Book Reviews, Part 1

I find new reading material mainly by lurking on discord servers, skimming blogs, and seeking out recommendation lists. So I appreciate projects like Paperback Picnic or Throne of Salt's book reviews. They're like a box of chocolates, except instead of sweets I'm being provided with new stories.

Anyway, I'm not a big review-writer myself, but I keep a log, and for purely self-interested reasons I think more people like me should share what they've been reading. So I'm going to be the change I want to see in the world by posting stuff I've enjoyed in the last 3-ish years.

If you have books you would like to recommend, or a lead on review archives yet untapped, maybe consider posting a comment. Or pinging me over discord, sending a carrier pigeon, making words appear in the dust on my windowsill, whatever floats your boat.

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Adrian Tchaikovsky:

Sometimes it feels like this guy is phoning it in, and sometimes he's great. Here I include only the ones I liked.

- Children of Time &c

Extremely good. Look it up; if the premise seems the least bit appealing to you, you should stop bothering with my dumb blogpost and read this instead.

- City of Last Chances &c

Has a lot of multithreaded plots, such that it's really more about the city as a whole than about any individual character, but IMO all the threads were interesting in their own right.

In City of Last Chances it feels very much like Tchaikovsky is taking notes from TTRPGs, probably by way of LARP, which is mentioned in his author bio. I'm not really an OSR person, just stuck here forever, but in OSR jargon I think it'd be called a powderkeg.

There are currently two sequels, which are set in different places and have a more linear feel. The second book is pretty good, if not quite up to the standard set by the first. The third is once again good, but slightly less good than its predecessor, and at this point I think the series might be starting to outstay its welcome.

- Cage of Souls

Mediocre plot-wise but the world it takes place in is cool. It's set at the end of time, where the planet is polluted and desiccated, there's one known human city, and everyone lives in the shadow of sci-fi technology they know very little about. One running theme is that life will continue to exist in some form even post-human-extinction, and there are some alien and not-so-alien creatures which are positioned as 'successors.'

I've only just started Alien Clay, and I suspect I won't like it as much, but there seems to be a lot of shared subject matter? It might be a rehash, or maybe Tchaikovsky just has a thing for heterodox academics sent to prison in a hellish environment.

- Elder Race

The best of the novellas. Short and sweet. Expert System's Brother is also decent.

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The Zahir, Borges

Borges is good in general, but this one Got me, maybe because I'm very prone to hyperfocusing, developing obsessions, making objectively small and inconsequential things into my entire world. For Borges I think this story might be about love, maybe of the unrequited parasocial variety? But for me it's about things which have permanently reshaped my brain. Fantasy novels, TTRPGs, video games, a friend's intensely elaborate paracosm that I've been gaming in since high school.

I don't know if others would find the same significance in it, but it's so short that you might as well read it and find out.

A Deadly Education (just the first one), Naomi Novik

I feel kind of weird about including this one, because it's extremely YA, and if you look at online reviews it seems the attempt at internationalism has holes large enough to drive a bus through. But when I read it I did in fact enjoy it. It feels dense, conceptually, like there's a lot of setting per page. It's also in conversation with Harry Potter, which I found fun, YMMV.

The sequels are Fine, but they lose most of these qualities, and in doing so they retroactively make it feel like the first book had less depth. Also, the romance is better when it might plausibly not be a romance, and in the second and third books that headcanon is no longer tenable.

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Susanna Clarke:

- Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell

Very, very slow. But compelling once you've dug into it, and also quite substantial. I tend to tear through books in an a day or two once I've hit my stride, but this one kept me going for at least a week, maybe more.

Anyway! This is sort of noted in-story, but being surrounded by one's own fragment of timeless and eternal night is not really a curse. If you're a fey being with the power to immure people in darkness, please consider doing that to me, it'd be rad.

- Piranesi

This has become the book I recommend to acquaintances who aren't really into fantasy or sci-fi. It's unique, well-told, and much faster than Strange & Norrell, but still rich with delicious delicious Themes.

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Zelazny:

- Chronicles of Amber

The classic. This series is a product of its era, and it's obvious that Zelazny was writing it by the seat of his pants. If you're willing to overlook those faults, it's pretty good. Might be worth reading the first few just to take inspiration from the politics-and-feuding-amongst-a-family-of-magical-immortals, if you're into that sort of thing.

- A Night in Lonesome October

A novella about a bunch of archetypal gothic horror characters trying to prevent or facilitate the unsealing of the great old ones, told from the perspective of an animal familiar. Much like City of Last Chances above, this one feels like a TTRPG scenario, and part of the reason I'm so fond of it is that it seems like the mechanics would actually be pretty solid.

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The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, &c, Catherine Valente

Yes, it's in theory a children's book, but it's genuinely amazing even as an adult. Charming, whimsical, ideas you get the urge to steal, the works. The sequels are also very good, albeit in the samey, watered-down way that sequels so often are, up until the first part of The Boy Who Lost Fairyland, which stabbed me in the heart.

I want to like Valente's other stuff, but I tried Radiance and couldn't stand it, so maybe the children's fiction nature of this series is load-bearing. I'll have to give it another go at some point.

Un Lun Dun, China Mieville

Another children's book. Not as good as Circumnavigated Fairyland, but still weird and fun.

The Night-Bird's Feather, Jenna Moran

Great, weird, aesthetic setting, lovely cast of characters, well-written, et cetera. It is maybe a little didactic, which I imagine could be grating, but I enjoyed it and recommend it.

Technically shares a setting with Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine, but honestly, NBF stands on its own, and I wasn't especially satisfied when I went to dig for more.

Exhalation, Stories of Your Life & Others, Ted Chiang

Lumping these together because they're all short stories. They're good, and often manage to immerse you in an interesting world despite being so very brief. Off the top of my head, my favorites were probably... Exhalation itself, Understand, the one about the tower of Babel, and maybe 72 Letters.

Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon

Do you like alien lifeforms? Unusual modes of being? This book has alien lifeforms, and also some transcendental stuff involving alternate physics and the Demiurge at the end. It's about a human narrator psychically projecting into the cosmos, where he hops from planet to planet, follows the history of the universe into the distant future, and joins with other psychic projections to search for God. It's not really a traditional narrative, but it's still very fun.

...also it feels like it's part of a microgenre alongside All Tomorrows. I'm still looking for a third example, maybe throw me a comment if anything comes to mind.

The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins

This one makes a lot of questionable decisions. A lot. But as is thus far the theme of these reviews, I really like nonstandard fantasy worlds with a lot of conceptual density, and it turns out that I'm willing to look past some flaws if you give me one of those to toy with. Library at Mount Char is good in that way, even if (spoiler alert) it leaves you wondering why anyone would think "it was necessary to test the worth of my successor" justifies all abuse and forgives all sins.

Neal Stephenson:

- The Diamond Age

- Anathem

The Diamond Age is great so long as you ignore the ending, and maybe all the stuff related to the Drummers. Anathem is also great, and I was only tempted to ignore a few pages of epilogue.

Come to think of it, Anathem reminds me of Norrell & Strange, in that it's long, meaty, and very much a philosophy piece (like how N&S is a period piece). Anyway, rare case where Stephenson mostly sticks the landing.

Permutation City, Greg Egan

Really a philosophical idea dressed up as a story, with a nothingburger ending. It's a cool idea, though.

50 Purchases From the Goblin Market

1. Creature which resembles a telepathic and prehensile wig. It feeds on dandruff.

2. Rag doll which is legally your firstborn child.

3. Goblin coins. Indistinguishable from the real thing except that they have the taste and melting point of chocolate.

4. A foul breeze. The smell is intense enough to cause nausea; it has the personality of a very dumb and very loyal dog.

5. The deed to a bridge, location unspecified.

6. Goblin fruit. Sort of a carrot-ish potato pumpkin thing. If you eat the seeds they start growing in your stomach.

7. An evil kitten.

8. Broken shards of mirror-glass. If you're cut by one you have to put your hands on your head and hop in a circle or it's seven years of bad luck.

9. Stepladder cursed to fail you when you need it most.

10. A homunculus. Knee-height, will follow orders if they're written on a piece of paper and fed to him. Contradictory instructions cause indigestion.

11. Use of a magic chariot for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth day it breaks free of all earthly ties and flies into the sun.

12. An unbreakable, unfoolable, unopenable lock.

13. A witch's iron eyeteeth. Wickedly sharp, rattle alarmingly in the presence of bad juju.

14. Coin that always lands on its edge.

15. Novelization of your life up to this moment. The sequel was critically panned and is no longer in print.

16. A stolen bicycle.

17. Cardboard box which holds a very small and gullible angel.

18. Turkish delight.

19. A reanimated snake skull. Very bitey.

20. A perfect skipping stone.

21. Lava lamp with real molten rock inside.

22. Rubber bugs that come to life when you take them out of the tube.

23. A flaming axe, but the handle ignites instead of the blade.

24. Loaf of bread containing three rocks, a razorblade, and a spider.

25. Dead phoenix wrapped in a fire blanket.

26. Loom that weaves gold into straw.

27. A lemon.

28. Realistic fascimille of your own severed head.

29. Matchsticks which produce lots of oily smoke but no flame.

30. Fisheye paint. Distorts the apparent proportions of anything covered with it; has no effect on color.

31. Two-dimensional sword. Very sharp, very brittle, difficult to hold without losing fingers.

32. An ant farm with tunnels shaped like letters. The ants claim to be superhumanly intelligent, want out of the box.

33. Certificate of marriage to Old Man Winter.

34. An eleventh finger.

35. Parrot with an encyclopedic knowledge of swear words.

36. Divisibility cloak. Allows its wearer to harmlessly detach and reattach limbs.

37. A spell whose only function is to remove itself from the caster's memory.

38. Glowstick that emits gamma radiation.

39. Fake vampire teeth that give you the ability to heal by drinking blood. After each use, save or develop a dependence.

40. Scrap of paper which describes your worst enemy's worst sin.

41. A haunted dollhouse.

42. Paper-mache gorgon mask.

43. Indelible ink. Can't be erased, washed off, written over, or scraped away.

44. Bucket of holding filled with 64 cubic feet of molasses.

45. Magnificient robes struck by a curse of selective visibility.

46. A chitinous violin. It can play insect noises (crickets, cicadas, etc) but not any human music.

47. Talking lockpicks. Rude, judgemental, will briefly scream in pain if broken.

48. Violently explosive bubblegum.

49. Nutshell containing an infinitely spacious pocket dimension.

50. Canopic thimbles housing the mummified organs of a pixie queen.

1d20 Invisible Planets

 1. The vulture moon. Circles buzzard-like beneath the horizon and feeds on ghosts. Will trade you the thing you want most for the thing you most need.

2. A gas giant that's slightly out of phase with the known universe, detectable only by the manner in which its gravity distorts other orbits.

3. A star-cinder: It fell into the sea and guttered out. On stormy nights the leviathans dredge its corpse back up and parade it through the western sky.

4. A puzzle-box of planetary scale, now disassembled. The pieces were buried in nearby moons.

5. Hyperhyperborea: An ice giant visible to stargazers only in the uttermost north. It wobbles between past and future pole-stars, carrying the details of their conspiracy to overthrow Polaris.

6. A boltzmann planet that exists for an instant at a time, appearing and discorporating far too quickly to be seen.

7. Chiraldia: A planet made of frozen mercury that only exists in mirrors. To set foot there is to trade places with your reflection.

8. A comet formed from ice so pure and clear that it is undetectable to the naked eye.

9. Euryale: A dim, faraway planet that tutors witches and transforms infants born under its auspices into monsters. Astronomers who examine it too obviously or for too long tend to die in their sleep.

10. A rocky planet that is sending a message in morse code by varying its albedo. This operation is taking place on a geological time scale; the periods of darkness between dots and dashes last centuries.

11. Aculeata: A star that emits no visible light, but which is terrifically bright in the ultraviolet, such that its focused attention can cause sunburns and blindness. Believed to have made an ancient pact with bees.

12. A nameless, ruined world, inhabited only by a starving god. All thought that references it is devoured.

13. The planet that would exist in place of Mars, if a butterfly had flapped its wings five billion years ago. It houses a thriving post-scarcity civilization, observable only through a prism that refracts possibilities.

14. Rorschach: A black moon that creeps through the spaces between stars. People hold impromptu masquerades when it is high in the sky.

15. Passerine: A magnetic planetoid that the Earth swallowed whole in a fit of youthful hunger. When its strength waxes it takes control of birds and forces them to fly straight upwards until they die of exhaustion.

16. A star that wears a veil of dust to hide its beauty. Poets spend months training telescopes on its region of space, hoping that the rings and nebulae will part to afford them a glimpse of its splendor.

17. Chfled: A moon that shines in hell. It illuminates the crossroads and graveyards where devils work, and is seen most clearly by the hubristic, the foolish, and the desperate.

18. Meinong: A planet populated exclusively by impossible things. If something is done for the first time elsewhere, the version of it that exists on Meinong disappears: ergo, it might emerge from hiding if someone were ever to invent a whole-planet invisibility cloak.

19. A star that makes noise instead of light. On quiet nights you can hear it mumbling.

20. Skynest: A rogue planet steered through space by a species of telepathic moths. It stands behind the sun, waiting for the latest generation to emerge from their chrysalises so that they can disassemble and archive the Earth.

50 Magical Paradigms

I like magic that's weird and complex and entwined with the setting in which it exists. Usually, I make something bespoke for every game I run - you can see an example here.

This is at odds with the standard D&D approach, where there's a list of somewhat arbitrary spells that get taken out of the box and used as-is, without much room for additional depth.

The local blogosphere is a bit better. There are lots of posts out there that think about what magic actually entails, or which go for an interesting aesthetic, or which have a solid thematic throughline.

There are two models I see a lot. The first conceives of spells as invisible critters that a wizard keeps locked up in their brain or spellbook. My favorite writeup is this post by Coins and Scrolls, which is incidentally also very in tune with my philosophy as regards magic-related worldbuilding.

The other old standby is Magic Words, which I think I first encountered via Papers and Pencils here. (There are more fleshed-out versions elsewhere, but unfortunately not any that have stuck in my long-term memory). This one posits that wizards learn spell-fragments, in the form of words like "fire," "missile," or "door," which they can then piece together to write their own spells.

I like these frameworks well enough, but I've seen them both re-iterated several times, and I wish there was more variety, or maybe more willingness to create something weird and out-there. 

I also enjoy coming up with this stuff for its own sake. So here are brief descriptions of 50 paradigms, most of which are at least loosely compatible with standard magic rules that assume wizards exist and are people who cast spells.

If any of these paradigms catch your eye, then maybe think for a moment about how you'd expand on them, or what the implications might be for a setting that uses them.

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Spells are...

1. Supplementary lobes grown in the brain using meditation and mnemonic techniques.

2. Fragments of the stolen mind of God.

3. Formulae describing a manner in which the delicate and volatile balance of cosmic forces can be safely manipulated.

4. Impossible sleights of hand invented by the King of Thieves.

5. Sorcerous bloodlines unlocked by convincingly fabricating the presence of a deity or lesser spirit in one's family tree.

6. Astrological rituals that invite the influences of the seven elemental planets.

7. Three goblins in an invisibility cloak.

8. Proofs that natural law is false or self-contradictory, promulgated by demonic philosophers.

9. The cobbled-together scraps of lost extrauniversal sciences.

10. Echoes of the word that brought the universe forth from primordial darkness, bounced back and forth across the cosmos from the day of creation until they were finally caught and decanted into jars.

11. Commands issued to a system of menhirs and henges empowered by ancient infrastructural rituals.

12. The sacred mysteries of dead, dying, or forgotten gods.

13. Ab-logical insights arrived at by taking psychedelic drugs or staring for too long into the depths of the chaotic planes.

14. Writs that empower eligible persons to make wishes with specific predetermined wordings.

15. Good advice given by someone at least a hundred years old.

16. Keys to various seals and limiters that were placed on mortals to prevent apocalypse.

17. Cheat codes for the universe simulation.

18. Koans, the contemplation of which allows one to perceive and transcend the illusionary nature of reality.

19. Astral weapons designed to be implanted in a soul.

20. Hyperdimensional structures that snap back into conventional spacetime when cast.

21. The caster's own externalized thoughts.

22. Chemical poultices and powders with a bit of something extra mixed in.

23. The secret arts of smiths, clockmakers, masons, etc.

24. Services provided by residents of the goblin market in exchange for items that suit their peculiar and highly specialized tastes.

25. Talismans prepared according to a series of exacting instructions and charged with the caster's will.

26. Phrases a bit like "abracadabra!" or "open sesame!" which for some reason only stick in the minds of the initiated.

27. Bullets etched with sigils and words of power, which ascend to a higher plane of existence upon being fired.

28. The misfortunes that escaped from Pandora's box.

29. Techniques learnt by beating a monster at its own game. (Defeating a basilisk in a staring contest, a giant in an arm-wrestling match, etc).

30. Favors that Entropy bestows upon those who hasten the world's decay.

31. The forms of a proscribed martial art that unbalances the vital energies of its adherents.

32. Sluglike things made of animate ink which pour forth from a spellbook to do the caster's bidding.

33. Objects or entities sealed within an extradimensional space in the wizard's hat.

34. Bizarre, temperamental devices that require constant maintenance and recalibration.

35. Pharmaceutical cocktails that briefly grant the imbiber psychic powers.

36. Patterns of mana that behave like cellular automata. Magic missile is a glider.

37. Parapsychological mutations induced by exposure to mythos entities.

38. Miracles worked by the various saintly relics that the caster keeps about their person.

39. Applications of the force exerted upon reality by purely mental phenomena such as perception or intent.

40. Demiplanes smaller than the head of a pin which follow altered laws of physics.

41. Stakes won from a set of anthropomorphic personifications that the wizard gambles with in their dreams.

42. Thaumic technology smuggled from the sunless lands beneath the sea.

43. Things the wizard sees with the eye they sacrificed for forbidden knowledge.

44. Divine retribution that the wizard directs to their own ends by tricking the gods with meticulously chosen blasphemies.

45. Otherworldly communications encoded in the movements of birds, the patterns of fallen leaves, the letters of magazines.

46. Hypnotic patterns inserted into the collective unconscious.

47. Things left over from previous iterations of the universe.

48. Secrets that you can only understand by emulating the mental architecture of an octopus.

49. Bursts of chaotic magic that in their natural state could do absolutely anything, but which the caster circumscribes with probability manipulation.

50. Ritualized dialogues that will persuade some vast and inhuman being to grant the caster a boon if executed correctly.

How to Play By Post

 It recently occurred to me that I have about a decade of experience with Play-by-Post (PbP) games. This seems kind of absurd to me: I'm young enough that I don't usually think of myself as having decades of experience in anything, aside from all the life-support stuff like eating and sleeping and reading.

Anyway, this realization was prompted by @cole1312 on a certain OSR discord server, who requested resources on running PbP games. Such resources exist, but I hadn't yet written one. This is what I'll point to if I see a similar request in the future.

If you're new to PbP games, the essentials are all in the first four sections - Setup, The Gameplay Loop, Momentum, and Things You Should Know.

The Advanced Topics are just a couple of weird things that I've done in the past, or that my groups occasionally do. You can think of them as a sort of human interest piece. Though if you try them, or if you've ever done something similar, I definitely want to hear about it.

Setup:

The simplest possible setup is a discord channel, forum thread, or email chain where players post actions or dialogue and the GM posts turns. Unless you're running your game on a forum and expect only a token amount of discussion, you'll also want an Out-Of-Character (OOC) backchannel. 

Each platform has different advantages and disadvantages. A forum thread is easy to keep track of and makes a great archive, but discussion will be slow. In Discord communication is very fast and you can create as many channels as you want, but old material rapidly gets buried.

The Gameplay Loop:

Gameplay in PbP games works a lot like gameplay in person, but for practical reasons it needs to be a little more structured. Additionally, the GM customarily rolls all dice. This speeds the game up a bit and eliminates awkward situations where you need to worry about honesty.

The basic loop is:
1. The players all post actions.
2. The GM rolls dice, writes up the results of each action, and posts them. This is a turn.
3. Return to step 1.

Sometimes the GM may respond to individual actions outside of the turn structure, if the action in question is something very minor that shouldn't take a full round. This is most frequently applicable to conversations, since waiting an entire turn between each line of dialogue would be far too slow.

Momentum:

It's very easy for a PbP game to slow down, and when that happens, it becomes increasingly likely that the game will grind to a halt and die. So, the most important part of running a PbP game is to keep the momentum going.

The root of the problem is that, by default, PbP games have very little time pressure. There's no expectation that anyone will do anything at any particular time, so it's easy for players to put off writing an action or for the GM to put off writing a turn.

My solution to this is to create a schedule. Choose when to post turns: every day after 9:00 EST, or on certain days of the week, every other Saturday, et cetera. Whatever works for your group. Then skip players who haven't posted by that time.

Skipping players doesn't feel great, but if you aren't willing to do it, your game WILL be held up by one person who never gets around to posting an action.

Lost momentum is difficult to recover. If your daily schedule slips and you begin posting turns every three days, players adjust to having the extra time. You'll have a hard time getting them to submit daily actions again, and in practice you may have trouble getting yourself to write turns more frequently. If there are long enough gaps between turns, people will also forget what's going on and may have trouble reengaging.

Things You Should Know:

PbP games are very slow. In person, it takes a few seconds to go through one iteration of the gameplay loop. In a PbP game it will generally take at least a day, and often much longer. An adventure that could be run in one or two sessions might take months to finish asynchronously.

Because an entire turn's worth of actions are processed simultaneously, PbP doesn't play well with systems where a single action or round of combat requires multiple branching decisions. The wizard can't decide to cast a counterspell mid-round if an enemy is about to throw a fireball, because "mid-round decisions" don't exist. The best you can do, in this case, is to let players make parts of their actions conditional. "I climb the ladder - and if I see the enemy wizard casting an offensive spell, I pause to counter it."

As the GM, you're probably doing a lot of rolling and bookkeeping that the players would normally keep track of themselves. Choose a system which won't make that unnecessarily difficult. One modifier per roll is manageable. Juggling two or three per character per turn gets old fast.

PbP games are, in my opinion, an underexplored medium, and you can use them to do a lot of really neat stuff. To list just a few possibilities, specifically ones exemplified by games that I've more recently played or run:
- PvP games that make heavy use of private channels and hidden information.
- Games where the "party" is somewhat nebulous and each player is free to pursue their own agenda
- Games with elaborate setting mechanics that reward a lot of thought and planning.

Advanced Techniques:

Inventory Management:

If your game has extensive bookkeeping needs, you may want to use Google Sheets. This allows you to create spreadsheets that anyone with access to the link can view and edit, which means you can fob a lot of that bookkeeping off on your players.

This sounds a lot scarier than it actually is. Your spreadsheet basically needs three fields: Name, Description, and Additional Notes. If you're tracking items you may want another field or two for quantity or monetary value or what-have-you.

Here is one of mine, from a game I've spoken about before.

Turn Anarchy:

Don't wait to do a full turn. Respond to actions as quickly as players post them.

This is a very intense experience. If you have enough players, and if your game is moving fast enough, chances are that at least one of them will be around at any given time. You can, in theory, have unlimited TTRPG. As much TTRPG as you want. Be very careful.

If you ever decide to do this:
- You will probably want to use a text-based chat program in which you can create many different channels. Practically speaking I mean Discord, but if you have a suitable alternative then go for it.

- Each player gets their own IC channel. This is important, because the game will move at different rates for everyone, and it will move very fast. Trying to use a single channel is mentally taxing, makes you lose track of actions, and is overwhelming for your players.

- There won't really be a "party," as such. Sometimes players might work together.

- Use a very simple system. Mine is "roll 1dX to resolve uncertainty, higher is better."

Lastly, most seriously: Set boundaries with your players and with yourself. Continue to do stuff other than your game. Make sure you're getting enough sleep. This was incredibly fun for me, on the few occasions I've been in a position to do it, but you really, really do not want it to get away from you.

Settingpost - Scrap: Industrial Magic

The following is a description of an asynchronous play-by-post game I ran for a while, with a few elaborations and extras.

It's from the perspective of advising someone else who might want to run a game in the same setting, mostly for my own convenience while writing. That said, it might be a decent example of how to manage a magic system that uses very little abstraction.

The Premise:

The players are a group of Machinists, tinkerers who build wonderous devices from metal, runes, and soulstuff. They scrape out a living at the border of the Waste - a perilous, continuously shifting magical wasteland that was created decades ago by the impact of a falling star, and which has since been used as the dumping ground for an empire's worth of faulty devices and alchemical pollution.

Thaumaturgical surveys have detected an anomaly at the center of the exclusion zone, something with a magical signature far stronger than any machine yet created by mortal hands. It could merely be a danger - but it could also be the key to controlling the forces that shape the wasteland, or to reproducing the cataclysm which created it.

The players, for reasons known only to themselves, have decided that the prospect of getting their hands on those secrets outweigh the considerable risk of mounting an expedition past the Waste's outermost edge.

The Magic System:

Every thinking being has a soul, a sort of aetheric nucleus which houses their memories and personality. The souls of beings with a physical body are typically entangled with their brain (1), but there also exist disembodied souls, more colloquially known as spirits, which are capable of persisting without a body to anchor them (2).

Souls naturally generate thaum, magical energy that can be used to power runes or sorcery.

Each rune has a name and a function. To power a rune with your own soul, you need only touch the rune and will it to be so - but this is an exhausting process, and human souls have only so much energy to spare. More powerful devices often make use of bound spirits, entities confined by runic enclosures that drain thaum and induce a sort of dreamless sleep. The practice is ethically dubious, but effective - as fueling more advanced creations otherwise requires inefficient thaumic batteries or simultaneous contributions from many operators at once.

Conversely, sorcery is performed by channeling thaum through knots that have formed in one's soul. Each knot is an clot of aetheric structure that embodies a particular concept, and prospective sorcerers must form them by taking part in initiatory rituals, undergoing ordeals, or engaging in obsessive study. There is also the unwise route of experimental soul-surgery.

Gameplay:

When I last ran this game, the party started play with an airship. It may be preferable for them to remain earthbound, in which case I would instead provide a crawler or an automobile. Access to a single large vehicle is an important part of the setup - it forces players to work together, always a consideration in play-by-post games that are freeform enough that characters could easily wander off in different directions. It also acts as a mobile storage space and workshop, in a setting where crafting is an essential part of gameplay.

I might give players a choice between a few transports with different strengths and weaknesses. Most of the options available in-setting will be bulky constructions that operate by harnessing the power of a bound spirit, but if the table is particularly averse to that idea, it's possible to acquire a lightweight vehicle that can (effortfully) be run with thaum from the characters' own souls, or a somewhat awkward mundane conveyance like a zeppelin or steam-powered cart.

It is also essential that players have tools that allow them to shape wood, stone, metal, etc so that they can create runic equipment. These tools are themselves likely to be runic devices. My go-to option is a runic array shaped like a set of interlocking rings which allows the players to deform matter held within it.

The Waste is ideally represented by a hexcrawl, but one where the hexes change periodically. Locations are occasionally shuffled around by dimensional instability. Spatial anomalies aside, hexes can also suddenly be contaminated with extradimensional flora and fauna, blasted by storms, terraformed by buried machines, or altered by spirits. The longer players spend in one place, the less the landscape behind them will look like the one they originally passed through. Environmental hazards are common and varied.

Ideally there should probably also be other factions attempting to reach the Center. I haven't run that variation, though so unfortunately there aren't any further details to go into.

Running Runes, Sorcery, & Spirits:

I have provided a list of some runes I used at the bottom of this post. I don't necessarily endorse including all of them - Reservoir in particular is one that I would strip out if I were to run the game again, as it makes storing thaum for later use too straightforward. There are also many redundancies, because I allowed players to formulate variations of runes they already knew. I have stripped out the worst offenders.

There is a core set of runes that the players should be provided with at the start of the game. These are runes which serve essential functions, like the "transfer" symbols that, when chained together, act like wires that can run thaum from one part of an object to another, making it possible to control a large device via a contact point in the handle or console. 

These core runes are:

Transfer (for transferring power to other runes)
Dissonance (for binding spirits)
Cage (for holding a bound spirit in a hollow container)
Projection (as a basic way to manipulate thaum)

There should also be something that lets players make simple weapons - I used "burst," which acts as a basic force gun, but something like a sharpness rune would also work fine.

Players should be able to acquire a new rune or two by taking apart any runic device they find. The GM should also ideally be able to say a few words about how the device works. For example, a bomb might be triggered when plates bearing two halves of an explosive rune are allowed to touch.

Runes can be written in any medium - painted, embossed, engraved, et cetera - so long as it's possible to reproduce the rather intricate symbols in fine enough detail.

Thaum dissipates quickly in empty air, unless there is an ongoing effect that preserves it.

Sorcery is more freeform. As described before, knots are gained from initiations, study, ordeals, and soul-surgery. The key is that an experience must reshape your soul - either directly, via exposure to spirits, high concentrations of thaum, or surgical modification, or indirectly by changing the sorcerer's identity. Each knot corresponds to a particular concept - "life," "rage," "annihilation," "force," "plants," and so on - and can be invoked to cause effects related to that concept. Finesse is difficult and must be trained, as must more exotic interpretations of the concept in question. Generally, a sorcerous spell must promote or manipulate the concept it's associated with, and cannot directly reduce or eliminate it. A sorcerer with a rage Knot could induce rage or redirect it, but would be incapable of soothing it.

Spirits can look like more or less anything. They also have varying levels of intelligence, ranging from that of a plant to that of a superhuman mastermind. Their bodies are incorporeal, essentially aetheric shells filled with thaum. They can be harmed by physical objects, very inefficiently, but to truly hurt them it is generally necessary to use attacks that make direct use of thaum, a more conceptual effect like those associated with sorcery, or runes like Dissonance that influence the soul directly (3). This requirement is more flexible than it may seem - with sufficient force behind it, even a charged line of Transfer runes will do. Spirits almost always have supernatural abilities equivalent to those of sorcerers.

Spirits originate from the space between dimensions, and sometimes cross into reality in places where dimensional boundaries are thin (this happens frequently in the Waste). The crossing and subsequent adaptation to conditions within reality is difficult: some spirits fizzle out within moments of arrival, and those that survive rarely have comprehensible memories of the Outside.

There are really no further rules. Players can make any runic device they can comprehensibly (and COMPACTLY) describe - the GM pictures it and uses their understanding of the setting to determine whether it works, and if not, to determine what goes wrong. Expect some very creative problem-solving: one of my players designed a gun that shaped Thaum into Dissonance runes and fired them at the spirits they were going to fight. There will also be some getting lost in the weeds.

The Ending:

The object at the center of the wastes is a massive titanium sphere, cracked and partially disintegrated, illuminated by flares of escaping Thaum and covered entirely with celestial runes. All astronomical bodies in this setting are actually mechanisms of vast and abstract power. Stars, in particular, are meant to reinforce and manipulate dimensional boundaries. This one broke when it fell from the sky, and its death throes are causing the dimensional instability characteristic of the Waste.

The things that would be possible for someone who controlled or studied this device scarcely bear contemplation, and are certainly outside the scope of this game. Successfully laying claim to it is a win condition - provided that the players can do so before some other group beats them to it.

Footnotes:

(1): The brain acts as a sort of metaphysical scaffold, keeping the soul firmly anchored to the physical body and supporting it as it grows. Damage to that scaffold - of the sort that might be caused by asphyxiation or blunt force trauma - will also affect the soul, in much the same way that knocking out a load-bearing wall would affect the structural integrity of a building. 

(2): Great thaumaturges from ages past are said to have been able to disentangle brain from soul in order to become spirits themselves, but modern experiments with this aim have been less than successful.

(3): Human souls can also theoretically be harmed by these sorts of attacks, but are resistant to them as a result of being anchored to the body. Soul-surgery is usually performed either sorcerously or with implements that produce highly concentrated and intense thaumic effects

Sample Runes:

Transfer: Transfers thaum to the rune ahead of it. Can be chained together to transport thaum over the surface of an object.

Dissonance: When directly touching a spirit, loosens its control over thaum. Self-sustaining once the spirit can no longer prevent the thaum it generates from activating nearby runes.

Cage: When repeatedly scribed on the outside of a container, creates a stable shell of thaum that can hold a spirit in place.

Projection: Launches thaum outwards, perpendicular to the surface the rune is printed on.

Burst: Consumes thaum to launch a blast of force.

Pressure: Exerts even force on whatever is in front of the rune, with intensity that scales directly with the amount of energy that is used.

Fork: A modified transference rune that divides energy into two equally-sized steams. Used to regulate the overall level of energy that is fed to each component.

Reservoir: Energy seems to build up in this rune, forming a pool that nearby transfer runes can draw from. Used to reserve energy for maneuvering and stabilize the engine's output.

Forcefield: Consumes thaum to generate a flat plane of solid force.

Foam: Creates small bubbles of thaum.

Halo: Concentrates thaum several inches above the rune.

Clot: Causes energy to stick together and accumulate.

Linkage: Directs magic towards matching sigils on other devices. Slight variations in the dots at the center of this rune can be used to connect it to different networks.

Clairaudience: A scrying rune that allows the being powering it to hear all sounds it's exposed to.

Waste: Consumes thaum.

Ray: Consumes thaum to fire a beam of destructive magic.

Unburden: Consumes thaum to reduce the weight of whatever it is printed on.

Ooze: Consumes thaum to produce toxic sludge.

Arc: A targeting rune that makes magical effects curve towards whichever direction the glyph is pointing.

Partition: A rune that repels energy. Powering it is difficult. The designers of the Thaumic Forge resorted to a long chain of Projections.

Valve: A Transfer variant rune that restricts the flow of Thaum. Its output can be adjusted by varying the angle of two specific lines.

Oculus: Powering this rune with your own energy allows you use it as an additional eye.

Kinesthesia: Powering this rune with your own energy allows you to sense its approximate location.

Spark: Consumes energy to create a concentrated ball of electricity.

Bolt: Consumes energy to create a lightning bolt.

Fog: Consumes energy to create an expanding cloud of mist.

Kamikaze: Consumes energy to violently shatter the object it's printed on.

Smelt: Consumes energy to heat up the surrounding area.

Enervate: Weakens and disrupts any spirit that is directly exposed.

Scorch: A rune that consumes energy to produce flame.

Blindsight: A divination rune that provides the person fueling it with a blurry image of everything within a five-meter radius. It is not affected by light, or the lack thereof.

Shockwave: Consumes energy to create a surge of destructive magic.

Attract: Consumes energy to pull at any object that's in front of it.

Confine: A ring of runes that prevents objects from leaving their area of effect.

Reinforce: Consumes energy to increase the durability of the object it is printed on.

Cruor: Transforms energy into blood.

Volatilize: A ring of six runes that consumes energy to make objects more explosive.

Sustain: Consumes energy to prevent a spirit from deteriorating.

Squall: Consumes energy to generate gusts of wind.

Tar: Transforms Thaum into flammable pitch.

Frost: Transforms Thaum into ice.

Blacken: A ring of six runes that consumes Thaum to make objects a darker color.

Filigree: A ring of six runes that consumes Thaum to cover objects in intricate black lines.

Shroud: A rune that consumes energy to surround itself in magical darkness.

Empathy: A divination rune that forms a weak telepathic link between all entities who are currently powering it, allowing them to sense each others' emotions.

Lifesense: A divination rune that allows the entity powering it to perceive nearby Thaum.

Unnerve: Consumes energy to evoke feeling of paranoia and unease in nearby minds. The effects become more pronounced during extended exposure.

Membrane: A weak binding that does not prevent spirits from manipulating thaum.

Imbue: Concentrates Thaum within the object it is scribed on.

Sever: A rune that consumes energy to apply cutting force to whatever is in front of it.

Sensor: A divination rune that provides tactile information to whoever powers it.

Encrust: Consumes Thaum to cover the object it's scribed on with a layer of stone.

Fuse: A Transfer variant that holds energy for one second before moving it onwards.

Hamper: Consumes Thaum to slow down the object it's printed on.

On Pokemon

 

Prompted by this post from Alone in the Labyrinth.

Pokemon is a setting that I feel I should have a take on. I was really into it as a kid, and in fact thinking up my own creatures/regions/etc was a first step towards most of my current hobbies.

In practice, I haven't been able to reinterpret it in a way that feels satisfying.

For one, I think any more narrative medium demands that you focus more on the interaction between pokemon and trainers, which is... sort of barren, as it currently exists. You catch a being in a ball and now it joyfully does whatever you say, modulo some minor problems that are always eventually overcome.

At this point I think it would be productive to engage in one of my favorite activities: Taking something apart in an attempt to understand it. So, digging into that feeling a bit... maybe the crux of the issue is that Pokemon justifies itself via doublethink. Pokemon are intelligent creatures, so they understand you and have cute, relatable personalities, but they're animals, so you make all the decisions. They're objects, so you're allowed to treat them like collectibles, but they're also sentient beings that you're meant to develop a bond with. They're wild, in the sense that they exist in "nature," but they're civilized, so they're never shown to eat anything but berries and meal cubes.

Ultimately, pokemon are convenient. They're compatible with video game mechanics, they work well as animated characters, they're kid-friendly and promote kid-friendly themes like adventurousness and friendship. They indulge particular fantasies, like having a magical animal companion, or engaging in pitched, superpowered battles, or acquiring new powers and becoming stronger by making use of them.

I think that convenience is ultimately the reason I find pokemon/trainer relationships uninteresting in their current form. As written, Pokemon rarely have motivations of their own, if those motivations would conflict with the priorities of their trainer. They rarely take much initiative, even to cooperate with trainers, because in that case their trainer would need to learn how to work with them rather than ordering them around. They can have personality traits, in contexts where that's easy to implement, but those traits are usually superficial. Interaction can occur, if the needs of the story call for it, but it can also be elided.

Taking a step back...

If I were to make my own setting in the monster collection genre, I think I would start by playing with some of the convenient ambiguities. The object/being binary is a particularly substantial one. Lots of interesting themes to explore there. To begin with, maybe there's a sense in which the monsters are literal objects - for example, the spirits of sacred weapons. So on one hand, they're embodied as items that someone can physically hold or keep locked up - and they lack the ability to do much of anything on their own.

On the other hand, there are questions you can raise about these beings' experience of the world and their motives. Do those weapons choose their wielders, or are they chosen? What do they think of the humans who fight with or over them? To what extent can they act independently? Do they have agendas of their own? And practically speaking, you can only wield one or two weapons at a time, so the characters of the ones you're using have much more direct significance.

Another route might be to swerve hard in the opposite direction and give monsters much more agency, so that it isn't really possible to "collect" them at all. Then maybe you end up with a game that's about negotiating with powerful forces, where it's possible to gain their cooperation, but any cachet you have with them is ultimately finite or temporary.