Book Reviews, Part 2

Part 1 

Instead of novels, this second post will focus on things I've found online. As such, this is not a place of honor, no esteemed deeds are commemorated here, honestly a portion of what I read is kind of trash. But some of it's tasty trash.

I'm always open to recommendations. If there's something you think I should read, let me know in the comments or by whatever other route is convenient for you.

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North of Reality / Greater Reality Area
Should you read it?: Yes. 

About: A series of vignettes about weird people/places/things/ideas. My favorite thing about them is that they all follow a kind of internal logic perpendicular to the logic of the real world. The author cites Pataphysical Essays by Rene Daumal as an inspiration, which I suspect has something to do this - it is (intentionally) difficult to get a straight answer to the question "what is pataphysics?", but I think it may share this property of seeming to construct its own alien rules.

Anyway, all the individual stories are very short, and they're well worth a try. I'd recommend starting with North of Reality and exploring via the links rather than going in chronological order. If you click on the highlighted text it contains asides.

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Pact / Pale
Should you read it?: I enjoyed these but cannot unreservedly recommend them. Honestly, reading Pale non-serially would probably be a surreal experience.

About: I am in it for the magic system. Pactverse magic operates on a few core principles:

• Wizards cannot lie, nor can magical beings, thus a lot of magic is really making deals with goblins and bogeymen &c.
• The universe is made up of animistic spirits.
• Patterns have power. If something is repeated enough it will progress from social convention to spirit-enforced fact.

There is, uh, a lot beyond that. Enough that there are detailed excerpts from in-universe notes and textbooks. This is a great example of magic that, while "soft", has a lot of detail to dig into. It's my personal catnip.

On the other hand... well, these are wildbow stories and have his typical flaws. The pacing is terrible, there's a lot of really pointless angsting, you probably know the deal.

Also: Plea to the Moon Mother, incomplete at 7 chapters long, and the only pactverse fanfic I know to be worth a damn. Reconfigures the setting to be about Siberian folklore and a now-outdated conception of AI, and is extremely evocative, for what little is there. It's been removed from Ao3, but I can provide an archived copy upon request.

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Blood is Mine / My Delerium Alcazar
Should you read it?: I may be biased on these, they're perfectly shaped to appeal to me specifically. I do still recommend them.

About: A pair of illustrated (sprite) stories which I think were operated as quests. Usually game archives kind of suck to read through, but these are an exception to the rule. The first bit of Blood is Mine also makes it look like it's going to be a cheap horror cliche, but seriously, don't let that stop you.

Now that we've gotten those disclaimers out of the way... the characters are great. The setting is great, it's an urban sci-fi-fantasy blend with cosmic scope and a bunch of interesting paranormal phenomena. The author has this habit of using recurring phrases which is just, chef's kiss, it gives them this amazing feeling of significance and gravity.

Unfortunately BiM ended with a summary of what the remaining plot would've been, and I doubt MDA is ever going to be continued. In spite of that both are still pretty great.

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Squiggle's Creative Extrapolation Essay - Not a book, but I'm putting it here anyway.
Should you read it?: Since you're reading an RPG blog you are probably in the right target demographic.

About: A short post which outlines a ~formulaic way of coming up with worldbuilding tidbits. It's a bit focused on magic systems, but the same process could be applied to whatever else you like.

This is a pretty good formula, as those go. I think it's handy in the same way a spark table might be - fun to play around with for a bit and see if anything interesting pops out.

Also: If you like this, you could check out Recursive Magic Systems, which is much longer and denser but also has merit.

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Upon the Mirror Sea
Should you read it?: Sure, it's a solid story. 

About: A story about Gibson cyberspace you access using DMT, which is also wired into the collective unconscious. It's a little fond of its psychedelia, but if you can bear with that it's a good read and has some stealable ideas.

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Dictionary of Mu
Should you read it?: There's no narrative, it's a setting encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia is good, your honor.

About: Recommended to me by Kyana of noise sans signal. It's a sword & sorcery setting on a red, dying planet that hates you. Intended to be a supplement to Ron Edwards' Sorcerer, so there's a lot of emphasis on demons, which are shadows of dead history - things that have either been completely eradicated, or which are set to become that way, like oceans or the written word.

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Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy At Utmost North
Should you read it?: I'm not sure I would play it, but it's definitely worth a read.

About: A game about an order of doomed knights in the icy utmost north, who wield starlight swords and hold back demons which emerge from the sun and the festering ancient Mistake. It's a storygame built around a set of ritual phrases, but even if you're not into that sort of thing, it's well worth looking at for the setting and backstory alone.

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Bridge to eQualia
Should You Read It?: If the theme resonates with you. I quite liked it. 

About: A short detective story about escaping into fictional worlds. 

Also: I hear the same person recently wrote this thing which I have not read but intend to get to at some point.

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Sword Interval
Should You Read It?: I read this a loooong time ago, probably around 6 or 7 years, but I remember it fondly. 

About: An extraordinary rarity: a webcomic with decent pacing that has actually concluded. Let's see if I can dredge some details out of my memory... monsters are becoming increasingly common, there's a creature called the Hierophant that's trying to end the world. There's a... government organization?... killing one child every few years and each time it causes a natural disaster. And there are witches who each use a body part as the source of their magic, hair, blood, teeth, etc.

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Chasing Sunlight
Should You Read It?: Nope. 

About: A pastiche of sunless sea which has a pretty solid hook: humanity is in a lightless world surrounded by eldritch nonsense. Civilization is made possible by zint-light, whose ultimate source is a monarch that seems not entirely human himself. The protagonist saw sunlight on an expedition to the far east and is obsessed with returning.

Unfortunately, the execution is poor. The writing is clumsy, it suffers from mediocre eldritchness syndrome, and the plot is extremely formulaic: The expedition enters a place, it blows up, they make a narrow escape, repeat until the end.

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There is no Antimemetics Division
Should You Read It?: Yes, but skip the sequel. 

About: I think this one is pretty well-known, but for anyone unfamiliar, it's an SCP story about self-censoring information. Not the strongest ending (for some reason {the omnipresent mind-extinguishing anomaly turns out to be a guy who is shootable?}), and the sequel declines dramatically in quality and focus. That said, everything up to that point is genuinely very good.

Also: I believe it now has a published version stripped of SCP elements, the quality of which I cannot speak to given that I've only read the original.

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Ra
Should You Read It?: Tentatively, yes. It's by the same author as antimemetics, if that affects your calculus one way or the other. 

About: This is another one I read ages ago, and I don't know how it'd hold up if I reread it today. That said, it made an impression at the time.

Basically, magic is discovered in the 1970s, it seems to be harnessed via a combination of industrial equipment and wizards with staffs, there's an akashic plane made of black glass you can get shunted into when you work with high-energy spellcraft, there's a science fiction conspiracy having to do with how all this came about.

Also: Same guy wrote Fine Structure, which imo is not really worth it, but some people disagree.

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The Dark Wizard of Donkerk
Should You Read It?: Solid 4/5. 

About: My personal pick from Alexander Wales, who is probably better-known for having written Worth the Candle*. The high point is the interaction between magic systems. If you've seen me banging my drum about how those work better when there are multiple that interlock, this is one example of how that might look in practice.

*: Unfortunately that one's been stubbed. If you want to see it I think your best option is to plug this into the wayback machine. Though there are some extras still available.

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12 Miles Below (it's stubbed, so another wayback machine special). 
Should You Read It?: Probably not. 

About: The protagonist is part of a clan who lives on the frozen surface of the earth; below that surface there are 12 levels of subterranean architecture occupied by increasingly dangerous killer robots. He gets trapped in the first stratum and matters slowly escalate until it's a save the world plot.

It's weird how things that are released serially like this can become a part of your life. I think I started this one around my freshman year of college, and kept reading it more or less as it came out until it finally wrapped up a couple months ago. Makes it stick in your mind in a way that would be impossible for an ordinary novel.

For all that... I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I can recommend it in good faith.

I have good things to say about it. The setting was interesting enough, it had some crafting, which I think objectively tends to be a slight negative but appeals to me personally, and it's okay at the save-the-world plot, when it finally got there. The story does meander, but not too terribly for a serial written across 5+ years.

It's just that, you know, the prose kind of sucks. Five years of bad prose is a lot to wade through.

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The Top 9 Trends To Bring Back In 2022!
Should you read it?: Yes, if you've read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. If you haven't, read that first and come back to this a few weeks later.

About: A short but funny and imaginative fanfic of the aforementioned novel by Susanna Clarke, framed as a modern clickbait listicle.

All I know about magic systems, I learned from the Outer Gods

All images from wikimedia commons

OK: magic systems. I love them so so so much. They have rewarded this love by making me totally insane, like one of those people who get a glimpse of Yog-Sothoth and start gibbering about how it's the key and the gate. I'm writing this blog post from an asylum and having my accomplice smuggle it out.

The first thing I understood when I made eye contact with Yog-Sothoth is that everything is a magic system. D&D classes? Magic system. Laser guns? Also a magic system. Immovable rods, superpowers, pokemon, mecha, they're all magic systems.

The second thing I learned is that there's no such thing as a magic system. The world just works in a way that lets you throw fireballs. On earth I can do it with gunpowder and a long fuse; in fourhumourslandia I could summon a ball of unfinished aether and yell at it until my choleric temperament converted it to elemental fire.

(That sort of thing tends to be possible in our fictional worlds because we like including some sort of entertaining supramundane bullshit. You shouldn't be "making a magic system", you should be coming up with cooler supramundane bullshit, which need not necessarily have anything to do with "magic" or "wizards").

Then Yog-Sothoth turned me around and said: Whisperling, your supramundane bullshit must serve the needs of your game. Suppose you want to run a game about sky pirates. This game must take place in a setting where there is such a thing as a sky pirate adventure, and it would be fun if that setting were to have fantastical elements relevant to the sky pirate lifestyle.

Like this

There are many viable sky pirate settings. In some, people have saber duels on the upper deck of a zeppelin. In others, dogfighters in one-man airplanes gun down enemy necromancers. Your job is to choose amongst them and form a specific vision of the world you want to create.  

While keeping hold of that vision (but not too stubbornly, let it evolve over time), you can flesh out the details of your world, and by extension the details of any fantastical elements you wish to include.  
  
Perhaps you could compile a set of setting-appropriate classes for players to choose between. Musketeer, Pilot, Berserker, Tattooist, Visionary. Or if your setting is flexible enough to accomodate any of the million classes out there, you could let your players bring whichever they like. That's a perfectly acceptable solution. Remember the first lesson of Yog-Sothoth, that classes are actually a magic system.  
  
But I hail from the forum game mines, where we have neither classes nor systems! I believe those things are boring, that extradiagetic advancement is the devil, and that I will like my sky pirates better if I do something else instead! Of course, I still want characters to have badass special abilities. Wouldn't be much of a sky pirate game otherwise.  
  
My preference is to come up with supramundane bullshit that exists within the world, that the players can diegetically use to do cool stuff in the same way they could diegetically use a knife for stabbing.  
  
Let's say that there is a substance made of concentrated malice, and instead of bullets guns shoot 'hexes' made out of this malice stuff. And you can use malice for other things, too.

• Malice responds to your grudges.
• If you whisper to it every day and bind it in paper curse talismans inscribed with the name of your enemy, you can shape it into a curse that pursues its target like a living thing and makes their life hell.
• If you wear a hex cartridge in your breast pocket, you can take its malice into your heart and grow it by killing people you hate, and this will make you stronger and faster and more spiteful.  

  
Maybe there are magic tattoos that you can get by making a bargain with spirits of the air.  

• Every tattoo has a unique ability. There are whole books of the things, but the spirits will only give you one, and you have to know which image to ask for.  
• Your tattoo is stronger when you impress the spirits. They love drama and narrative and big personalities. But their favor is fickle, and if they lose interest it will not last.  
• As the cost of this bargain, if someone with a magic tattoo stays on the ground too long they'll start to wither away.  
• If you win the attention of a specific spirit, usually by playing into its favorite tropes, you can speak with it and make further bets and bargains. Spirits can manifest as wind-animals with thunderstorm bodies and hailstone teeth.  

 
Anyway, you can go on like this for a while, and then whether it's a "magic system" or not, you've got a bunch of fun setting-appropriate toys to play with. IMO having this bespoke stuff for each game is much more interesting than saying "eh, it's a kitchen sink, anything goes" or shoving the same old D&D magic into everything.  
  
You might want to tie some mechanics to these toys, as appropriate. Maybe shaping malice requires a lot of skill, and your ruleset tells you to roll for difficult and risky things. So when making a curse you could require a CHA roll to prevent it from rebounding back on you because it hates everyone and everything.  
  
Finally, know ye this: magic systems like being connected. If you can take two or three or four and let them interlock with each other, the result is often better than the sum of its parts. 

 

 

Behold, an air spirit! (Actually an underwater panther).

Anyway, after Yog-Sothoth beamed all these ideas into my brain and was about to leave, I said: "Wait! Please! When people talk about magic systems, don't they want a single unified structure that explains how all magic works? I have to give them something, or they'll eat me alive!"

Okay, Yog Sothoth thought at me, we can get into that. When you're creating a magic system you're walking a tightrope between abstraction and specificity. On one hand, there's generic fantasy magic that's 100% vibes. On the other hand, there's Brandon Sanderson circa mistborn, or the MU spell list.

Yes, this is the soft magic/hard magic binary, but you can't just collapse an entire system down to "soft" or "hard". You need to pay attention to how you're navigating abstraction and specificity in your creative process and know how to use each to best effect.

One of the reasons people tie themselves in knots trying to create a Unified Theory of Magic is that they start with the idea of generic soft magic that can do anything, and then try to come up with hard rules that emulate it. That can't be done, 2+2 cannot equal red. Then they sit there mumbling things like "magic is programming" or "the rules of my magic system are that it can't do resurrection or time travel", because they don't have any way to bridge the gap.

There are other approaches that work better. Here's an incomplete list:

• Accept abstraction, but add evocative details or bits of mechanical definition where they provide the maximum toyetic benefit. Spells are critters. You have an affinity for Bones and can attempt to cast any bone-related spell.
• Just go 100% hard magic and write allomancy 2.0 or MU spell list 200.0. (Fun fact: usually these systems still have to be powered by an abstract force that just has specific rules about how it manifests).
• Use hard magic that can be leveraged to create more complicated effects. If you wanted to actually execute the "magic is programming" concept instead of using it to convince yourself that your soft magic system is hard, you could make a set of basic functions (think printfire()) that casters build into real spells using control flow.
• Add a layer of GM interpretation to let rules do abstract or unpredictable things. Ex: fuse two items and get an output that combines the properties of both.

The common thread is that you're using abstraction and specificity in strategic ways, instead of fumbling around trying to make one act exactly like the other. The other common thread is that you have to pick something and commit, you can't just go in circles contemplating aesthetics forever. That way lies madness.

Speaking of madness, Yog Sothoth was still hovering there, and now it was examining me contemplatively. Maybe we have gotten ahead of ourselves, it said. Let's take a step back. What makes a magic system good? 

"Well," I argued, "There are the obvious things. Is it pleasing for players to interact with? Is it good for the GM to run? Does its presence invite extrapolation and creativity?"

Yog Sothoth gazed at me and said: That response is correct but over-general. You could ask those questions about any element of your game, and they would trivially be applicable to each. What makes something a good magic system, rather than good encumbrance rules or a good candlestick?

"Well, we've been over this, if encumbrance rules and candlesticks are also magic systems-"

Yog-Sothoth writhed unimpressedly.

"Okay, okay, fine. As I understand it, the characteristic features of a magic system are its flexibility and the depth to which it can be explored. They're what distinguishes it from something like a magic item or a superpower. These aren't unbreakable rules, but classically, a magic item does one thing and that's pretty much it. A magic system is built to be capable of lots of things, and it's rewarding for players to spend time experimenting with its mechanics to do them."

The divine presence gestured for me to continue.

"But I still say candlesticks are a magic system. Like, you can light them on fire and they provide illumination. Then you can use them to light other things on fire. And they burn down eventually because the fire consumes the wax as fuel. That's about as mechanically rich as some magic systems."

Yog Sothoth looked at me, aghast, and said: You have learned too well. And it threw me back to earth.

Now, could someone please get me out of this padded room?