Topics

166

Announcements! The Town Crier! / Mastodon Account Move

« on: November 13, 2022, 04:42:35 PM »

Exilian is now at Exilian@Indiepocalypse.Social on Mastodon

We've moved! After a year or so on the big mastodon.social server, we've now moved our Mastodon account and we can be found at the new address of Exilian@Indiepocalypse.Social. Indiepocalypse is quite a new instance covering - like Exilian does - a diverse range of independent creative projects and ideas, and it should consequently be a much better local timeline for what we do as well as a technically more stable system than the sometimes slow experience on mastodon.social which is increasingly a very busy server.

If you were following us on there already, the follow should have been re-pointed to the new account when the move took place, but clear do check in case there were any issues. Our front page and emails will now be pointing to the new instance. We're excited to be in a new place and the administrators of indiepocalypse.social have been very helpful getting us set up: if you're a Mastodon user we hope to see you on there sometime soon!

167

General Chatter - The Boozer / Evermore: The Theme Park That Wasn't

« on: November 08, 2022, 12:02:01 PM »

I can't say I watched every minute of this video, it's four hours long for goodness' sake, but I did find some bits of it very funny. It's a deep-dive into the many, many failings of the Utahn theme park Evermore, which aimed to be a live-action actor interaction driven game-fantasy-themepark experience and is... not necessarily achieving its lofty goals, to put it very gently.

Also part of me wants to open a theme park now, if only because the success bar in my head has just plummeted dramatically.

168

General Chatter - The Boozer / Pub - Nov 17?

« on: November 03, 2022, 05:39:27 PM »

So, we're due a Thursday pub this month, the 24th would be the obvious but I have a conference from the 25th-27th in Krems so I might go to Krems the night before which could make hosting awkward, so the 17th seems like it might have to be the answer unless there are major objections/mob violence to the contrary.

169

General Chatter - The Boozer / Pub Oct 21?

« on: October 14, 2022, 04:28:24 PM »

I figure people will have more on for Halloween, so we should do pub next Friday. Shorter notice than usual for which sorry - I'm still struggling to peel myself off the sofa some of the time, very much not out of the Covid woods yet.

170

The World of Kavis / The World of Kavis - An Introduction

« on: October 05, 2022, 03:55:30 PM »

THE WORLD OF KAVIS

Introduction

The World of Kavis is an RPG setting I've been designing and running games in for some years. The idea of it is that it fulfils several things I want out of role-play gaming settings:

• It is earthy without being grimdark. Fundamentally things in Kavis are messy, usually small or at most realm-spanning in scale, folkloric in their themes, but not hopeless or excessively bleak.
• It is fractally designed. There are some big places and themes that I've nailed down about the setting, but I want it to have space for other people's games and creativity too in the long run.
• It is explicitly early medieval in theme, and leans into that in its practice: navigating the ways that this world is different to a modern world is intended to be core to the gameplay, and to create some of the narrative tension and ideas that the world needs to function. Things like faith, ritual, and obligations matter because they matter to people in this world and that's something the players don't get to ignore.

I run games for Kavis using the Savage Worlds system, and I eventually hope to release some setting books and guides. In the meantime, this forum is a sprawling notes-sheet of various bits of the world and setting, which you're welcome to peruse, discuss, and nab ideas from.

Basic features of the setting

Geography: some of the basic features mimic, but do not copy, elements of early medieval Eurasia. There is a central post-Imperial power, the Heirophancy, that fulfils the role of a Byzantium or a Persia, stretching across part of the heart of the world, still a force to be reckoned with but undergoing significant strains and change. In the the continent of Chardil to the northwest and to the south and east of the Heirophancy, other polities likewise are reconfiguring themselves. Kavis isn't a world that is intended to be shown as an unchanging medieval eternity - players are thrown into it in flux, with new religious and social movements and political fractures and reconfigurations very much in progress. Rather than these potential changes being necessary overthrows of tyrants or unwanted threats to all that is good and just, they are often rather complicated movements that characters may have validly mixed feelings about.

Species: There are, like in most fantasy settings, far more sapient species than in our own world. In Kavis, there is a metaphysical divide between dawnfolk (essentially, fey of various sorts), dayfolk (humans, animals, dwarves, etc) and duskfolk (goblins, trolls). Dawnfolk, dayfolk and duskfolk are not in any sense morally different, and indeed goblin PCs are expected in the setting: rather, they have significant difference in their ways of existing and reproducing and thinking, and their basic needs or lack thereof, and these things can at times lead to both alliance and friction, and often lead to a certain amount of social sorting. Among player species, there are essentially two - humans and the somewhat elf-like Hanau form one, and dwarves and gnomes the other. Gnomes and Hanau have similar relative traits to their 'core' species of longer (but not infinite) lives, somewhat frailer bodies, and certain differences of mental state: I have a moderate amount of idea how this came about, but it's not something I've written much about as of yet. Goblins are also playable - whether they count as a species is dubious, as the premise of a species is based on biological ideas of reproduction and relatedness which simply don't really apply to goblins.

Magic: Is highly unpredictable, on the "there is a big d100 miscast chart which has a 1% chance of blowing you up and that's the second worst result available to you" level. This is the area where I've most heavily rewritten Savage Worlds, using a no power points rule mixed with a very chaotic system and some new edges etc to account for that. Magic is also very rare in Kavis - it needn't be among player characters, who are in any case the heroes, but magic is not something that most people come across every day, and may elicit fear and awe among folk who are unused to displays of magical power.

Things you will find:

• Nature-inspired monsters. I really like taking actual weird creatures and messing around with them.
• Monasteries, temples, festivals - faith and religion are part of everyday life and integrated into it closely.
• Weird fey shenanigans. Fey creatures in Kavis often have ideas and wants that are at a 90 degree angle to anything that makes sense to dawn and duskfolk, which can provide unexpected opportunities for both collaboration and conflict.
• Actual moral choices - ideally not arbitrary ones. I'm often not interested in writing adventures that ask how far you'd go to save the world: I want to know what characters are willing to do for individuals and smaller cases of right and wrong, and in my longer campaigns I work a lot on earned consequences for those actions.
• A wide array of cultures and peoples - like in the real world, people in Kavis move around, and the protagonists are likely to be very mobile and meet other travellers, mercenaries, wandering holy men, and so on.

Things you won't find:

• The undead. Strictly speaking a mage could probably animate a single skeleton for a prank, but it would be intensely difficult and binding spirits into things that are already dead is so difficult it's prohibitive to actually do it en masse. The dead are dead in Kavis, and indeed there are many different myths and theories as to what happens to them.
• Certainty about the divine, faith, morals, etc. Kavis is a world where nobody can really prove most of its metaphysics, and thus has a similar range of lore and debate to our own world.
• Demons, devils, angels - see the previous point.
• Giant scenery chewing villains and heroes. Villains may be grandiose, melodramatic, and even want to take over the world, but this isn't a setting where there are true god-tier characters who are simply peronally powerful beyond mortal comprehension.

The History of Kavis as a Setting

The first thing that would later become Kavis was the setting for a computer game, called the Big Random Game, which I made at about the age of eleven I think. It had you wander round an island, defeat a troll, then go through a short adventure in the town of Travel (which I failed to notice for a long time was already a word, and pronounced "Tra-vell" with the stress on the second syllable). Travel, or Taravel, is still very much in existence in the setting as a small port in the southeast of Chardil. Not far from there is Soros/Saoros, which provided the focus for a second computer game I made in my mid to late teens, named Adventures of Soros. The unfinished python text adventure allowed for four playable races, elves, dwarves, humans and gnomes, three learnable character classes, and various other little quests and activities. I also started playing around with goblins that were somewhat complicated and in friction with rather than all against the human inhabitants of the world at about this point.

A few other key bits came from other sources. The term Hanau for the elves was imported when I was writing the background for Raiders and Traders, another game project made in my teens which was a city-builder: the term derives from the Easter Island folk, the Hanau 'E'epe - I once saw a rather bad translation of their name as long-ears, which led to me backwards-applying it to my elf-like folk.

I started work on Kavis more seriously in the later 2010s: I started this forum in 2018 and ran my first Kavis one-shots in 2019.

Notes Pages - Contents

General and Miscellany
Songs and Poems
Some Magic Notes
On the Hanau
On the Dwarves
On the Duskfolk
End of Year Celebrations around Kavis
Philosophers from Kavis
On letters, letter-carriers, and carrying information

The Heart of the World
Covers the Heirophancy and the lands around the Dragonfly Sea.
On Heirophantic Religion
Table Societies in the Heirophancy
The Land of Dulshan
The Land of Camahay
The Lands of Palictara and Tullactara
The Land of a Hundred and Fifty Lakes and Assehr
Monasticism around the Dragonfly Sea

Lands of Steel and Starlight
Covering Chardil, the northwest continent of the world's main regions, and the Starlit Sea.
The History of Chardil
Some Lords and Vassals in Chardil
Faith in Chardil

Paths of Sea, Stone, and Sky
North & east of the Heart of the World. Covers the Wendings, Mav and the surrounding regions, the Shaigel, and the Fire Paths beneath the earth.
The Shaigel
The City-state of Caracess

Isles of Salt and Secrets
South & west of the Heart of the World. Covers the oceans, Verasine and its archipelago, and the deserts west of the Mattahars.
The Lands of Verasine
West of the Mattahars
On the Cheloniads

171

Announcements! The Town Crier! / Updates from the Forge 47: Autumn 2022

« on: October 03, 2022, 11:03:01 PM »

Issue 47: Autumn 2022

EDITORIAL

Welcome to Issue 47 of Updates from the Forge, Exilian's newsletter of creative geekery! As ever, in this space we'll be going over the brilliant, quirky and curious projects our members have been up to, showcasing new games, creative writing, and music, and useful background projects that might provide resources for your creative endeavours. Creativity doesn't happen best in a vacuum, and Updates is a core part of how we tell the world about the great things Exilian folk have been doing - we hope you enjoy them, and if you did so, please do share the link to this issue so more people can see this lovely range of indie and hobbyist creative projects.

The summer months have been good on Exilian considering the difficulties we and many members have been facing: our monthly online meetups continue to go well, and if you're reading this we'd love to see you at one sometime (let us know if you're not recieving invitations and would like to). We've had one big and very exciting release, that of Roadwarden from our friend Aure: the game has been very highly praised for its storytelling and depth, and if you're a fan of text-focused, narratively driven adventuring then it's very well worth taking a look at. We also have a new article in the Exilian Articles section, from Jubal on the subject of fantasy and the far right, and how drawing more and quirkier inspiration from the unexpected realities of the medieval world can make it harder to produce simplified, extremist imagined pasts in our games and literature.

And then, of course, there have been a wide range of creative endeavours throughout the site. We're delighted to share with you another eight Updates from the Forge this season - read on and discover new games and ideas you might never have known about before!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial
  
• Game Development
  
  • Primordial Legends - Hollow Hero Kickstarter
  • ROCKPOOL: An RPG of the Shoreline
  • A Hero's Rest
  • Tabletop Turn Order in Rbuxton's Devlogs
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Music To Mug Adventurers To?
  • Stories from Spritelady
• Miscellany
  
  • Miraduel's Composing
  • Bluezone Sound Effects

GAME DEV

Primordial Legends - Hollow Hero Kickstarter

A new game from Melbourne based development team Toybox Games, Primordial Legends is the tale of Brunt, a mighty wombat who must set out from her home, the eponymous Hollow, to explore a jungle landscape that's full of secrets and mysteries. Raised by raccoon-folk called the Dreg, a day comes when unusually large insects disrupt the Dreg village and Brunt sets out on her journey, narrated by her adoptive father Eldar. The game unfolds as a mix of action-RPG and puzzle mechanics - here's the trailer:

There are lots of reasons for interest. From a gameplay perspective, the choice to make an action-RPG hero a heavy, high-strength character rather than a very dodge-and-roll focused protagonist happens less often than one might think, and the integration of puzzles into the gameplay should provide varied gameplay and interest. The game sections shown in some of the images and trailers look very pretty - dense jungle environments give a lot of opportunities for backgrounds feeling lush without trying to render things on into eternity - and the inclusion of a full voice cast suggests a very character-driven focus to the story. The bits we know of the story so far provide a general sense of mystery and adventure, and add to the genre of wombat heroine characters in fiction probably previously only represented by Ursula Vernon's Digger which has a lot to recommend it as a course of action.

Also, it's on kickstarter! There's only a few days left of the campaign so do head over and have a look at it now if you think this game might be of interest:

Check out the Kickstarter

Discuss the game on Exilian

ROCKPOOL: An RPG of the Shoreline

From our own Jubal, a new RPG book! ROCKPOOL, as the title implies, gives you the chance to play strange little fey creatures who may or may not implicitly be similar to hermit crabs, living around the edges of a rockpool. The 12-page book includes rules for playing the game, from giving your characters aims and balancing their stats to key specific mechanics for the tide and for dangers and occurrences around the rockpool world. The game's three stats work as trade-offs between different capabilities, so there may be dangers in min-maxing too much through the game. Also included is a bestiary with everything from dog whelks to driftwood hags and starfish to shoreline crabs, giving you a range of different creatures to interact with in your adventures.

ROCKPOOL is solely and exclusively available so far as part of the Katelynn's Closet Charity Bundle, which is available now on itch.io and offers you the chance to get over forty different tabletop RPG products being sold together for charity. The bundle already reached a match-funding offer of $1000 but is still running so every purchase will add to the 2000 dollars already raised to help disadvantaged young people in the Cape Cod area get clothes and supplies they need. The bundle also includes a tiny action RPG about peas, journalling games about mail delivery and strange pets, and much more besides! Why not take a look?

Discuss ROCKPOOL on Exilian

Get the Katelynn's Closet Bundle

A Hero's Rest

Building up a tavern in 'A Hero's Rest'

From Vanargand Games comes a new management sim game about setting up a stop for bold adventurers - producing a tavern, blacksmith, apothecary, and the many other amenities heroes might need, while providing them with suitable quests and goods. You must manage your buildings in considerable detail, including furnishing, ordering food and creating quests, items and equipment to sell. You can also produce templates for different kinds of adventurers who will boldly go forth to gather supplies or clear out goblins for you - but beware. Managing your resources may be tough and require you to find extra resource around the landscape or barter with passing traders, and heroes may well retire or go elsewhere, or even die, if you don't get them the supplies they need.

The game goes into Early Access on October 12, and it can already be played in demo version on Steam. The demo lets you work through a few weeks at the start of the game and takes you through a tutorial of the basics. The systems feel high-detail at first but once buildings are set up it's quite possible to settle into a general rhythm of working out where the gaps in your storage or sellable items are and trying to work out quests and actions to restock and progress through the game. The cartoonish-fantasy look and feel is pretty fun to watch as patrons and paladins come and go, and the game seems to offer a really wide array of options, so if management sims are your thing, this may well be worth checking out.

A Hero's Rest on Exilian

Check out the game on Steam

Tabletop Turn Order in Rbuxton's Devlogs

“What were they originally based on?”

“A random-ish pattern from a playtest with Fox and Stuart.”

“But you made them average to a fixed value, right?”

“Yes, but I can’t remember the average. That changed too.”

At this point Dennis, the Maths teacher, returned to his cereal, shaking his head.

One of Rbuxton's recent dev logs takes a deep dive into developing particular mechanics for turn order in a tabletop game. The tension between wanting to have a fluid, unpredictable turn structure in gameplay to force strategic problems and on the other hand the difficulty of executing actions simultaneously in a tabletop system is a long standing problem. Dice rolls, dealing cards, working out action systems that can be nominally simultaneous, using action point scores, and many other mechanics have been used in attempts to deal with it, and many games need slightly different ideal solutions to this problem. Richard's devlog gives a great insight into what grappling with these sorts of design issues can mean when pulling a game together, and how playtests and revisions can build as a process towards new solutions to the problem. If you're a designer or thinking about doing some mechanics design for board or indeed computer games, this may well be worth a read to help think about possible processes for getting through these sorts of problems...

Read the Devlog

Richard's Exilian Thread

ARTS AND WRITING

Music To Mug Adventurers To?

Jubal has recently been working on some more fan-music, and has released A Mugging Song, a short ditty about the Two Muggers, a pair of characters from Viva La Dirt League's Epic NPC Man skits. Accompanied by carefully cut clips from the original comedy sketches, the song merges folk, filk, and English light music styles to give. It's just one of a range of fandom and comedy songs that Jubal has done, too: there's also There Once Was A Fisherman, based on the VLDL film Baelin's Route, as well as a range of Dragon Age original songs (Lay of the Dread Nuggon, Harding's Waltz, and more) and Tolkien and Game of Thrones originals too. Why not check them out?

Exilian Media on YouTube

Stories from Spritelady

Lost in thought, Aurora gazed at the deer for several long minutes. Eventually, a particularly savage twist from the deer broke her from her wandering thoughts and she heaved a sigh. She couldn’t risk it getting free and hurting her, or rampaging on to the village, and it was clearly suffering. That meant she had to remove the risk, however much it went against her instincts.

Flicking her wrist, a thorned vine lashed from her hand and struck the beast in the chest. It stilled. In the quiet that followed, all Aurora could hear was the slow, steady drip of the blue taint as it fell to the ground.

As Aurora headed deeper into the woods, she began to notice ever more frequent signs of the infection. Before long, almost every tree and plant she passed seemed to contain traces of the blue canker. In some places, thick vines the size of her arm were wound around the larger trees, somehow seeming violent and threatening, despite the stillness of her surroundings...

From Exilian's own Spritelady we have another fantasy tale, this time of an elf called Aurora, following a mysterious illness through the woods. Caught between her desire to help heal the wounded and her need to help her party track down the source of the disease, she faces infected beasts that are spreading the blue-tinged sickness through the forests. But are Aurora and her companions themselves even safe?

Find out more by reading Spritelady's writing thread! We love seeing new writing and ideas on the writing areas of the forum, so if you want friendly and helpful feedback and thoughts on any of your work, please do feel free to share it on there as well.

Read Aurora's Tale

Visit Exilian's Writing Section

MISCELLANY

Miraduel's Composing

One of Miraduel's pieces for upcoming game 'The Little Green Mage'.

Hugh Holbech aka Miraduel posted in our Skills and Resources Offered section to showcase his composing work, offering highly competitive rates for videogame compositions. His recent work has included tracks for the games The Little Green Mage and Mad Chess, and his website includes a free music pack for game use that comes along with a sign-up to his email newsletter. There are some great themes and a range of classic thematic instrument sounds in his available work, so if you're an indie game studio or perhaps a small film-maker wanting more affordable professional work, Miraduel may well be the place to go.

Exilian Thread

Miraduel Website

Bluezone Sound Effects

From music and sound developer Bluezone Corporation, danys87 has been posting a range of low-cost WAV format sound effects for purchase and use in a range of projects. These include a stone textures pack with over seventy different stone impacts and similar, and a SF/Steampunk weapon pack with over 100 effects for the firing of everything from rifles to grenade launchers to futuristic lasers. The Bluezone website also includes an array of free sample packs for use in your projects, including a 1GB pack of sci-fi ambiences and SFX which could have a hugely versatile array of uses for futuristic settings. As such, there's a lot of potential utility pieces for your projects, and it may well be worth taking a look:

Bluezone Exilian Thread

Bluezone Website

And that's your lot for Autumn 2022! We hope to have many more exciting projects and updates to share with you for our Christmas/New Year issue at the very end of 2022, now just three months away. Maybe one of them will be yours? We'd love to have your creativity in this space too. Either way, we hope you enjoyed Updates from the Forge - please do leave a comment to let us know your thoughts below. Until next time!

172

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / ROCKPOOL: A Tiny RPG About Tiny Rockpool Creatures

« on: September 27, 2022, 10:29:39 AM »

ROCKPOOL is a tiny RPG about tiny Rockpool creatures. With separate aims and a world that is both teeming with life and in constant flux, will you and your friends be able to use your Tidefast, Spinethrown, and Shelltwirled scores, your ability to craft items out of bits of rockpool junk, and most importantly your ability to work together to achieve your mist-shrouded, salt-encrusted dreams?

Will you build yourselves a tower to watch the sea, hunt periwinkle shells, face off against the monstrous power of a shore crab, or learn magic from the grief-tossed Driftwood Hag and the mysterious Watcher in Seaglass? The choice is yours!

In the 12 page PDF you will get:

• Basic rules for playing the game.
• A Table of Occurrences for unexpected things.
• A bestiary of creatures you might find around a rockpool.
• Some pretty public domain illustrations from 19th century natural history books.
• A couple of small story-vignettes to give some more illustration to how I imagine the setting.
• The general feeling of melancholic hope that comes from feeling small in the face of sea-spray and the ocean winds.

In ROCKPOOL, the core of the rules are that it's intended as a GMed RPG, though it might well work if played GM-less, and that it's a 2d6 based system with stat trade-offs. Your three stats are all useful for different things, and can be rolled over or under - so for example, rolling under shelltwirled, a stat about finesse and dreaming, is important for creating items, but rolling over it might be important for perception, and the more you keep your head stuck in the clouds the harder it might be to work out what's going on around you. As a result, there's a real tension between the value of minmaxing and the value of being an all-rounder. Combat is simple and potentially brutal, with it being expected that the player characters may die at times: life in the rockpools is short, and the tide in particular gives a severe and regular threat to the player characters. You can improve your chances and get bonuses by crafting items from flotsam, to help progress towards your aims: there's not necessarily meant to be a core quest structure, more just the players trying to collaborate to achieve their goals.


I wrote ROCKPOOL in a weekend specifically for the Katelynn's Closet Charity Bundle which is currently available on itch.io. It's currently exclusively available via that route: buying it will raise funds for a small charity providing clothes and supplies to disadvantaged children in the Cape Cod area. If you do decide to give it ago or have a read, I'd be really interested in your thoughts!

173

Exilian Articles / Pasts and Playfulness: Protecting Fantasy from Fascism

« on: September 25, 2022, 01:55:10 PM »

Pasts and Playfulness: Protecting Fantasy from Fascism

By Jubal

It’s no great secret that the European and North American far right are very keen on the medieval period and medieval aesthetics. From DEUS VULT emblazoned on flags at the storming of the US Capitol last year, to anti-Islam imagery coming with , to ‘viking’ or ‘pagan’ masculine imagery being used to promote ‘traditional’ family structures, there are many permutations and combinations out there.

This far-right use of medievalism – the correct term for imagined-medieval aesthetics, not all of which come with true medieval pedigrees – comes along a number of lines which are often conflated. There’s crusade imagery, often appropriated within a ‘clash of civilisations’ narrative that presents. There are also religious-traditionalist images, often part of narratives around the supposed high or elite culture of medieval polities that is seen as having in some way degenerated (the Byzantine History-Far Right links are often in this area). Then, somewhat in tension with the former images, there’s the sort of ‘grimdark enlightenment’ view that sees a gritty, violent, hyper-masculine and often implicitly or explicitly non-Christian northern European culture with rigidly enforced social roles as an actively good and aspirational outcome. It imagines a past in which individual masculine dignity and a counterpoint submissive, protected femininity are restored by a revival of strength and 'pagan' cultural elements.

Some common, if not the most egregious, right-traditionalist responses to some fantasy photography-art claimed as a depiction of the early middle ages.

This is a complex area but the above outline will do – what I want to talk about in this article is how those of us engaging in creative pursuits that use medieval ideas and aesthetics can push back and undermine these people through our work. I’m axiomatically assuming that’s a good idea, and that part of it is in the work itself. We obviously can, and should, push back at a meta-level as well by rejecting these people’s claims: but I think it is also good when we can build wider and more interesting medieval worlds that are less simplistically easy for these people to hang their hats on. That both means not providing them with models of the past that chime so easily with the world they want to portray, and it means contesting their claims to aesthetics, imagery, and people as for example “White”, “Nordic”, or “Anglo-Saxon”, all terms that the far-right often use somewhat ahistorically and interchangeably to represent their ethnic and cultural ideals. These cross over both things that purport to represent history and fantasies that are justified by reference to that history – indeed, these things are actually a sliding scale in any creative work or representation.
In any case, I’m mostly going to focus on creative work here, more than about attempts at writing actual history: one can get sucked forever into the minutiae of why particular historical views held up by the right are muddled, wrong, and misread, and I don’t intend to wade into that in this piece. Instead, I’d rather focus on how we build medievalist ideas and aesthetics that are harder to appropriate and which help undermine far-right presentations of the medieval period in different ways.

I think one of the best ways to counter the sort of hyper white "Saxon" imaginary (examples shown in in the image screenshots here) is finding smart ways to play with it. Writers, artists, game developers etc can do a lot to shake and subvert far right claims on & about these imaginaries/aesthetics. We see even for pure fantasy settings many arguments about what is and isn't "realistic": really they're about what feels authentic, not about historical facts, though these relate to each other. But expanding that authenticity space to embrace more of human experience is vital. Essentially, we end up somewhat mentally trained to particular sets of expectations that certain things go together – and we should see those sets of things as arbitrary and malleable, they’re something that we as creators can and should actively work with.

Tales of medieval demon-fighting heroes need not be centred on Europe. British Library Add MS 5600.

That can go in lots of directions. Emphasising travel/connectivity/diversity and just diversifying the look of things is an obvious route and the one that's always talked about most, especially when it comes to issues like black representation in games. I think this is vital, though it's important to be doing it in a way that isn't just a diversity quota. There are lots of aspects and facets of representation, precisely because race and ethnicity are such complex things: simply picking a bunch of your historical knights and peasants to be exactly the same as all the others but with a different phenotype isn’t valueless: it’s perfectly reasonable for people to be able to see themselves in fictional worlds. However thinking about different groups of people and under what pressures ethnic and cultural identities are created allows for much more nuanced writing. Cultures aren't naturally rigidly sealed bubbles with a state machinery behind each one, and they don't solely come into contact through conflict. ‘Race is a cultural construct’ is often bandied around but less well utilised than it should be: it isn’t just a statement about a static feature of the world, something that got built sometime and has been squatting like a malevolent obelisk on the horizon ever since, rather it points at the ongoing process of that construction. Writing worlds that contain those processes is difficult, but it’s massively important because it stops views of the medieval past just being simplistic ones where present racial boundaries are assumed to be inevitable, inviolable, and eternal.

Engaging with people and texts about places and mythos more widely is critical: whilst the European past was considerably more diverse than the desperate imaginaries of a racist minority, it’s also important to recognise that even in that period this was not a disconnected world and that portrayals of the period need not be confined to a region that was rather a backwater in terms of Eurasia at the time. Other people seeing themselves in the past is partly a matter of “hey that guy has a face shape and hair like mine” but it’s also importantly about people finding their stories and their families’ stories in the imaginaries we build. These things help build on one another, too: the stories and names and tropes that make the medieval less European-centred may make it more familiar to some people globally who the Whites-Only Middle Ages types want to exclude, but will also make it less familiar to those versed in the standard medieval and fantasy tropes of the Anglosphere. That unfamiliarity is good! It’s fun, it stops settings becoming moribund, and it arguably presents better a world that had a potential for unfamiliarity greater than our deeply information-connected present. When I write medieval fantasy tales and games a lot of my characters whose pseudo-cultures are not very European are the result of me reading some piece of mythos or medieval text or history book where I thought “you know what – that’s really cool”, and that mix of enthusiasm and authenticity tends to work well.

I think another route which also works with the idea of unfamiliarity is to play more creatively with how weird and playful imagined pasts can be. For example I run early medieval fantasy TTRPG games that often focus on getting players to explore concepts and ideas like guest-rights and their importance. This helps combat the simplistic far-right version of the hypermasculine middle ages, in that it erodes the ideas of masculine authority and strength at the expense of the highly developed social rules and norms that people grappled with in the period. Similarly, portraying vassalage and manorialism and their very real quirks can erode the idea that medieval countries were simple precursors to modern states with their “nations” already formed. Appreciating how political and ethnic identities might not connect as neatly in a world where allegiance is fundamentally to a person not a state makes it harder for people to then accept appeals to ‘national’ moments in the medieval period as directly connected to the struggles of modern countries. Right-wing societal “values” of insular opposition to travel and outsiders, absolutist relationships with religion, and nuclear man-centred households don’t make sense in a medieval world: a complex, human pseudo-past society that needs to talk through its problems doesn't let them take that space.

 (As an aside, when talking historical games I often emphasise the "how" as well as "what", society & process as well as the aesthetic, and thus why code, quest design and narrative structure are useful to consider more. The above is one good reason why that massively matters).

"Remember what they took from you!" works a little less well as a caption for this picture.
British Library manuscipt, Royal 10 E IV f. 122.

I also mentioned playfulness. The fascist view of the medieval thrives on it being played relentlessly straight (in both senses of the term). The heroic or anti-heroic past culture-purists they imagine medieval warriors to have been are treated as precursors to their own fragile dignities in the present. It’s helpful to undercut that, and undercut it hard. Talking foxes, battle chickens, terrible puns, giant babies: the world is your oyster, and if you want to make the world an actual oyster, be my guest. Showing the bearded, axe-wielding hero of your piece, say, having to negotiate despairingly with a loquacious Saint of Snails is something you don't get to be a tough guy about later.

A final thought on an idea that resonates overmuch in fiction: the connection of blood and soil. This is (perhaps especially in Europe) a very core part of white supremacist ideals, the idea that essentially peoples are inherently connected to places by blood and culture. It's important to actively pull this one up by the roots, but it still appears played-straight in far too much fantasy, especially with the wider fantasy focus on bloodlines and inheritance as a way of passing down various forms of magical power or bond (one of my least favourite parts of Haven & Hearth, a game I generally love, is the fact that the land claims in it are referred to as A Bond Of Blood And Soil).

I think for this we should engage explicitly with ideas of nature and home, what it means to choose a place and expanding spaces of belonging so their claim doesn't land. We can and should make worlds and fey and woods and hills that explicitly reject blood claims upon them. There are any number of ways that things can be fated, and medieval rules of magic are often explicitly bizarre – check out just about any geas in a piece of Irish literature, half of them are rules like “you must never have a drink under a full moon, never eat soup at the same house twice, and never dance when there are more than three dogs in the room” or similar. We don’t need to make things entirely random, either: there’s no reason why someone’s personal, individual connection to a place or site should be derived from blood rather than being a personal characteristic of that person.

I will note that I'm not saying every work has to do all these things, all at once, and I'm definitely not saying there should be some wide shared agenda for what fantasy and medievalism should look like. What I want here is to say exactly the opposite: that taking medievalism in different directions, both digging deeper into the complex humanity of medieval material and thinking explicitly about when and where we use and reject that material, breaks medievalism out of the box and keeps it growing in a way that both offers huge storytelling potential and less fertile ground for people who want to use these symbols for their extreme misinterpretations and ideas. Making it difficult for the far-right to put their roots into medieval ideas generally also creates the space for a lot of the current common tropes and symbols of medievalism to be part of our stories and imaginations without dominating them: a bigger, more human scope for medievalism is good for everyone.

I hope you’ve found this brief discussion interesting – please do feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on this complex and growing area in the comments. Building complex, exciting, messy and human fictional worlds is something where we can all learn from one another: it doesn’t have to mean trashing or abandoning the things we love about pseudo-medieval worlds, indeed it’s the continuation of the process by which they were made. Our love of the quirky, the small, the strange and the ancient – that which cannot be made to conform – has a power, and it’s one that those who want the world to fit into cruel, bland boxes should, very reasonably, fear.


Acknowledgements and thanks for this piece coming together should go to Kat Fox for coming up with the original screenshots, Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm for her discussion of them on Twitter, and to Thaheera Althaf for reading over this piece, extended from an original Twitter thread of mine, before publication..

174

General Chatter - The Boozer / September pub, Thurs 29?

« on: September 19, 2022, 02:40:36 PM »

Would this work OK? I should probably get the announcement out soonish.

175

Tolkien & LOTR / Rings of Power

« on: September 18, 2022, 04:48:12 PM »

Anyone watching it/any thoughts? I've just finished catching up with the episodes thus far

I'm definitely enjoying it - playing fast and loose with the canon in places, sure, but that's what adaptations do. Bluntly, Tolkien's works live and die on feelings rather than plot in any case, and his legendarium is just that, legends that I think are at their best when they live and are retold. I have a few quibbles, mostly about how the Dwarves are presented, but that'd be true of any adaptation that I didn't personally make, I suspect.

176

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Caucasus Politics 2022

« on: September 14, 2022, 01:06:01 PM »

Azerbaijan has been attacking Armenia again - this time shelling into Armenia proper, possibly taking advantage of the fact that Russia is in no position to provide peacekeeping. The Pashinyan administration in Armenia has been much more willing to try and reach terms with Azerbaijan than its predecessors (much of the opposition to Pashinyan is from the more tub-thumpingly military-resistance and defend-Artsakh-at-all-costs political wing) but at the end of the day it looks like the Azerbaijan dictatorship's revanchist tendencies have won out.

It's all rather grim really

177

Announcements! The Town Crier! / Roadwarden Released!

« on: September 13, 2022, 12:02:05 AM »

Everyone in Viaticum knows to stay away from the wilderness. Nature is stronger than the people who struggle to carve civilisation from it, and most folk would not risk being alone on the dark roads. Roadwardens are different. Most flee from the struggle of the roads, some begrudgingly accept it - the roadwardens alone must make the danger their own. As messengers, bounty-hunters, impromptu corpse disposal, and emergency assistance, they have no equal. Living on the trail, some can retire comfortably and early - others leave only their corpse on the roadside. The roadwarden's trail may bring danger, but also respectability - and the promise of good pay. Are you ready to take it?

Roadwarden, a choice-driven RPG and the latest game in Aure's Viaticum setting, is now released! Playing the game, you can roam the pathways of a wide fantasy setting bursting with secrets, tales, and mysterious shapes in the trees just beyond the path. The game features in-depth NPC interactions with a unique tone-driven dialogue system, letting you build networks of support to speed your journeys along. You can shape yourself and the world around you along the way, as you unravel some of the mysteries, plots, and dangers that await on the roads ahead.

We've been watching Roadwarden's development here on Exilian for years, and it's thrilling to see it released. We hope you'll support Aure and give it a go, and we really look forward to hearing about some of your adventures on the open trail!

Buy the game on Steam
Discuss Roadwarden on Exilian

178

Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / A Microfiction Thread

« on: September 11, 2022, 01:27:04 PM »

One of the things I sometimes find actually fun about Twitter/Mastodon etc is the presence of microfiction - that is, vignette-tales a few sentences long, which of course thus matches the format. There are a few people who do this super regularly, and some (like me on occasion) who dabble a little, but anyway, here's a thread for posting microfictions you've written or ones by others you've really enjoyed.

My most recent, posted on Mastodon, was a riff on the Two Wolves Inside You meme/format -

There are two wolves inside you.

Also two pandas. And two lions. And two rockhopper penguins, and two sunda pangolins.

Also, two rather unhappy moles who wish to know where all the soil went.

You are Noah's Ark, and you are uncertain how you know this, or when you gained the capacity for thought or introspection.

There is only sea, all around; the rain has not yet stopped.

There are two wolves inside you, and you were built to keep them safe until the dawn.

179

General Chatter - The Boozer / A wonderful short film about medieval rabbits going hunting

« on: September 06, 2022, 03:46:34 PM »

Courtesy of Eadgifu who sent it to me, I found this to be rather delightful:

180

General Gaming - The Arcade / Haven and Hearth

« on: September 04, 2022, 10:36:27 PM »

I've been playing this again recently. For those who don't know it, it's a permanently in development, very janky, cute but also brutal sort-of-MMO (that is, it's an MMO but the player base is tiny).

It's been interesting getting back to it. Because it's survival/crafting focused with a very changeable map etc, it's quite interesting to see it develop. Some of the player base is terrible, and I did indeed get randomly griefed a few days ago and knocked down to 2hp before being helped out by a kindly USian player who dropped some bandages over to my place. The game has permadeath, so dying is pretty bad, though you can inherit a certain amount of a past character's stuff and abilities.

Anyway here's my base, I've got a cave and a little farm-garden. This is not very optimised, good players have much more of a defensive palisade system, but it is pretty and I am a bit of an aesthete when it comes to these sorts of games.

If anyone wants to have a go, there's a way to build beacons to teleport in new players to be based near you (otherwise you're placed randomly on the GIANT world map) so feel free to give me a shout