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Topics - Jubal

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61
The World of Kavis / Verasine
« on: October 07, 2023, 03:47:03 PM »
I'm not planning to do much with Verasine as of now, but it's there so should get mentioned and I need a notes space if only to avoid forgetting the name.

Verasine is the southwestern empire and archipelago that lies far to the west of Dulshan and Camahay. It's an explicitly imperial state, with a particular love of magic users who form its imperial elites: magic users are generally brought up by the state, and are considered sacrosanct to the point where they cannot be executed, only at worst exiled. Its underclasses are largely dusk-folk, for the Verasinka are the only day-folk who widely know and use the art of constructing dusk-folk. Their goblins and trolls form an often poorly treated underclass. Verasine is also not a place where many outsiders go: it is largely self-sufficient and besides one or two permitted ports, foreigners (except wizards) are known to be under penalty of death for stepping on its shores.

62
Coding Medieval Worlds / CMW4: Outcasts and Monsters
« on: October 03, 2023, 11:48:07 AM »
So, after CMW3 Outcasts and Monsters was the clear vote preference of the audience for what we do as CMW4. So here's an early planning-thoughts thread. Shout if you have ideas for speakers, things to do, other cool thoughts, etc.

Possible spins on the theme:
  • The problems of medieval evidence for outcast/marginalised peoples: how do we represent people who we know are under-represented in sources?
  • Marginalisation in the middle ages more generally - what it meant to be an exile or outlaw, or indeed a woman, a minority community, etc
  • What makes a monster medieval, both in our eyes and in what monsters medieval people themselves were fascinated by?
  • Do we have ways of encoding/game-ruling some of these statuses, and what do those look like?
  • How does the modern more monster-sympathetic trend in games play into these considerations?
  • Are there bits of medieval monster inspiration that remain under-used and under-utilised?

Tentatively CMW4 will be the 16-18 February 2024.

63
Announcements! The Town Crier! / Updates from the Forge 51: Autumn 2023
« on: October 01, 2023, 10:33:33 PM »
Issue 51: Autumn 2023

EDITORIAL

Welcome to another issue of Updates from the Forge! This is Exilian's newsletter of creative geekery, telling you what we've been getting up to over the past three months across the community. This time we have another eight updates from different projects, featuring kobolds, intergalactic warfare, the monuments of Armenia, and songs about necromancy, among our usual multicoloured miscellany of topics.

It's always worth noting that our main articles here are only a handful of the things going on among our members: other projects are getting some great updates, including a new steam page and trailer for BeerDrinkingBurke's excellent Innkeep. Also, excitingly, our top article from last issue, Under the Yoke from Priory Games, now has a launched Steam page so you can head over, watch the excellent new trailer, and wishlist the game.

Nor are the projects all we've got happening around the community: there's been plenty of lively chatter about people's reading and gaming, fun in the forum games area, and continued chatter about politics around the world. Other parts of the community outside the forum also include our monthly video-call meetups where we've discussed things from gelatinous cubes and warlock patron flumphs to the fluid dynamics of some very particular fluids. Why not drop by sometime?

In any case - we have plenty to show you for this issue, and it's time to get on with doing so. Without further ado, here's issue fifty-one with eight more updates from the creative forges of Exilian!

CONTENTS:

  • Editorial
  • Game Development
    • Can you survive the elements?
    • Yip! Yip! Yip Quest!
    • Jubal's Warhammer Campaign Systems
  • Arts & Writing
    • Exilian Chain Writing 2023
    • Ben, Books, Bones, and Barbie: Jubal's Music Returns
    • BagaturKhan's Potestas War
  • Miscellany
    • In the Shadows Of Mountains: A Yerevan Travelogue
    • New Lo-fi Music for your projects from SoundImage
GAME DEV
Can you survive the elements?


Mixing the action-roguelike and JRPG genres, new Exilian member samobee has come along with Elemental Survivors, a madcap, colourful game with an auto-attacking system, randomly generated fantasy landscapes, and a wide array of special abilities, powerful equipment and unique attacks for players to use as they forge a path through the game. The world has been overrun by a vast number of foes, and it's a peril you and your train of allies must end. Area runs last around 20 minutes each with a boss spawning at the end that provides an extra powerful challenge. Permanent upgrades and stronger equipment may help you bounce back from defeat as you try to survive the onslaught.

Elemental Survivors went into Early Access on Aug 25, and is available from Steam now, with future elements to be added including evolutions of attacks and high-powered summons that can turn the tide of your battles. The game's plans promise regular updates based on community feedback, so if you know what you want out of a game like this, getting in there at this early stage may be a great way to help shape the game's development. Why not take a look?



The kobolds ponder their next move. At least, to the extent kobolds can be said to ponder anything.
Yip! Yip! Yip Quest!

New Exilian member Ramorama brings us a kobold themed point and click adventure, Yip Quest, a tale of three kobolds trying to rob the treasury of a local princess, buy their own cave, and get as wealthy (and drunk) as kobold life allows. You need to switch between the three kobolds in your party to make use of their different abilities - Ram's strength, Raga's sharp eyes, and Kog's skinny gap-wriggling - as you concoct a fiendish and surely absolutely foolproof plan to boggle the minds of the princess' guards, and get into her luxurious treasury as seen on her PikPok profile. What nasty secrets might you find out about the princess' life and staffing along the way? And will you turn out to be the only ones with an interest in the luxurious royal treasury room...?

The game is entirely free to download from itch.io and is a delightful short old school point and click adventure made for the $107 Adventure Game Challenge. Its gameplay includes a fun range of item puzzles, whimsical comments on the scenery, and kobolds getting up to what can only be described as shenanigans. Very worth checking out if you need a silly hour or so's puzzling in your life!



Jubal's Warhammer Campaign Systems

Some older style wargaming content has come up recently as Jubal has recently released the rules for two Warhammer Fantasy campaign games he ran in 2009-10, with updated rules to make more readable and clear rulebooks. The two systems are Of Stone and Iron, set in the subterranean depths around the Dwarfs' ancient Underway road, and Of Wood and Water, an exploration of the Turtle Islands in the far southeast of the Warhammer world. Both systems offer detailed exploration rules on tile-based maps, with impassable and difficult terrain, natural disasters, monstrous encounters and the construction of new buildings and military units among strategic considerations for the player generals. Individual bonuses or objectives for different factions emphasise a variety of playstyles at the strategic level, adapting to or changing the landscape itself as the different peoples of the Warhammer world play to their strengths in these struggles for dominion.

While the rules were originally written for Warhammer Fantasy Battle 7th/8th edition, much of the system should be adaptable to other editions of Warhammer and indeed probably to other battle systems like Dragon Rampant or Kings of War. Let us (and Jubal) know if you have feedback or have run these campaigns yourself - a new way to experience the tabletop gaming hobby on a grand scale beyond single battlefields, adding strategy to the classic modern games of fantasy warfare!


ARTS AND WRITING


Exilian Chain Writing 2023

Quote
There was time to spare, for once, but that night’s journey was still uneasy.

Following her companion, the stocky little woman crept through unlit passageways with a level of quiet, slow purpose more usually reserved for snails than people. Light was not an option. Talking was not an option. Breathing was just about acceptable, as long as she held the imagined death-stare of a librarian in her mind to ensure, with withering glances, that she kept the noise down.

She adjusted her pince-nez and re-pinned a stray grey braid as she walked: there was no need for haste, and keeping her hands quietly busy helped with the nerves. The route was cool, even airy, but a nervous sweat still moistened her hands...

Exilian has done another chain writing project! This project had one chain story, a whimsical science-fantasy in which the mysterious Xellians bring a human to a piece of machinery awesome in its power. But to what end was this secretive project done? And what choices will the human - a grey-haired lady with pince-nez and a penchant for obscure books - make with a machine beyond all humaning reckoning in front of her? The answers to these questions may delight, excite and amuse you...

Our chain writing projects involve a range of writers each adding 250 or so words in sequence to make a roughly 2000 word story together - without conferring, so the tale can take many unexpected twists and turns as elements introduced by one writer get repurposed and pulled in different directions by another. The result is an exciting test of writing skill as the different writers have to adapt to and work with what they have available. Read on and see how our seven authors' penmanship shaped up!


Ben, Books, Bones, and Barbie: Jubal's Music Returns

After some months with a broken guitar and awkward attempts to learn the mandolin and gusle not getting to recording quality, Jubal's guitar is functional and that means music is finally back on the menu! Two new songs have arrived on the Exilian YouTube channel in the last month or so. Firstly, we had the Star Wars/Barbie Movie crossover parody number you very much weren't asking for, I'm Just Ben, in which Ken's earworm number from Barbie becomes a ballad for Obi-Wan to contemplate his past upon meeting Luke Skywalker. The song drops in a number of well-timed Kenobi lines with the backing video montage, and should be But that's not all...


...because there's also the song above - A Song of Books and Bone, based on Veo Corva's wonderful Tombtown novels, wrapping up the themes of these necromantic slice of life adventures and turning them into the sort of soft folksy lyrics that suit both artist and subject matter down to (and indeed, down beneath) the ground. If you like fantasy folk songs, queer magic adventure fiction, or just some warm lyrics about found family and community, this may be a song to have a listen to!


BagaturKhan's Potestas War

In the huge Infinitas setting created by BagaturKhan, thousands of years of interplanetary history and myriad alien species battle over the fate of the cosmos. One villain, however, stands out - Salazarr, a being millions of years old who takes the role of deciever and destroyer to civilisation after civilisation. He has been given many names: Marfur-Niari, the Dragon of Chaos, the Serpent of the Tempter, Bringer of Strife and Darkness. In some places, his name is forbidden, and in others it is reviled - but there is no telling whether he will bear the same name and guise when he next arises.

The Potestas War, a war so expansive it spilled even beyond the frontiers of our own galaxy to Andromeda and beyond, was one of the great rises of this ancient and terrible power, even greater than the Acheronian War and etching damage onto the stars themselves. BagaturKhan's latest story, Revenge of Tyrants: Salah'zarr War, deals with this cataclysmic conflict, tying in his with other Revenge of Tyrants stories and the rest of the Infinitas setting. The full story can be downloaded via the thread below - do go and have a read!


MISCELLANY


The Cascade staircase monument in Yerevan.
In the Shadows Of Mountains: A Yerevan Travelogue

Jubal's travel writings are a perennial feature of the Exilian forums, with historical, nature, and sightseeing notes on locations from Bordeaux to Venice, Tbilisi, and Tunis. In the most recent instalment he travelled in June to the Armenian capital of Yerevan, and his travelogue In the Shadows Of Mountains gives a detailed account of the city, its sights, and its deep and complex relationship with the mighty mount Ararat, today part of Turkey but still looming and overshadowing the Armenian capital. Seeing Armenia's capital through the eyes both of a traveller and a historian, the travelogue includes a lot of reflection on how the difficult history of Armenia does - and doesn't - interact with life in the modern city.

Besides the interwoven thread betweenpast and present, though, there's a great deal to be learned about Yerevan. From sheltopusik lizards in the Hrazdan gorge to the poetry and chatter of Cafe Ilik, from the Pulpulak fountains to the mighty sweep of the cascade staircase monument, it's a city with a great deal to discover and explore. An introduction to Armenian food, transport, and money may stand you in good stead if you ever want to visit Armenia, and if you won't be there any time soon then the pictures and discussion of monuments and artefacts alike will be an excellent remote view of the city. Read on to journey across the Caucasus...



New Lo-fi Music for your projects from SoundImage


SoundImage, the huge free-to-use music and texture library created and run by Exilian member Eric Matyas, continues to grow as time goes on! Recent experiments have included a big new range of lo-fi versions of Eric's tracks, eliminating some sound frequencies to build a softer, atmospheric soundscape for your games and other projects. Some of the tracks added in the past month in new lo-fi versions include some sci-fi themed pieces, Alien Colosseum, Stranded in the Outer Rim, and Tunnels Under Metropolis. Could the lo-fi versions find a home in your next sci-fi or space themed ideas?

Eric's music releases also include OGG music packs: unlike the free MP3 versions, these can be bought in reasonably-priced bundles and which offer greater looping and streaming capacity for game and similar uses. Unlike MP3 sound, which sometimes discards tiny bits of sound at the start and end of loops leading to momentary blips in the sound quality, OGG files allow for a much smoother sound whilst still be far lighter and less filespace intensive than filetypes like WAV. You can find all of Eric's OGG files via his gumroad page.

Why not check out SoundImage and see what's there for your project? Maybe there'll be some sounds you need for the next steps of your creative endeavours!



That's all for this autumnal issue - do keep letting us know about your current and upcoming projects on the forum, we're always very happy to have new things to put in Exilian's newsletter. For big announcements like kickstarters and full releases of games or books we can also sometimes do separate front page announcements, too, just get in touch if you ever need to ask about that. We'll be back in three months at New Year for yet another issue, so see you then for more Updates from the Forge!

64
Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Of Wood and Water: Warhammer Turtle Islands Campaign Rules
« on: September 30, 2023, 12:11:19 PM »
​Of Wood and Water

This is the second of a pair of campaign systems I wrote originally about 2009-10 for exploration-focused campaign games in the Warhammer world: the first was an Underway campaign, Of Stone and Iron, whereas Of Wood and Water takes players to the Turtle Islands, a mysterious jungle land on the far side of the Warhammer world to the areas players are usually familiar with.

The campaign system provides rules for exploration, with forests, hills, and water all in existence around the map. There's a detailed random encounters chart for players to have something to fight even if they're not battling fellow players in a particular campaign turn, too. Some specific rainforest battle rules are also in there, and there's a full system for income, troop training, and buildings.

There are four local factions: the People of the Moai, the People of the Consuming Forest, the Jungle Goblins and the Skink Tribes. These can all be encountered in villages and, depending on the player's faction, battled or allied with. The People of the Moai and of the Consuming Forest have new rules for units like frenzied man-eating giants, powerful walking statues, and sculptor-mages.

Do let me know in the comments if you read through and have thoughts, and especially if you actually try playing the system! It probably needs a lot of balance work, but hopefully it'll be chaotically fun regardless.



Design Notes

I think these design notes have to start with the obvious, so let's talk colonialism. The inspirations for Of Wood and Water are both obvious and sort of awkward: it's a campaign that looks at exploring and building in a mysterious jungle and it has some obvious C19 adventure tropes as factions can gain from discovering ancient temples and other things beyond their ken. And it's true that a bunch of European-coded people going exploring and building in a jungle is inherently going to have some inescapable colonial tropes going on. Even back in 2010 I was somewhat aware that wouldn't be ideal (dropping the pejorative term "pygmies" which official Warhammer materials had used in the past for indigenous people in the far reaches of the world), and instead theming the people of the Turtle Islands around a more Easter Island theme, beginning a long interest in the history of the moai statues which has cropped up at various other points in my fiction writing.

In the 2023 rewrite I refocused things to try and further improve matters. The new opening and closing fiction vignettes show things from the perspective of the People, as the Moai builders of the Turtle Islands call themselves, putting the local perspective more centrally in how players approach the book. Also importantly, I did some re-theming on the peoples that I'd written as allies for more evil-aligned factions, who I'd initially simply written as adventure-trope cannibals but have now been a bit tweaked to become the People of the Consuming Forest, still good allies for Chaos or other villains but focused more on the general sense of nature as a ferocious, all-consuming force rather than centring the specific act of cannibalism. One small rules tweak that I think sets out the change well is that their alliance list now includes Wood Elves, making them a more ambiguous force as opposed to just having all the obviously-evil factions on side. Finally, some optional rules for actually playing as a local faction were added, which would be tricky due to the lack of a fully developed army list but could also be a very fun way to approach the campaign.

All that said, this campaign still is what it is - an exploration and expansion focused rule system, in a world where how we think about those processes is heavily defined by our own world's colonial past. Your mileage may vary on whether that's something you want in your games! I'm not sure old-school Warhammer as whole can duck it, that said, given how much of the Warhammer world's theming and technology has a decidedly age-of-discovery flavour. I hope, then, that I've treated the issue with at least some more care than might otherwise have been the case.

In terms of other design notes - this can be quite a chaotic campaign, with the variant faction rules giving very different play-styles. Like in Of Stone and Iron, the lava/volcano rules can be immensely destructive on a campaign changing level, probably too much so but at the same time I think having a natural disaster that really really feels like a natural disaster has quite something to be said for it, there's good possibilities for an epic level of horror as the pyroclastic flows come crashing down on your marshalled forces.

I think if I were to do further rewrites of this I might reintroduce variant victory conditions like in Of Stone and Iron. This might allow some player choice in what sort of attitudes they want to take (especially for morally grey factions where e.g. a Dwarf player might both sympathise with the need to protect the stonework and culture of the Islands or simply be in it for the shiny objects and loot that can be gained). That said, I don't know when or if I'll next run this sort of campaign, I've not picked up Warhammer for a decade or so now - we'll see if I ever get there.

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Tabletop Design - The Senet House / ​Of Stone and Iron: Warhammer Underway Campaign Rules
« on: September 28, 2023, 11:15:45 PM »
​Of Stone and Iron

​Of Stone and Iron is a fan-written campaign supplement by myself, originally for Warhammer Fantasy Battle 7th ed but it can be adapted to other settings, wargames and factions with minimal effort.

The premise of the campaign game is that your forces are attempting to conquer or draw resources from the regions around the Underway, a giant and ancient Dwarf road lying deep beneath the surface of the Old World. It includes a turn system, map exploration rules with some highly dangerous terrain and monsters available, and rules covering battlefield, income, buildings, and more besides.

There are special rules covering most of the classic Warhammer factions, giving them different special goals, buildings, and tactics, as well as significant restrictions to normal styles of gameplay that will pose new tactical and army list building challenges for players.



Design Notes

I originally wrote Of Stone and Iron in about 2009, and decided to do a quick job on proofreading it and ensuring a public version was available this year when I was looking back through the rules as part of research I've been doing into campaign systems for wargames and how they represent the past. I think the core thing that worked well in the Underway campaign was the exploration mechanic, which I've used since in one other Warhammer campaign supplement (which I may also re-release soon) but also in standalone games like Hetairos and most recently the work I've been doing on a Cepheida exploration game.

In aiming to be a "full" campaign, Of Stone and Iron also had some of the inherent problems of campaign games - some people juggling lots of battles in a campaign turn, others with none. The hero requirement reduced the extent to which players could simply divide their force into stacks, but they could certainly divide their force quite a lot. We played the game at a club, which helped because people could shift around to all get some games in, but a more divided group might find the sheer quantity of smaller battles a little tricky at times.

All that said - if it was chaos it was fun chaos, and if I ever got back into wargaming I'd enjoy running something similar again.

66
General Chatter - The Boozer / Hotels and toothpaste
« on: September 25, 2023, 07:34:28 AM »
This is a very random one BUT - hotels always provide soap and shampoo, sometimes shower gel, conditioner. But I've never seen a hotel include toothpaste.

Does anyone know why this is? It's presumably something people forget a lot, and feels like just as much of a necessity for general daily cleaning as the shower stuff. So I'm just randomly curious as to whether there's a good reason hotels provide one and not the other.

67
Exilian Articles / Unusual selections from a magical library
« on: September 17, 2023, 12:04:48 AM »
Unusual selections from a magical library
By Jubal


Whilst digging through the lost libraries of the depths of Exilian, I decided to note down a selection of the most intriguing magical texts, to give you all some more ideas about what might lurk at the heart of any magical libraries, wizards' towers, or other such spaces that you may be creating for your TTRPGs, computer games, fantasy fiction, or similar. As such, here are twelve magical texts that you might come across. Read on... though, as ever, remember that knowledge can be a dangerous thing!


The Aumanac
If read normally, is just a series of folk tales: but it can be read in a different way (back to front, in columns, every other line: it's a hidden text puzzle) and if this is done the Aumanac bonds with the reader, its covers forming a breastplate, the pages a robe and cloak, and the metal corner caps transforming into a helm. The Aumanac armour does not have a terribly high armour value but works more by providing beneficial effects (forcing opponents to fail or re-try attacks, permitting the hero to try again when they fail at something) and also meaning deus ex machina events happen to the hero a lot: it is, in fact, literal plot armour.

The Holy Laws Of Meryten
A set of laws devised to govern magic by some gods at the dawn of time: these were long since forgotten but are mostly technically still in force, meaning that a user who has properly read the book has the opportunity to resist almost preternaturally well or even produce a full counterspell any time they are targeted by a magical attack, as long as they can come up with a plausible sounding novel loophole or legal technicality that makes the action illegal. The book can only be properly memorised by one person at a time, because the lawyer who wrote it all down didn't want anyone stealing his business.

The Good Little Bullywug
A children's tale about a sad little bullywug (that is, a frog person, for those who do not know D&D monster lore). She wants to be a princess but turns out to actually just be a bullywug after all. The tale appears unimportant, but if a hero expresses sympathy for the bullywug and hugs or gives a kiss to the book, the bullywug will be summoned. She is neutral good, really really wants to help the heroes, and mostly has the stats of a bullywug, but is *completely indestructible by any means* - she could be lost by e.g. being portaled away, but no attacks or environmental hazards will ever affect her. She will also leave the party if they do too many evil deeds, because, well, she's literally a children's book character and doesn't want to be disappointed by you.

The Volumomanteion
A tabletop-game only option. Pick another book from nearby the gaming table (not a rulebook, ideally a novel). The user of the Oracle should roll d100, and count pages and pick a sentence depending on the phases of the moon:

  • Crescent moon: Count from the back, first sentence on the page
  • Waxing moon: Count from the front, last sentence on the page
  • Full moon: Count from the front, first sentence on the page
  • Waning moon: Count from the back, last sentence on the page

The reader then becomes the agent of this prophecy: they get a small penalty, at the GM’s discretion, until they can reasonably argue that they have fulfilled the spirit of their selected sentence, at which point they get a small permanent bonus.

The Periplus, Commesian the Navigator
Often wrongly assumed to be the periplus (travel account) "of" Commesian, but actually Commesian transformed himself into a book to better record his voyages, which encompassed everywhere on the prime material plane. Commesian did so hundreds of years ago, but this means he can basically be used as a historial hitch-hiker's guide who can reveal the locations of lost treasure, cities, etc, often in the form of slightly annoying reminiscences about how everything was better when he was young. The book is sentient, but only talks if provided with incentives either by threatening its fabric or by coaxing it with offers of travel and stories of what the world is like now.

A History of Swords
This is a book that rewrites itself to be the history of whatever sword the reader is actually carrying and/or any swords in the room. Could reveal who was killed with them, those people's life stories, any magic item secrets, etc. It may reveal things about non-sword weapons but will be incredibly rude about their inferiority due to them not being swords.
 
The Prophecies of Ceraphai
The Prophecies is not, in fact, a book that may tell heroes prophecies about themselves: rather, it’s a magical book that seeks to make the reader an agent of prophecy, and will open itself to pages relating to areas, families, or that it senses the heroes may be near. The prophecies will not always be happy ones, but the heroes can loophole them and the writing is often such to allow for this.

A prophecy being fulfilled will cause the book to replace that page with some information of use to the fulfiller – be that a small bit of local wisdom, the location of nearby treasure, or similar. Pointedly failing to fulfil a prophecy or refusing to, conversely, will cause the page to be filled with a minor curse, explosive runes, or similar.

Six example prophecies
1 - The last heir of (family) must admit their true love before the month ends
Note: This isn’t necessarily a matchmaking task! Finding what they already love, in any sense of that term, and getting them to admit it should count. Though matchmaking might also work.
2 - The ruler of (place) is fated to die before the month ends
Note: actually easily loopholed by finding someone already on their deathbed and temporarily making them the ruler until the end of the month.
3 - There shall be no king/mayor/duke upon the throne of x hereafter
Note: just persuade them to change the titulature! Though having a revolution also works.
4 - Their bones shall be broken, their flesh burned, their home shall lie empty in the dark.
Note: bones and flesh can be purchased by the prophesy-holder at all good local butchers, thus becoming theirs. Their home doesn’t have to be emptied for more than a night.
5 – Only when a sapling planted this year touches the roof of the tallest tower will the city be safe from the plague.
Note: the prophecy never states that the sapling’s roots still need to be in the ground. Behold, a way to include plot-critical flowerpots and roof climbing into your fantasy worlds.
6 – The lovers shall never be allowed to marry without bringing bad luck to all the fishermen of the area, unless they dance their marriage dance upon the sea-floor.
Note: I don’t have a good way to rule this one, but it is a really good way for someone who took control water or waterbreathing spells to have a moment to shine. Also, a scene where the heroes have to let the lovers keep dancing while fighting off an evil overlord’s angry fish-men/drowned dead/giant doom nautilus might have something to it.

The Three Walled Castle
A children’s book. When opened to a certain page and sung the right nursery rhymes the book opens out into a tiny castle full of little fey spirits who are excessively and bizarrely chivalric. The castle only has three walls, and takes up approximately a 4ft (1.2 metre) square. The inhabitants are tiny (7-10cm), equipped variously as knights, archers, and royals, and number around twenty: they are very persuadable to take on anything that can be made to sound like a chivalric enough task, but conversely will refuse to help with anything that sounds unchivalrous.

The Heresiarch
This book contains details of hundreds of lost heresies and minor gods whose cults were wiped out by various inquisitions and similar. Not all the gods in it are evil, but all of them are chaotic or otherwise opposed to the usual ordering of society. At least, that's a first impression. Heroes reading this book will actually tend to find more and more heresies or ideas that speak to their particular frustrations with the social order they find themselves in, as the book tries to give them the information and ideas to break out of those bonds or strictures - for better or for worse, as the book is an agent of heresy for its own sake.

The Doomscroll
When unrolled, the Doomscroll is always full of tiny annal entries containing the worst things happening in the world. This is useful for discerning what the heroes need to be doing in an up to the minute way, but there is a catch. It may cause temporary penalties to intellect and wisdom to use, and those who know of its existence, especially its mysterious original author, can manipulate it to show what they want the heroes to see.

Tapputi's Laboratory
Mostly an alchemy guide, but opening a hidden part of the book's cover correctly lets you into the extradimensional laboratory, which is a small dungeon-style adventure themed around potions and alchemy that needs clearing. If this is done, Tapputi's ghost will be found at the centre of the laboratory and will provide useful advice on potions beyond those which can normally be created by mortal kindreds.

The Nestognomeicon
The pages of this book are quite loose. All of them contain terribly done pictures of gnomes. If one falls out, a gnome is spawned. Note that the book is around 350 pages long so if all of them fall out at once there may be some issues.

The gnomes from the Nestognomeicon have entirely beetle-black eyes, a preternatural sense for where paintings, metal items, and mechanisms are, and a tendency to hoarding behaviour: they speak their own clicking and guttural language unknown to those around them. In general they will attempt to find a suitably safe, small space and busily start hoarding items that are precious to them there. They are otherwise, well, gnomes.


The lost librarians of Exilian hope you found these texts interesting and enlightening, and remind you that under no circumstances are readers allowed into the Forbidden Shelves of the site archives. Have you seen anything similar to these books in stories or campaigns, or do you have any entries to add? Do say, and let us know what you might do with these texts and ideas, in the thread below!

68
Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Embroidered Worlds: Ukrainian fantastic fiction anthology on Kickstarter
« on: September 16, 2023, 03:26:25 PM »
Thought this might be of interest to folks here:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atthisarts/embroidered-worlds

From the Kickstarter overview:
Quote
Embroidered Worlds presents a living snapshot of imaginative fiction in Ukrainian culture today, including stories that span and cross the speculative genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, weird fiction, magic realism, and alternate history. The majority of stories included in the anthology will be from writers in Ukraine, and for most of them it will be the first time their work will be translated into English. Writers of the Ukrainian diaspora have contributed as well with stories that draw upon their heritage, illustrating the complex and diverse ways we celebrate and re-imagine culture. These writers and their stories are wildly diverse: There are ghosts and monsters, there are spaceships and ancient gods, there are battles — real and imagined — as well as time-travel adventures, post-apocalyptic settings, magic and folk motifs. Through all this amazing storytelling, we glimpse the ideas and ideals, the history and future, that the Ukrainian people are fighting and dying for.

69
Southern Realm / Southern Realms Module System Download
« on: September 13, 2023, 02:42:13 PM »
I recently had a request for the Module System - the modding python files - for Southern Realms to be made available. To make sure they're up for anyone who wants them, they're now here as a download from the Exilian server.


If you make use of the system, please do use the forum to let me know what you've been doing with it - I'm always keen to see what anyone does with SR in the future :)

70
General Chatter - The Boozer / September pub - Sep 29?
« on: August 28, 2023, 11:10:58 PM »
We should be back to a Thursday and I think that means Thursday 28: Thurs 21 is possible but may be difficult for me as I'm planning a holiday and may be away or traveling back that day.

So, any objections to the 28th?

71
Game Reviews / Pirate Dragons: Early Access Review
« on: August 26, 2023, 04:18:53 PM »
Pirate Dragons Early Access - a review by Jubal

Game Type: Indie/Commercial
Genre: Action RPG

Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1835120/Pirate_Dragons/

Graphics rating:
Gameplay rating:
Immersion rating:
Overall rating:

So, pirate dragons. The good news about pirate dragons is that it does what it says on the tin: you are a dragon, you start your own privateer fleet, you go around fighting between different factions and attacking pirates and generally building up a haul of booty. You can do some trading, though I will admit I largely skipped the trading part of the game in favour of attacking pirates to try and take their stuff. I'd have liked to see the other game elements expanded a bit, but basically the core naval combat loop is the heart of the game and that's correctly where the focus has been.

The upsides
I think the most important point to make about this, and it's genuinely no small feat, is that by and large I found the flying combat genuinely good fun. Most games with flight combat or other 3D combat are absolutely terrible, because making a good maneuver system work in 3D that the player can actually aim with is very difficult. However, having most of the targets be moving in 2D (effectively, due to the water surface) actually works pretty well, and the overall experience of flying down the side of a boat and fire-strafing it is really enjoyable. That's a big plus and somewhat the really core selling point of this game, and given this game is very cheap I think it was entirely worth the price for this alone.

The surrounding game also has a bunch of worthwhile basic RPG stuff - towns to visit, quests, and so on, where you can work up your hoard and build a bigger ship fleet at the various ports. There's upgrades available both for you and for your vessels, and a fair bit of customisation - you can make your own flag with a good range of options, name your dragon and each of your ships, and so on. I'm an absolute sucker for that sort of bit of writing yourself or your take/ideas into a game's story, and I really enjoyed that.

The downsides
Firstly, optimisation. Yes, my laptop isn't new, but that doesn't mean a game of this size should be taking this long to load or having the graphics glitch because things can't handle them. I was having glitch-outs in some battles due to the particle effects etc, and if there's one thing an action RPG really, really can't do without, it's smooth gameplay. The size of the back end also needs a look, because this game is somehow larger in file size than TES IV: Oblivion, which given its very significantly smaller range of landscapes is something that should maybe be a cause for concern.

There's some work needed on the UI, which looks a bit, to put it gently, cheap (I think better fonts and graphics work could help a lot here). It's also not always clear what's going on: it took me a while to work out, for example, what the impacts were of losing - a defeat screen that gave readouts the same as the win screen ought to be a priority, I think. I found the map movement really janky too, the controls felt a bit awkward (I'd have preferred a "click to move here" system). I think I also needed to be able to zoom out a bit more and it felt tricky to work out where I was and where I was going except by near constant map checks.

Hopes for the future
The core gameplay loop is good except when the optimisation can't keep up, though it's quite built towards a skill-first game and one with solidly mid-range difficulty. It'd be interesting to see more options for balancing skill and preparation, the kind of thing that e.g. the Witcher does well, where your skill in combat balances against your tactical sense of what to do. Right now for example you don't have any control over your bonuses and when they launch and what you get: being able to plan and prep those in some way could add a really interesting tactical element. I didn't play much with the alternative breath weapons, but flagging those up better might be good - possibly adding quests to initially unlock them, then keeping the training as it currently is for improvements would be interesting.

I think there's more to be done on building up the setting too. This is never going to be a setting-first game, but I still felt a bit lost in the way that everything felt kind of generic and unexplained. Where really are we? Who are all these factions? I think expanding the quests as the game develops will be important for this, and I'd also like to see more variety of random encounters available.

Finally, more for stretch goals, I think a game this reliant on the core game loop needs more variation in that loop. The different ships as it is are fine, and the occasional enemy wyverns add interesting variation, but considering some other sea monsters or similar to change things up would start to make the game have a much stronger sense of variation and be generally less same-y. Dragon versus kraken as a boss fight would be really tricky to do well, but would also be SUPER fun, having the kraken in a bay of destroyed ships and just lobbing hull parts at the dragon as you try and burn each of its tentacles off or something.

Anyway, a solid purchase given the low price for now, and plenty of potential for more as it develops, so this is 100% one of my best below-five-euro steam purchases of the last two or three years, and I've made quite a lot of those. Looking forward to seeing more.

72
General Chatter - The Boozer / August Pub - 18 or 25?
« on: August 08, 2023, 06:27:38 PM »
We're due a Friday which given need to announce in time gives us these two options. Any preferences?

73
Spamfest! / Test thread
« on: August 07, 2023, 08:58:29 PM »
Test

74
General Chatter - The Boozer / In The Shadows of Mountains: A Trip to Yerevan
« on: August 04, 2023, 07:09:58 PM »
In The Shadows of Mountains: A Trip to Yerevan


Republic Square, at the centre of Yerevan.

The night train from Tbilisi had been rattling through the night, cutting across the middle of Armenia first and then looping around the Turkish border. I moved down from my bunk and exchanged a few words with the trio of Russians who shared the sleeper cabin, and my eyes opened wide to see the twenty or so white stork nests piled high upon old railway girders and towers as we passed an old rusting rail terminal – and then one of the others in the carriage pointed it out to me, that there it was in the background.

Ararat.

I was on my way to Yerevan, and Ararat loomed above me.



Georgian pro-Ukraine graffiti, evoking Pirosmani's Portrait of the Actress Margarita.
I had boarded the train to Yerevan from Tbilisi, which was itself not quite the same as the place I had left in 2019. Always a chaotically beautiful city, Georgia’s capital felt more on edge than it had once done. Pro-Ukraine graffiti on every other house and signs in shop windows asking customers to agree that Putin was a war criminal were visible vents the anger of the capital’s residents at a government seen as abandoning Georgia’s internationalist position and anti-Russian stance just when it geopolitically mattered most. I was visiting the universities there at a difficult time: Ilia State in particular, by reputation the more liberal of the two state universities, was seeing a wave of attacks on its rector by government-aligned media outlets causing a great deal of turbulence. More widely, the influx of Russians to the Caucasus was audible in central Tbilisi, the numbers resented by Tbilisi residents faced by high inflation. The newcomers were a mix of those deeply in need of refuge, the children of liberal Russia seeking refuge in a punk opposition from abroad, and a great many colonial-attitude middle class Russians seeking somewhere inexpensive and comfortable to ride out their government’s follies.  The unseasonal storms that hit the city while I was there seemed to reflect some of the mood.

In general Tbilisi sometimes feels caught somewhere between the good and bad bits of both a 1920s re-enactment and a cyberpunk futurism, with very little between the two. I could veer in the space of minutes between neon lit graffitied under-road shopping alleys, vine-wreathed painted balconies, bitcoin terminals, archives run with galleries of card catalogue drawers, electric violin rock solos, and wine cellars in use practically since the Middle Ages. It is a city of small alleys surrounded by dry hills and filled with pollution, emotion, stories, and wine, and I have given it and its country a great deal of my life and intend for that to continue (perhaps of interest here is that in Georgian countries have a deda-kalaki, mother city, rather than a mere capital). I bought a pomegranate juice, fresh-squeezed and overpriced, from a street stall one night, looked between the pips innumerable flooding into it and the dark surroundings, and thought of Persephone. Softly thanking the stallholder, surrounded by old buildings and new lights and car noise, I drank deep. Gaumarjos, Hades.



The Opera and ballet house, with the wittily named Swan Lake in the foreground.
But this time I was headed onwards, as well. It was slipping into night already as my train left Tbilisi: the train conductor only bothered speaking Russian, perhaps indicating the radical shift in the make-up of foreigners in the Caucasus after the war and the pandemic. I can hardly claim the sleeper bunks were comfortable, and the journey is slow, but given my personal dislike of cars it was an option that had some charm – particularly on the way back, now that the timetables have changed such that one crosses the open Armenian highlands in daytime, though the journey to Yerevan was almost all overnight, with hours spent disembarking the train to have every passport checked and stamped by both the Georgian and Armenian border guards in a frankly absolutely wild display of the inefficiencies of nation-states. After the dark, and besides the storks, the morning brought magpies innumerable – sevens after sevens of them, coming out of a countryside that looked greener and rougher than the relatively bland, mechanised post-soviet farmland of Kartli. There were enough, I thought, for a lot of secrets in this little country.

It is hard not to compare Yerevan to Tbilisi, or Georgia to Armenia. The cities are sisters, the countries brothers - not in the way of bickering children but in the way of old siblings who have known more than their share of troubles, who know that some things cannot be undone or unsaid, and other things should be said but never will be.

My first real impressions of Yerevan were walking in from the station: the language balance is more visibly towards Russian as a second language than in Tbilisi, though as elsewhere in the Caucasus the younger generation here are far more Anglophone than their older counterparts. Yerevan has a more solidly twentieth century look to it than Tbilisi, lacking any real retained central old town and with far more wide, planned, tree-lined avenues. The centre is based around a number of soviet era set-pieces: the wide sweep and columns of Republic Square or the squat grey presence of the Opera house. Distinctive faded-red stone faces many of the buildings, which gives the city a more ancient feel than the age of most of its buildings would imply (though the city itself is certainly ancient). The town birds are pigeons, laughing-doves, sparrows, and most of all innumerable swifts: I have rarely if ever seen skies so full of them and their high whoops and shrieks are a key part of the city's soundscape.

Another immediate curiosity in Yerevan is money. Most currencies I have had to use in recent years (the Pound, Euro, Dollar, Georgian Lari, and Tunisian Dirham) operate according to the principle of a small, low-cost base unit and then a larger central coin, as with dollars and cents, pounds and pennies, lari and tetri, and so on. The Armenian dram, the word being cognate with e.g. drachma, very much does not do this. Instead it simply has a base unit, the dram, worth something like a quarter of a euro cent, with no higher denominations. Banknotes run easily into the thousands – I don’t think I ever saw a one dram coin, while my highest single expenditure was something like thirteen thousand drams. The feeling of putting notes marked 1000 into a tip jar (not even an especially high tip) is certainly a strange experience by European standards.


A huge Zodiac-themed fountain outside the famous Moskva Cinema.
A colleague I was meeting with also introduced me to another feature that is quintessential to the city – water fountains. There are big water fountains for show across the city, probably more per unit area than I’ve ever seen elsewhere – but the real jewels in the crown are the pretty little pulpulaks, small drinking fountains that are placed across the city. They are built at about at waist height with a continually running jet of water aimed directly upwards, quite differently to drinking fountains elsewhere that tend to be angled to allow for e.g. bottle refills. The pulpulak is conversely drunk from directly: one bows at the waist over the upward-pointing water jet to drink straight from it. They exist across Armenia, often fed by springs, and often serve a memorial function or have associations with khachkar cross-stones – bowing to the pulpulak to drink is not only a necessity of the design but a mark of veneration and respect.

My first day or so contained little exploration, in part due to meetings, in part due to yet more unseasonable storm weather and some dramatic thunderstorms, and in part due to my body deciding to give up on me briefly with some minor travel illness. On Tuesday evening I went to a small art café near where I was staying, Ilik – here I learned that smoked trout has a long tradition in Armenian cuisine, and that the flavour combination of smoked trout and orange is one I have a very great deal of time for. It was not to be my only trip to the café.

In general food and drink in Yerevan is good: to make the inevitable comparison, my brief assessment is that for restaurants I think Tbilisi has the edge, but for cafes, snacks, and street stalls Yerevan does a little better. Armenian food feels more meat-centric in its traditions than Georgian, with the most promoted items being barbecue meats of various sorts. More stereotypically Georgian dishes such as khachapuris and khinkalis are not hard to find, but I focused on less familiar options like the meats, tolma, smoked fish, and harissa. This last is not to be confused with the similarly named hot peppery paste from North Africa: Armenian harissa is a dish of bulgur wheat porridge mixed with meat and seasoned, and is one of the country’s national dishes. Armenian food is meant to be shared: one of the difficulties of eating as a solo traveller in Yerevan is that the best way to do most restaurants involves multiple dishes between multiple people.

The city is more walkable than much of central Tbilisi as few cars are funnelled directly through the centre, and this creates more scope for crepe stands and other such enjoyments (easily washed down due to the pulpulaks, a particular blessing in summer heat). There are some traditional bakeries around the centre, too, with dough made into rings and stuck to the inside of a kiln oven to bake: this bread is fantastic, and excepting travellers with gluten intolerances is definitely one of the must-eats of Yerevan. Some other interesting flavours of the city include sea buckthorn, a notoriously astringent and tart berry with an extremely distinctive and hard to describe taste which, with sugar added, is used for teas and other drinks.



Manuscript pages at the Matenadaran museum.
On Wednesday I finally felt able to explore again, and that meant the Matenadaran, Armenia’s national centre for manuscripts. I had already been there for a meeting, but now was time to explore the museum. The building itself is impressive to begin with, an enormous statue of Mesrop Mastots, the monk who apocryphally invented the alphabets of the Caucasus, standing guard at the entrance before one ascends to a temple-like square building with old heroes of Armenian law and literature lined up in front of it in statue form.

The Matenadaran’s collections are spectacular: there are few superlatives worthy of using for them. I may be more of a lover of old books than the average traveller, but the middle-eastern styles of art that come with a lot of manuscripts from this region make for stunning illustrations. The brightly coloured pillars, page decorations, and birds make the pages feel vivid and almost heady in a way that the whimsy of western European manuscript traditions rarely matches. As with most national museums, parts of the signage should be taken with certain pinches of salt – the suggestion that cross-script manuscripts written in other languages with the Armenian alphabet were simply ‘due to its phonetic perfection’ may be a slight over-simplification of the process. Nonetheless, the exhibitions are fascinating to go through whether specialist or not. The Matenadaran as a whole is the jewel in the crown of Armenian historical studies: a whole second building around the corner from the museum contains library and research facilities dedicated to the rich history of Armenian manuscripts – many of them from monastic and literary traditions crucial to the development and preservation of an Armenian identity over the last millennium. Within the wells of written memory in Armenia there is everything from geography to history to healing, foreign connections and of course religious works, the Armenian church being subtly but continually present laced throughout the weave of life in the country both historically and up to the present day. Even compared to the national museum or gallery, the Matenadaran is a must-visit collection when in Yerevan, without a doubt.

A note for the traveller should be made here in that Armenian museums in general have a rather loose approach to signage compared to some counterparts in other countries, such that one sometimes has to risk a bit of wandering around to find tucked away exhibitions in rooms that are down flights of stairs or otherwise non-obvious. Had I not done this, I would for example have missed an entire and well worthwhile exhibition at the Matenadaran on Qajar Iran (19th century), and later on there was a similar story with several rooms at the National Gallery.

My old book fascination sated for the time being, the next stop was the Cascade. Located near the heavy grey opera house, it is an enormous monumental stone staircase with a large modern art gallery inside. It is both one of the largest monuments in Yerevan and, because it runs up a hillside, surprisingly hard to see until one is almost in front of it. Under the staircase lies a modern art museum, some of the collections of which spread out in the small park at the Cascade’s foot, a mix of metal lions, double-eyepatched pirates, unusually stout Greek warriors, and large delicately metalled teapots.


The Cascade staircase, one of Yerevan's most iconic monuments.
The staircase itself is a long climb, more of the city’s rooftops revealing themselves as one goes. One can skip parts by using the escalators in the museum below the stairway, but I though it worth doing the climb once at least. Large cutaways in the centre contain large fountain arrays, while beds of red flowers and neat box hedges stand guard at the sides. The uniformity of the planting is a pity: with some more larger shrubs, small trees, and general variation in the plants the Cascade could feel much more alive whereas at present it is very bare beneath the heat. The stairway continues up the hillside until at the upper levels there are or two large subsections which have remained unfinished for decades, with an enormous hole between the top of the existing staircase, full of rusted girders and looking more like a Warhammer: 40,000 terrain map than part of a capital city’s most recognisable piece of monumental architecture. One has to walk round the hole to reach the top, where a high pillar stands as part of a paved area.

And from the top, of course, one can see Ararat. The mountain is enormous, distinctive in its shape, and with a deep sense of presence even beyond its own form. Snow-capped even in summer at over five thousand metres high, it is undoubtedly one of the most breath-taking pieces of natural scenery I have ever witnessed. Ararat appears on maps well back into the medieval period, with its peak’s resonances as the supposed end of Noah’s voyage giving it a sacred character. One could easily wonder how much species extinction Noah might have caused after the flood was over, simply by the difficulty of the journey down those steep and snowy slopes again. The fact that Ararat has no nearby neighbours of similar height makes it stand out yet more in the landscape. Its oldest Armenian name was Masis, though nowadays Ararat, a term that first appears in the medieval period around when the association with Noah’s Ark first developed, is used interchangeably if not more commonly even in Armenian. It has passed between and indeed acted as border point for empires throughout history, its imposing peak a point over which full ownership by any state has been far from the norm and tense if achieved. There is nothing easy about Masis, Ararat, or Ağrı Dağı (Sorrow Mountain, to the Turks), or Ἄβος and Νίβαρος (to the ancient Greeks) – even in its names it defies simplicity, its height accentuated by the sheer mass of history lying beneath its slopes.

There is less of a sense of rolling argument about Armenian history than its Georgian counterpart. Georgian history feels chaotic, contested, used to frame a thousand slightly different ideas about what Georgia is or should be or might become – the Armenian past has this element of contest too, of course, everywhere does, but it is understood through a framework where the depths of time are solemnly remembered, almost mourned, imbued with a sense of loss. According to one report at a conference I attended recently, a plurality of Armenians still consider the reign of Tigran the Great (95-55 BC) the best period of Armenian history. Dreams of national strength and even empire ring a little different for a people whose stories are often more of bitter survival than conquest, though all such imaginaries of the past as present risk a certain creeping toxicity in the self-images they create.


Graffiti of a church and Ararat from the Kond district.
And above all that sense of loss? There is Ararat, always Ararat. The national gallery seems to have it in every room somewhere – how could one be an Armenian artist and not try to capture the mountain? Sometimes it is a spidery background sketch, sometimes the centre of the piece; sometimes it is clad in its own grey and white raiments, sometimes appearing in bright surreal colours as if from a dream. But those peaks are there, always there.

Ararat, along with other sites like the medieval capital city of Ani, lies just outside the closed modern borders of Armenia, in Turkey. The borders are closed, the mountain itself requires military approval to climb: Armenians cannot easily visit these places integral both to Armenian history specifically and to the shared histories of the region. Historically the church forbade climbing Ararat, but today it has become the cherished goal of many an Armenian just to try and stake their own closeness to the mountain. In a country with a powerful cultural memory of genocide, Ararat looms over the sense of Armenian loss so heavily in part because it is treated as part of that loss. As the region was hacked into modern nation-states during the years of Turkish post-Ottoman ‘modernisation’ and Russian dominion, an unbearable weight of pressure built towards turning the past into a mirror of modern statehood, to ‘prove’ the antiquity of particular groups or claims in increasingly zero-sum contests over who could both legally and morally own what. Thus, even the landscape itself became locked into a singular, ethnocultural concept of eternal state ownership. It has had a bitter and often deadly effect on the region as a whole.

But it is one thing to consider the lack of ownership Yerevan has over Ararat: to best understand the city, one must also, I think, consider the ownership that Ararat has over the minds of Yerevan. Graffiti in Tbilisi was angry: graffiti in Yerevan, that city of fountains and mourning stones, was rarer than in its hectic, eclectic cousin. When it could be found, though, those two peaks were as present in the bright paintings on walls in Yerevan just as much as they were among the artists of the National Gallery.

On Thursday I went to both the Gallery and the National Museum, which coexist in the same building on Republic Square, the fountain-filled formal Soviet era heart of the city and are both well worth visiting. The building occupies a centrality in one of the city’s central locations that one would almost more expect from a parliament building than a museum: gazing up to Masis as it does, history sits heavy in Yerevan’s heart.


Tiny model carts from ancient Armenia: remembering the little crafts and tales of a place matters.
The National Museum goes from finds from well before the emergence of Armenian identity, transparent volcanic glass knives from the Armenian highlands still looking sharp after many centuries, ancient silver ritual goblets, and tiny models of oxen and sheep. Roman era gold-working, medieval bas-reliefs, and traditional clothing and jewellery from Armenia in recent centuries were all included as well. It was partly because of renovations in certain sections, but I was interested to see how heavy the relative emphasis on ancient and pre-Roman history was there. As a medievalist, my knowledge of Urartu and other ancient realms of the Armenian highland is minimal, and I found the wide array of animal designs and stonework fascinating to look through. Recent history was not absent, however: a photographic exhibition detailed sharply the impact of recent fighting in Artsakh (the Armenian-majority separatist region within Azerbaijan’s formal borders, more commonly internationally known as Nagorno-Karabakh). At the centre of the museum is an exhibition of historical maps. The one-room distance between the photographic story of some of the most recent encroachments on Armenian-majority lands and maps showing the empire of Tigran the Great stretching between the Black, Caspian, and Mediterranean seas is noteworthy for the juxtaposition.

The National Gallery was also partly being renovated when I was there: the medieval art is mostly large copies of church wall art, with my favourite sections coming more from the more recent Armenian artists. Besides the recurrent sight of the twin peaks of Ararat, Armenian mythic figures burst from the paintings: it was a far cry from many western fine art galleries whose halls tend to focus much more on portraiture of the elite and on the Greco-Roman canon, and was much the better for it in my view. The water goddess Tsovinar bathed in a spring – one wondered if she still dances half-unseen through the great fountains of the city. The pages of illustrator Martiros Sarian offered takes on the firebird, the Shahnameh, and myriad other fables and tales from Armenia and beyond, with bright little figures striding through pages of adventure and promise. A phoenix formed more like a pheasant than the conventional swan-like or hawk-like views strutted from the craft of early twentieth century sculptor Hakob Gyurjian, whose work varied from curled cats to nightmarish creations, imparting a mix of sexuality and danger that seemed ill fitted to the usual moods of Yerevan. Perhaps that challenge was part of the point. Gauging a place from its art is tricky in part because art is there to be formative as much as reflective. Those reactions then build a new sense of a self, that is in turn reacted to: what it means to be from anywhere is a thing always in subtle flux.

It was the ancient model animals from the National Museum that probably most stuck with me from the museums, though. There is something endearing in the fact that humanity has spent the entirety of human history discovering and inventing materials with which to reshape our world, and there are few if any where nobody has contemplated making a tiny cow out of them at some point. More human by far than the idealised statues outside the Matenadaran, the little shapes of prehistoric animal figures were a reminder that history need not always be heavy. It can be easy to be swept up by the scale of history and landscape, by past and present pains that cannot be reckoned and cannot be numbered by our finite capabilities. This place deserves, though, to have the myriad small histories of its joys to be told and retold just as much as the weight of its pain. There is much to be said for tiny clay or metal oxen from thousands of years ago, and perhaps it should be said more often.



One of the blue-scaled lizards of the Hrazdan gorge.
Friday came and the Hrazdan gorge beckoned. It was my one real natural history stop in Armenia – I had hoped to do the botanical gardens as well but ended up lacking time – and despite my contacts being a little sceptical of its value, I think I managed at least three or four entirely new species for me in a matter of hours. The gorge is shallow, with a fast-flowing river at the bottom, and a rough track along one side that turns at a certain point into the route of the Children’s Railway, a small novelty rail ride where one occasionally has to stand out of the way for the train as it rattles past. The trees gave cover for a Syrian woodpecker – a species that nominally extends in range as far west as Austria, similar in appearance to the great-spotted woodpecker, but which I had never seen before. Perching above the valley was another nearly-familiar bird, a sparrowhawk, but in this case it was the shorter-clawed, longer-winged Levant Sparrowhawk, a cousin of the common European raptor more adapted for catching mammals and which has a tendency to form flocks unlike its western counterpart. Grey wagtails hopped between the stream-stones and lizards with gloriously blue-scaled flanks skittered between cracks in the walls.

One rather larger reptilian face appeared in a hole in some rocks, and I failed at a number of attempts to photograph it – but deciding to double back at the end of my walk to have another go, my second visit to its hole achieved the aim, and I ended up looking at what I could later identify as a sheltopusik, a European glass lizard. Lacking legs – a surprisingly common trait among lizards compared to the popular imagination, the better way to tell a lizard from a snake is that the former have eyelids rather than the number of limbs – they can grow up to 1.3 metres long, and particularly like eating slugs and snails, which probably explains the utility of a small cave with a riverside view. I left the by now probably rather grumpy creature to its shaded home, and headed onward.

The Children’s Railway has a beautiful if dilapidated station building, only one side of it holding a table with ticket sales and snacks, the rest just sitting out of use, with one carriage and train running on the tracks and several others rusted nearby. An intermediate stop halfway along the railway is almost entirely falling to pieces, the children’s railway getting a children’s microcosm of the general problems of Caucasus infrastructure investment. Building work along the gorge more generally, however, is clearly rapidly ongoing in places with new homes being built down the steep parts of the valley side. It’s a worrying development given how few big green spaces Yerevan has easily accessible to begin with, and the gorge could definitely do with a lot more improvement and protection than it currently has available.

After the gorge, I headed through a tunnel and up to Kond, one of the remaining old areas of Yerevan. The winding street layout certainly was pre-modern, the building a cluster of varying age. Some are in ruins, many others need urgent building work, with battered tin rooves and none of the attempts other places might make to sell ‘old town charm’ for tourists. At the entrance to the district there is a new hotel emerging, but probably more despite Kond than to make any use of it: it towers above parts of the district, grim square glass and stone above the ramshackle life below. Bits of the area have an artistic flair, with graffiti murals, but it has seemingly not attracted a more general bohemian artistic edge as a place. I tried to find the better reputed of the district’s two cafés, failed, and ended up being directed into the other by someone I thought was directing me towards the first place: after some confused back and forth I ended up with an overpriced fruit juice and a small amount of food, which I ate sitting in a curiously decorated kitchen. The tree of life was muralled, large, on the wall, represented as a pomegranate tree. A picture of Ararat, inevitably, was hung above its topmost branch.


Part of the sprawling Vernissage craft market.
Departing from Kond, I returned to Café Ilik, where I perched awkwardly at the T-junction bar and ordered some wine and the “talking fish” – a reference to an Armenian legend, the dish is a lavash bread wrap of smoked trout, which comes with a piece of poetry picked for you by the Café. Ilik’s owner, Anahit, was behind the bar, and on noticing my evident curiosity listening to an Armenian and a Frenchman talking in English at the bar itself, invited me up to join in the conversation. What unfolded was the sort of scene one imagines in travel narratives but rarely actually comes across in person: a succession of colourful characters and conversations over the course of the evening. I talked to a local film-maker and a graphic designer from France, discussed the women of medieval Armenian history and how they attained power with a local NGO organiser, and had an Armenian diplomat whose expertise was in his country’s Ethiopian connections decide to buy me a drink and tell me I should go and visit Lalibela and Aksum. Behind the bar, the music shifted to Leonard Cohen, and I felt more at home than I had done at any other time in Armenia. There are few places in life that achieve that sort of carousel of human interest, and they should be cherished where one finds them.

On my last day I went for a walk with a friendly local and discussed life and the city, and then visited the Vernissage, Yerevan’s large craft market. When I say large craft market, I wish to stress that I do not simply mean that there were a range of things avaiable. What I mean is that I had counted double digit numbers just of stalls selling chess sets by the time I left. Silk scarves, dresses, pomegranate themed pottery in varieties innumerable, musical instruments, handmade obsidian knives, optical equipment, rugs, coffee-making equipment, vases, paintings, books: the place was a kaleidoscope of creative possibility, though with the omnipresent themes of art and design that meant you could be nowhere but Armenia. I bought a present for my mother and a duduk for myself – the latter being a Caucasus instrument similar to the oboe, with a much larger and heavier double-reed than that instrument. Mine is beech and rather a beginner’s version, apricot being the more traditional wood. One friend described the sound as being, even when played well, somewhat like a haunted saxophone, and they’re not entirely wrong, though it can be haunting as much as haunted, both powerful and delicate. My own attempts at playing it still suggest that the haunting is that of an unruly poltergeist rather than a shepherd-spirit from the Armenian highlands, but hopefully I’ll get there.


The next day it was time to leave: rain settled in over the city, and I turned, like the weather, and headed onwards. On my way to the station I had a confusing interaction where I struggled to buy two apricots, because I simply had no money small enough give it was five hundred drams (about a euro) per kilo, I had few smaller coins and it took some persuading for the elderly salesman to accept that I was honestly prepared to pay a hundred drams for a single piece of fruit. Snacks thus obtained, I found myself passing the statue of the mythic David of Sasun once more and re-entering the railway station. The rail route changed its timetable during the very week that I was there: the train now runs all the way to Batumi directly, starting earlier from Yerevan, such that one can do the Yerevan-Tbilisi leg during the daytime. Ararat was still visible for some time – but, as the mountain itself knows too well, everything recedes eventual into distance, memory, and myth. Flocks of what I think were rosy starlings whipped up from the rocky terrain of the Armenian highland, and the colourful flashes of hoopoe and bee-eater passed quickly with the rattling of the train, as well as larger birds of prey, heavy-winged over the landscape.

Northern Armenia is much less bare and more wooded, when one gets there, between the flat farmlands of Kartli and the bare highlands to the south. As the night drew closer, the swaying banks of trees beckoned me through the mountains again, green and gentle. The shadows of the mountains wrapped around the train, as they have always wrapped Armenia, and in that last half-light that they leave, there is a place where dreams can touch reality. Some dreams are hazes of glories lost, of wars and statues and heroes: the imagined past is easier to dream than the complexity of the future. But the difficult little dreams of hope nestle in those shadows too, in the burrow of a glass lizard and between the pages of books at the Matenadaran and hiding under the glasses at Café Ilik. Ararat, unreachable and ancient, looks over Yerevan and shelters them all: and, for better or worse, I think it always will.


75
Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Objectives and partial asymmetries
« on: July 24, 2023, 11:59:44 PM »
So in my Cepheida game, which is a scenario-driven map exploration game, I am struggling with determining the objective structure. The things I sort of want include:

  • Faction to play a role in your objectives: I want the system to model that people are there for different reasons. Thus the objectives should also be asymmetrical.
  • Combat is a key mechanic but I don't want it to be a game where the optimal strategy is to beat the hell out of the other player.
  • I probably also want there to be some core scenario that is shared, so the asymmetry isn't total

The problem with all this is that it makes for a game that is neither fully collaborative (because you want to achieve your faction objectives) or fully adversarial (because if I make it fully adversarial then it makes sense to run a combat heavy list and just attack the other player hard). So I'm trying to work out how to square that.

I've rejected one good idea, which was to run the whole game via campaigns: thus if you ended a scenario early by shooting your opponents, you didn't maximise your victory points, which would be bad because if other players in the campaign played more collaboratively then they'd be doing better than those of you in the shootout game. The reason I think this doesn't actually work is just that I don't expect anyone to be playing long campaigns of Cepheida, as much as I'd like to believe that true I think the game needs to be workable for single-game play.

I might partly fix it via some other mechanisms:
  • Making the core scenario more collaborative, so there's shared problems and you risk all losing if you take too aggressive an approach to other players.
  • Making the faction objectives secret, so you can reveal who won after the core scenario is complete. This might need multiple objectives per faction and randomising which you get in a given game, to allow replayability.
  • Adding in buffers against aggressive play, especially making the start squares especially impregnable or dangerous to assault, such that players have an easy "out" and can bunker down if being attacked too hard.

I think the issue is still that most of these have a decent chance of "everyone wins" as an outcome, which somehow feels worse than "everyone loses" in a nominally competitive game, though maybe the option of a draw isn't so bad. If anyone has other thoughts and mechanics to suggest, I'd love to hear about them!

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