Colombians. A man approached me with a big wooden tray, a common sight in the city, loaded with snacks and chewing gum. I politely waved him away but, to my surprise, he kept approaching. With a big clownish grin on his face he nudged the tray right into me and pushed me to one side with it. We laughed together at the joke but, when we parted, I realised something was amiss: he had swiped the phone from my right trouser pocket. I kept walking, humiliated, and he vanished into the crowd. It was a clever trick, but not clever enough: the phone in that pocket was a decoy, an old broken thing intended as a distraction. My real phone was tucked safely in a pouch under my shirt. Listen to your parents, folks.
I was more shaken by the incident than I cared to admit. I was frustrated at my poor judgement and the loss of my decoy phone, which I had actually planned to use as a defence against mugging. I spent the morning trying to make a new one out of an old phone case, some coins and sellotape. My story spread around the hostel as the morning wore on and the residents began to sober up. It got back to the one person I was hoping to keep it from.
"Richard!" cried Claudia as I tiptoed across the lobby, "I'm sorry but that is very stupid. I told you not to walk alone at night in El Poblado!"
I looked at my feet; there was no defence. I wondered if we backpackers are like toddlers: discovering our limits by pushing against them. The part of me that wanted to test myself against El Poblado had evaporated, and I'm glad to finally get it off my chest. I made sure my next adventure was much more tame.
~
Along with John and several others from the hostel I booked a place on a tour of Santa Elena, the township to the East of Medellín which is the true home of the Flower Festival. I had been told that the festival traces its origins to one Santa Elena resident's decision to carry his wares to market in Medellín on his back. This was an exaggeration at best: it was common for people to make this journey on foot with their loads (which could even include sick family members) on wooden chair-like frames. These frames, known as silletas, are now used exclusively to show off the region's flowers.
Our bus left Medellín and wound its way up hairpins to the relatively flat region above the city. It was a climb of around 800 meters and the temperature dropped noticeably. Our tour guide had provided each of us with a scarf and white paisa hat, the latter named after the people of the Antioquia region. I did wonder if our guide had a sense of humour: the disc-shaped hats were hopeless in windy mountain weather. On several occasions a gust caused the group to lose them en masse and have to run around in pursuit. As for the tour itself, we stopped first at a large statue of a silletero with his load and then drove on to a farm. The last part of this journey was done on foot along a dirt track with beautiful hedgerows on either side. The colonial-style farm building had been part-converted into a museum. In its expansive kitchen we sat down for a traditional meal, which included a local speciality: hot chocolate with a lump of cheese melted in it (an unpleasant and surprisingly greasy experience). The house overlooked the flower fields, where a vast number of species, from tall sunflowers to daisy-sized numbers, were displayed together (Colombia is actually the second most biodiverse country in the world). Exploring this garden was the highlight of the tour, and you can see why in the following picture.
Most of the farm's flowers had already been picked, boxed and delivered to Santa Elena's residents. They were busy spending the precious few days before the big parade attaching the flowers to their silletas in complex and beautiful designs. The catch was that each silletero would receive just one type of flower in their box. The event would start, therefore, with some frantic trading involving the whole community. This would have been going on at about the time I rolled into Medellín by bus the previous week.
My next tour was to Medellín's Comuna Trece, which translates as District 13. This impoverished part of the city was notorious for gang violence in the 20th and early 21st centuries, but is now - bizarrely - a tourist attraction. In the past couple of decades a combination of investment and grassroots community efforts have transformed the area, succeeding where violent military assaults failed. It was a focal point of the city's cocaine trade and the associated violence (Escobar's shadow looms large here), but the streets have been regenerated and are now full of dancers and artworks.
Our guide for the afternoon was Bryan, a resident who had taught himself to speak what he called "Street English" and later turned out to be a rapper. Before leading us up the hill into his neighbourhood he asked us not to give money to any of the children who would show off their dance moves to us. Giving to adult street performers, he said, would be fine, but the children should be encouraged to stay in school. Our first few stops were at pop-up street dance shows; we were evidently expected, but this was part of the fun. As we walked further the street art became progressively bigger, louder and more colourful. Some of the works were reproduced in the many eccentric souvenir shops.
We stopped at a small museum where the horror of the gang wars was brought to life. At one point the army was sent in but failed to eradicate the gangs. In the interest of claiming a victory the government secretly made deals with some of the gang leaders, so a false peace was created for a few months. As the buildings of the area became more and more damaged the street artists set to work claiming the wreckage as their own in protest. Most harrowing of all, however, was Bryan's own story of a gunfight from his childhood. He and his brother were watching from their window when a combatant backed right up their house to shelter by the wall. Seeing the boys looking out of the window, he told them to move for their own safety. They did so but, when they looked again, the man was dead.
Much of the investment in Comuna Trece has been spent on infrastructure: metro lines, a cable car and a series of public escalators traversing the steep slopes. At the top of the hill is a - relatively - big road on concrete stilts, and it was here that the tour ended. We had ice cream and enjoyed the sunset views over the city. I had time to follow the road away from the crowds to where things were quieter. Strangely quiet. Looking back along the road I could see what an engineering marvel it was and, from the footprint of the stilts, how many homes must have been demolished to make way for it. Just as I was reflecting on the ongoing costs of regeneration I abruptly reached the end of the road. It was unfinished, which explained the lack of traffic. A tall metal fence separated it from an older, dustier track. I peeked through and saw rubbish spilling out of abandoned brick buildings. A chicken strode defiantly across the road.
Some of my friends at the hostel were heading to a party called "Gringo Mike's Big Gringo Tuesday". I turned it down as I had more important plans for the morning: a visit to the Botanical Gardens. (I was later vindicated in my decision when an Australian friend described the evening as "Just a big gringo f**kfest, to be honest".) I arrived at the ticket office early in the morning but had still failed to beat the queue. The gardens themselves were interesting but they were not what I'd come to see. They put on a special festival of their own every year, which celebrates flowers from Colombia and beyond. These include some amazing flower sculptures, and the centrepiece this year was a wooden boat listing dangerously in a stormy sea of blue and white. I also enjoyed seeing some fat pitcher plants and the creative arrangements of tulips made by various tulip societies. It wasn't just the flowers that were beautifully decked out: many visitors had brought their highly accessorised dogs along.
The big day was nearly upon us. As a warm-up, much of the city was closed off for an enormous parade of classic cars. To my surprise this parade was led by perhaps a dozen of the city's bin lorries, polished up to perfection. Following these was a seemingly endless stream of cars, and my most vivid memory is of watching them negotiate a tricky speed bump. The next day I rose early and donned my new flowery shirt, paisa hat and garland of plastic flowers (I had acquired the latter in some nightclub or other). It was time for the cultural phenomenon which had first brought me to Medellín: the Desfile de Silleteros.
I found a good spot among the crowds lining a main road. The parade was opened by a single vintage car carrying three or four elderly people. They were dressed in white and had red scarves tied around their heads. These were some of the original silleteros who had taken part in the first parade in 1957. They were followed by a series of warm up acts: some police officers with their dogs; a terrifying armoured police vehicle (with flowers); a troupe of what I took to be Brazilian Carnaval performers. Finally the first silleteros appeared: the children who had competed in the junior category. Each carried a wooden silleta of the traditional form: a sort of stepped wooden backpack overflowing with flowers. They were chaperoned by members of the Scout Association, who kept them supplied with water and relieved them of their loads occasionally.
Next up came a lone woman, bent under the weight of her 70 Kg silleta. She carried her paisa hat in her hand because her head was busy with a strap supporting some of the weight. She had a huge grin on her face and was waving her hat to draw more and more cheering from the crowd. Every so often she span around to show off the enormous circular design on her back. It was a riot of colours and textures consisting of more flower varieties than I could possibly name. This silletera's name was María Claudia Atehortúa and she was the overall winner of the Feria de las Flores 2023.
After María came the rest of the silleteros who had competed in the emblemática category. These were the circular ones which I had grown used to and were all spectacular. There were several other categories: tradicional, which the children had been carrying; commercial in which the logos of sponsors, including Coca-Cola, were reproduced in flowers and monumental. The latter lived up to their name: wooden constructs burst out of a - usually - circular base; they were much bigger and heavier than the others. My favourite was an enormous lion's head with a mane of what looked like grasses gone to seed. The silleteros were evidently enjoying themselves, and every so often they'd put their loads down so that they could fully show them off. One man went right up to the crowd, reached in and emerged with his son in his arms; they waved to everyone together. It was a joy to watch the paraders pass by and transform from exhausted people under heavy loads to flowery, tortoise-like creatures once viewed from behind. It was a testament to both human ingenuity and human endurance. In the silleteros' six kilometre walk through the chequered streets of Medellín there was a sense of defiance, love and hope. Yet there was frailty as well: in every flower that fell from a silleta I was reminded that these beautiful artworks were temporary, and would be lost until the cycle began again for the next year's Feria.
I had time for one more adventure before leaving Medellín. I turned my nose up at the Pablo Escobar museum, which is run for profit by members of his family, and at the associated theme park and zoo. I set off instead on foot through El Pobaldo to the Museo El Castillo. This mansion was built by the architect Nel Rodríguez in the style (for some reason) of a French château. I arrived at the ornate gateway and saw a long curving driveway bordered by tall conifer trees. These, like many of the plants in the grounds, were covered in ghostly cobwebs of Spanish Moss (a sort of creeper which is neither Spanish nor moss). The whole place was reminiscent of the enchanted château in Disney's version of Beauty and the Beast. I brought my entry ticket for seventy thousand pesos: I would later learn that, back in the 1930's when the house was built, that sum would have bought me the entire property.
Inside I had a tour of the grand rooms and eclectic collection of (mostly European) oddities. My guide's use of the English language concealed a razor-sharp wit, and I'd like to share some of his descriptions with you:
"This is the only original carpet in the house which you can walk on, so please make the most of it."
"If you ask me how much the chandelier is actually worth, well I cannot tell you: my boss doesn't want me to know!"
"In this room we have a collection of seven hundred silver spoons donated to the family by a rich auntie. If you ask me why she donated them, well I can tell you: she was very rich and she had too many spoons."
I was reminded of a tour guide in Spain who had repeatedly referred to us, his audience, as his "family". A part of me had wondered if I should point out that the word isn't usually used in this context. I decided there was no need to be a killjoy and, if my new friend wanted to refer to me as family, who was I to stop him? The English language, I reasoned, belonged as much to these non-native speakers as it did to me - perhaps more so.
~
I was up early on the morning of my departure. The backpackers of the hostel - including, at last, some Colombians - were all fast asleep. Over breakfast at the Table I made one more friend: a French backpacker, who arrived, as many of us had, looking shell-shocked from their first metro journey. She asked me about safety in the area and my answer, unfortunately, got back to the one person I was hoping to keep it from.
"So, Richard," said Claudia during checkout, "You don't think El Poblado is safe?"
I thought for a moment. Of all the people I had met in Medellín, Claudia was the most proud of her city and how far it had come. In the backpacker community, however, my encounter with the pickpocket was by no means an isolated incident.
"I'm sorry, Claudia," I said, "But I don't."
Perhaps, had I stayed in Medellín longer, my assessment might have changed. Perhaps I could have given the Digital Nomad lifestyle a shot after all. The Highlands of Colombia, however, were calling me, and I couldn't miss my date with the world's tallest palm trees. I did not look back.
The seriousness of the history I've presented here was not lost on me during my visit to Medellín. My objective in this article was the juxtaposition of the old and the new; the violent and the beautiful; the cultural and the sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll. I have not presented events in chronological order and there may be factual inaccuracies - please shout if you spot them. In the interest of brevity I've omitted a lot of detail: the police officers in the parade, for example, were actually on bicycles, and had their dogs sitting to attention in little doggy side-cars. It's unexpected joys like these, especially when flowering out of hardship, that make travel worthwhile. I hope this article has motivated you to put a bag on your back, go somewhere new, and see some more of this crazy, kaleidoscopic world in which we live.
Links
Here's the promised "further watching", specifically the opening, minute 6:30 and minute 10:00 of this vlog by the Mexican backpacker Alan X El Mundo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiSNmmEQqIg
Editor's Note: More of indiekid's travels in the Americas can be found in his piece on travels in southern Chile, and in a two-part article on the Mexican leg of his trip with part one here and part two here.
The Name of The Game
February 28, 2025, 11:31:07 AM
The Name of The Game
By Jubal
This is a short piece on naming games! A lot of people, especially in small gaming projects, need to find names for their game, and a lot of what some people come up with can be a little underwhelming.
Often, I think the trap people fall into is to try and take a name format they know from a larger game elsewhere, and then take something that sounds vaguely similar, without thinking about game names in terms of function. Game names, though, absolutely are a functional part of the game's marketing and experience.
Game names need to do one of three things, ideally more than one: they need to sound snappy and engaging, they need to tell people something about the game, or they need to give a hook people will be interested in. You don't need all of these in every game name - there are trade-offs - but these are core things to keep in mind.
Sounding snappy is the most subjective part of this setup, but it's important nonetheless. If game name ideally shouldn't be more than about 4-5 syllables. If it's longer, then it at least should have an obvious abbreviation. All the same techniques that work in poetry or marketing also apply to game titles: think for example about assonance (whether words have sounds that form a pattern) and alliteration (same sound/letter at the start of the words). Sometimes the best way to get a sense of this is to literally try saying the name out loud, or get someone else to do it: the instinct of whether it sounds right is easier to get in spoken format.
A brief note here on articles. "A" and "The" have quite different functions in titles. It often IS worth using one or the other. "A Tale of Doom" is better than "Tale of Doom", but is also different to "The Tale of Doom". Use "the" when you want the name to feel definite and singular, and "A" when you want the name to feel like part of something wider, more ephemeral, or more specific to a character rather than the whole world.
Telling people something about the game is a complex problem. It's a major part of game naming – you want to be informative but ideally without just saying a feature directly. So for example "Dungeons of Hinterberg" is a really good info-title. Dungeons bring the correct expectations of dungeon-crawling, and Hinterberg implies some kind of mountain settlement, and that's basically the game... but it doesn't tell you everything, and it implies some uniqueness to what it's doing, because Hinterberg is a place the player presumable doesn't know (providing a bit of a hook). It's also important that Hinterberg provides a bunch of signals that a more generic name might not – hinter makes us think hinterland, berg is a common root for mountains. Dungeons of Alzorgard is not nearly as good a name, because Alzorgard tells us nothing by comparison. Conversely, the game "Tactical Battles" is too blunt a name. Quite a lot of games have tactical battles, so why people should play your game which hasn't told them anything other than that it has a very common feature in it is left unclear.
The "hook" element can also be phrased as "does the title create a question the player will want an answer to". This is a less strongly used element, but it can be pretty effective. Usually hooks aren't phrased as questions, though there are exceptions: it's about creating a juxtaposition of things that inspire curiosity, or using something that's inherently mysterious. Something like "There's A Gun In The Office" is a hook title: it does tell you quite a bit about the game's setting (guns and offices) but primarily its job is to set up a literal Chekhov's gun effect, an expectation that the gun will eventually go off, but without being clear about under what circumstances.
There's a sting in the tail of all these parts, though, which is that a lot of them are easier, or suggest longer names, for games that are in larger, better known franchises. This is for two reasons. Firstly, if an abbreviation can apply to multiple things, you need to be a pretty big game to muscle others out. DAI, in gaming circles, is Dragon Age: Inquisition. So if you went and made De Administrando Imperio, a Byzantine management sim based on the text of the same name by the emperor Constantine VII, you absolutely wouldn't manage to get more than about five actual Byzantinists joining with you in calling that DAI rather than the Dragon Age title.
Also, bigger game names can be longer because the need to inform a player that a title is part of a series they like is valuable enough to take the extra syllables to do. The extra six syllables to add "The Legend of Zelda" to a game's title is more than worth it because for most buyers the single most important factor in their decision to buy is just "it's another Zelda game!". Conversely, if you're producing the first game in a planned series, calling it "The Apocalypse of Artodor: Swords of Awakening" doesn't work as well. You may have 10 Apocalypse of Artodor games planned, but having that in the title doesn't yet mean anything to anyone and is a lot of weight of syllables for something which doesn't have a strong pull factor. It's also notable that a lot of bigger game series start with a simpler title rather than a long one with a colon: for example, the first Zelda game is just "The Legend of Zelda".
Now, let's look at examples!
Dragon Age: Origins. OK, I know it's the first game in a series. The Dragon reference also tells me it's probably fantasy. Solid title all round.
Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. This seems a fairly long one – but most of the name is there to tell me things. First, the game tells me that it's a Legend of Zelda game, which is an already established franchise. The Ocarina of Time bit is more a hook than information, in that it makes us question "what does an Ocarina have to do with Time" and in many cases "hang on what's an Ocarina". So, informative and raises questions.
The Exile Princes. This tells me it's likely to involve rulers, maybe strategy or RPG elements, maybe exploration elements given the 'exile' element. All of which are correct.
Roadwarden. This is snappy and tells me who my character will be, really good informative title.
Wildermyth. Also snappy and tells me that a) there'll be a mythos/fantasy element and b) that there'll be some focus on the wilderness. Again, informative but the portmanteau saves on syllables, making it much cleaner than "Mythos of the Wilderness" would have been.
Rome: Total War. This tells me it's a Total War game. Even if I've not played one, Total War is a strategy concept in and of itself, so the franchise title works even if you're unfamiliar with the franchise. Also, it's about Rome. And the whole thing is done in four syllables.
Deponia. Actually one of the weaker examples here in that it tells me absolutely nothing. However, it sounds kinda cool, so fits the snappy criterion.
Under The Yoke. This is a really good one. It's short (four syllables) and it provides multiple meanings which both apply to the game. It's a game about medieval agriculture so animals will literally be yoked to plough fields, but the phrase "under the yoke" is often used for someone working excessively hard for someone else, as was the case with medieval peasants.
Tyranny. A three syllable, single word title that also gets across the overarching theme of the game, how you survive and create your own space under – while taking part in – a tyrannical overlordship.
Hopefully this illustrated some problems and possible solutions when it comes to game naming. Thinking through the three principles we had at the start – what does it tell the player, what questions does it raise, and does it sound good and do so efficiently – is a good basic framework that you can come back to.
Hope you found this useful! If you have any questions, comments, or things you think I've neglected to mention, please say so in the comments below. Or post your own game naming question/problem and I'm happy to see if I can advise at all!
The Exilian Romantasy Blurb Generator
February 15, 2025, 10:13:56 PM
Symbolic of your tale? Hit the button to find out!
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...
17 More Things We Came Up With Playing Word Association
December 31, 2024, 09:41:38 PM
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.
This Dungeon Could Have Been An Encounter
December 31, 2024, 12:23:04 AM
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.
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