Muppets and no Sausage Rolls - I read Electric Bastionland - DRUNK

Behold, I hath read (much of) Chris McDowalls Electric Bastionland and tweeted about it, often while drinking. Below you will find my often-incisive analysis and commentary while my brain rockets back and forth between alohol and the effects of antidpressants.

(I left the mis-spellings and insanity in. Headings and sub-headings added by me.)

We Begin

Ok I'm gonna drink and read Chri's Electric Bastionland and tweet it now

Jealousy

everyone has better design skills than me

"Other game say Gamesmaster, Referee or MC but this is Bastion and we do things differently" -

differently, even to the last version of this game, in an acceleration of the rule that every rpg deign head must ritually kill gary in their mind by renaming the DM into something new to symbolise their new dawn

A Starting Party

a sandwich is SIX POUNDS - like, actually that is possible, like an M&S sandwich

Huh so there is starting group debt and even a starting Belloq rival figure with more hit PROTECTION (not points) than you - so the game is very absolutely and directly about doing this particular thing right now

and you also have a failed career

and dying adds to the groups debt - so if you die, even doing something heroic and useful to the group and Basionland as a whole, you are still fucking the rest of the group and your own future self

there is something extremely british and of its generation about the quiet background sadism of that concept

so you start with lamps and batteries, climbnig and camping equipment and food and water - presumably because its boring getting those things

one other thing you might add in - and this comes of gaming with the Fallen Demiurge whos name shall not be spoken - is in a city game no one ever has a car to start with - so I would add in, considering the ambient britishness - a bus pass or family ticket

So in other versions of ItO the crapness of your stats got you better stuff, and good stats got you rubbish stuff - a concept I enjoyed - is that still the case here? For it seems not..

Chris Betrays Gaming

multiple attackers are NERFED - no longer do numbers count for all, and one man can indeed hold off an army

what will this mean for adventuring

no doubt much flop sweat was dropped by Chris over this arguably non-diagetic rule!

HAS CHRIS MCDOWALL BETRAYED GAMING?

LIKE WHEN THAT D&D RUYLESET HAD DAMAGE ON A MISS?

THE JURY IS OUT

AND IS ALSO ME

it makes EB an essentially interpersonal adventure-world and sets a hard - or flattened curve limit, on tactical thinking

so - big ass rooftop ambushes etc or hiring a company of dudes - all flattened, both against the players and if they try to use those methods

a sandwich and a drink gets your hp back but riskes a random encounter- curiously specific

You Will Play This Game The Way Chris Says

Also - 1st mention of Greggs

fuck Electric Bastionland is like being kicked out of your parents house in your 20s and trying to survive off your overdraft while sleeping on a friends couch and begging for a job in Greggs

carryig too much shit reduces your hp to zero! Ruthless!

And effective

rules here are bascially chris staring at you thru the page & saying "the game is not _about_ that"

so there is no 'persuasion' rules - just save CHA to avoid a *negative* reaction and to *stop* your peons running off

that still doesn't get people to *do* things for you - that is all down to gameplay

ah so in fact one map cannot hold off an army as they would be a detachment and roll a D12, while he would roll a d4

HOWEVER

one man could popssibly hold off an armies worth of INDIVIDUALS provided they do not fight as a detachment

'vehicles take no damage for running over soft targets like people' - dark, since everything else is an exchange of risk - time for some hit and runs!

A Complex Relationship with Risk

SCARS - what are scars in EB? Are they gud?

They are a reflection of the creators complex relationship with risk and its role in gaming

you get one if you go to EXACTLY 0hp

not a likely event

and if you get one, there can be good and bad effects (though since the standard response is death, any intermission of chance is 'good'so we may account scars as mercy if we wish

scars are a kind of high risk high reward routlette game you get accesss to for being damaged to juuuust the right degree but not dying

they are interesting enough that I wuold have got rid of the 'death at 0 hp rule, and just made the damage suffered a modifier on an extended

Exemple of play has differing corridors having differeing smells and winds - an adaptation to the generational praxis of high resources but limited time - corridors only gain meaning thru context which the modern gamer may not have time to create and so they must breathe and live

example of play - everything broken down into either/or risk decisons - the essential binary of meaning creation

say w your friends, or run away? fight, or flee? risk w reward or safety with life - the essential dilemma of entropy bound forms

hmm, no random roll for targets in multiple pc situations - a ruthless and heavy burden on the DM - orr CONDUCTER

and classic mcdowall fair declaraion of in-world risks, even if that level of perception not necessarily diagetically justified - a very prodestant mind. All the information will be given to you and you will decide, and FACE THE CONSEQUENCES.

curious that we can creat nothing complex without embedding our perception of morality into it

ok a new page has happened

ok weapons are basically

- how much damage d6, d8, d10, d12
- is it bulky (can't carry too much
- does it do BLAST (and so harm detachments)

and thats the deal

THA ART

lol Alecs art has started to come in and the text is so Gen-X british and the art so US Zoomer/Millenial that the combo makes a whole new thing

Old ItO was a lot like watching a british sitcom from the 70s, a halrold pinter televised play or an episode of Dr Who -

what will the asethtic of this version be??

'Board' meaning somewhere to sleep - costs £10. More than the d6£ you start with - so you better get working day one

fuck Electric Bastionland is like being kicked out of your parents house in your 20s and trying to survive off your overdraft while sleeping on a friends couch and begging for a job in Greggs

also - why is Greggs not in this Chris? UKFAIL

Hospital and Leasure are free, but slow - spending money only speeds them up

taking an 'improvement course' lets you re-roll a stat, but you have to keep it whatever - an accurate representaion of british education system

'luxuries ' include a medal ceremony for yourself, a sanctioned duel, a legitimate funeral (10k, really you should be leaving at least 1k for your inheritor to clear the expense of your death) and a radio station

ahhh so he has dealt w the transport issue - public transport is available with sliding scales for distance

A NEW THREAD BEGINS!

OK new thread as we are on to 'failed careers'  -- which aaaare about 215 pages of this 333 page book

answering the question of how do you turn a rulselight system into a fucntional money making product in our global times

answer - fill it with art and make char gen also worldbuilding and make there be  a LOT of it

so this is also our map to Electric Bastionland, through the failed careers of its economy and society

which are also options

(look out for a shit neutered version of this in D&D 5E(b) <<<< A PREDICTION

£10,000 is the group debt - so game assumes that by the time you have done enough shit to make that, you will have embedded yourself in the world and caused enough trouble to be essentially self-generating adventure machines

The Mysteries of Publishing Exposed!

Interesting that this is *not quite* black and white

for anyone who doesn't do pblishing - B&W is much cheaper, and so the profit margins are highter

so every creator notices this and thinks "wait, I'll just do B&W art w high quality, charge the same and make a mint"

BUT

then they think - "hey this thing is going well... maybeoooone colour wouldn't hurt.. just one..."

and then you end up w a full colour book

those are the beans which I just spilled

Cultural Background

so from one career we have sci-fi, sci-fantasy, terry gilliam, touch of 40k, edge of dr who

terry prachett - a 'loot office'

o there is some of the old school ItO evening out of capacities thgrough the money and hp system - w lower money & hp granting cooler stuff and higher worse etc

3. Trench Conscript. What was your role?

£2 -Recon. Take paints and a portable canvas.

So for anyone who did NOT grow up wathing british TV in the 80's/90's

So while up to now was lite sci-fi and Blackadder, this Dead-Shoresman is pure Gaiman. Not only are you back from the dead, but no-one believes you.

So there's this invisible backwash of generall 'oddness' (hook in the title) that flows through market towns at night, moterway service stations, the BBC at odd times

and EB is right slam in the centre of that

I Complain about 'Hipsters'

This book will be popular w hipsters and people who care about 'design' because its easy to read, text tlight and has good art

it is worth caring about for other reasons

I am just making it clear that other, more attractive and succesful, but shallower people, will enjoy this for the WRONG REASONS =and they need to be jidged for that

"Threatening Stave - has no fucntion but glows and vibrates in a way that suggests that it could be used for distributing extreme pain"

what can we say about art?

So - first ItO felt VERY british, 19tC industrial in aesthetic

Here the people and style are clearly not that - more idk definitely US, maybe futuristic/current - from a different social milueax

& sadder - more human - but also more beautiful

definitely the people I saw walking around the hipster area of toronto - thin, golde, multi-ethnic, rather than the dense potato people I know from my youth and environment - 1 of which I am

so for me there is a very slight tension between the art & text

but not necessarily for the first reader, for whome the whole will fall a new whole <<< PARTICULARLY BRILLIANT PHRASING HERE PATRICK, THAT'S HOW YOU GET THOSE SILVER ENNIES

I gotta stop because its nearly 10 heere and I drank everything in the room

got up to page 37 though, so you no i did an in-depth reaed

back tomorrow maybe?

More Cultural Influences

K I bought more cider and am back to read Chris McDowalls Electric Bastionland again

'Verminator' gets a combination of Cronenberg castoffs

'Lost Expeditioneer' is in debt to the Elephant Reinbursment House, which is a post-singularity sci-fi story right there

Wall-Born more 'infinite city' vibes and more of a China Mieville feel

Cities demorph and arrange themselves neatly for game designers shaping space w random generators and tables - maybe because they are already organised on human-useful lines anyway - as much information as arrangments in space

'shoe throwing' - thats not an object Chris, you have broken your own rules. Inspired by Austin Powers or that guy who shoes George Bush?

All the places Aliens can come from are worse than Bastion. makes sense I guess.

BONE MAGNET! My old nemesis!

The next drink is for Chris for having to come up with 1200 items and elements

"Dog rifle" is one of those fragments which tells a.. _tail_..

Face with tears of joyFace with tears of joyRolling on the floor laughing  im dying inside

'Roadside Picnic' is probably the best tonal match for the technology. Reality-bending, semi-useful, not understood, often one-shot and clearly not meant to be used for the thing it is being used for. Humanity as scavenger.

This definitely feels more like 'Dark Toronto' more than decayed England.

(I have been outside the UK a handful of times in my adult life so my field of reference may be limited)

In the absence of a frontier or a singular unnatural incursion, the adventure takes place 'in between' islands of various elements of order which, if seen from afar, could be mistaken for a whole

See the book 'the insurgent archipelago' which was about no matter how dominant modernity becomes, its very complexity keeps creating new webs and cracks and elisions of chaos betwixt its endlessly moving parts

There is always a little microdrama or a little worldbuilding in the back of Alecs art

main figure, often a crowd, often a single individual that doesn't quite fit, often crossing eyelines, and something in the background, a wreck, a cable car

so depending on what PCs you roll in EB, you could be playing a Neil Gaiman urban fantasy game, a near future China Mieveille sci-fantasy, straight sci-fi or just victorian social drama

Urchin pack - think Arnold was the 1st person to have this idea. I always wanted to use it in a Frostgrave RPG

Classes
Wizard - magic & in charge but can take no action
Merc Company - as in the whole company, can do stuff but no authoity or money
Dog - is a dog, can smell. A good dog.
Barbarian etc - more like standard characters

The advert and the celestial sphere is very "Electric Bastionland", whatever that is

I fully support this movement! #HumanityFirst


If warhammer has taught me anything its that if you really love humanity, you need to kill anything that isn't human

and most of the things that are - because they are getting it wrong

Char Gen is also NPG gen, society gen, plot gen, rival gen and item gen

efficient

'Masked Horrorist' is very Ramsey Campbell, so we can add that to the stew I guess

Chris you give away being able to see in the dark too easily, have I taught you *nothing*?

of course you can basically hack your own 'bastionland' by making maybe 20 character gen packages of a particular tone or diagetic implication

oh gooood people are going to do that - they are going to release _zines_

if you imagine Electric Bastionland as a real place, life there is largely about intuiting the use and meaning of any one of a million potentially powerful but *singular* items, talents or situations, encountered near-randomly in the mosaic of order

The Absence of Moral Chaos - a personal failing in Chris McDowall????

There is no moral chaos is the decision matrix of EB. Risks may be unfair but they are always signalled. It's rare you make a choice without knowing the consequences. My impression is that mad streaks of luck or doom are not an intended part of the game.

Which is a major character difference between Chris and I

It does take some balls to just say "Yes there are Muppets in this"

"They are not aliens or androids. They are Muppets. And they even sometimes act like you are in a Muppets Movie"

But "Monstrosities" are still an element and you can recognise immediately that they are monsters, even if verbal and self aware. This does seem to nudge slightly against the moral axis of much of the rest of the book.

Hmm Chris and his cult of information again.

Information is not the be all and end all Chris! If we never have to gamble with limited, poor or deceptive information then ARE WE NOT MACHINES?

I skipped a lot of the failed careers. May go back to them later

"If you get into the habit of giving the right amount of information to your players, they have more agency in their decisions, and are less likely to be unpleasantly shocked by the consequences of those choices.'

No. Negative affect, boredom, frustration and *some degree* of unknown unfairness are vital and necessary organs of FREEDOM.

These advices are good but they cannot be held to be absolutely true

If I am a contrarian, what of it. I drove to that forest to test my eyes! I was acting legally and ethically!

I have been drinking yes

heuristics of efficiency

It's tomorrow now

Reading this book on vision confirms that evolution is as obsessed as Chris McDowall with cognitive offload, heuristics of efficiency and more minimising time on unnecessary decisions

So the obverse of Chris's risk/reward hypertransparency is the severity of impact once the choice is made

No "minor" fuckups and few "learning" mistakes? Is that how it actually plays over time?

Ah ha! "Like your Tomb of Horrors style deathtrap dungeon might be full of hidden traps that don't announce themselves, but you're breaking that rule as a specific exception for this particular dungeon"

A paradox of performed secrecy in films is that the actor (& film) communicate simultaneously to the audience that they are lying &/or keeping a secret and..

to other characters in that fiction that they are telling the truth.

A dual signal

So in EBlnd can there be *real* geographic secrets? Like a secret door?

*People* can keep secrets, but are not likely to have more than one, if at all

But can there be a secret place which does not communicate it's existence

but which can still be discovered?

The doctrine of information and risk and the iteration of the game world may interact strangely over time to produce unpredictable cognitive lacunae of particular types

Maybe

giant ants and the attention economy

Look giant ants are not uninteresting as a concept - they are basically the Borg - but, ants

The city as starting area seems to be as common a concept to whatever the current gen is as the wilderness was to whatever older gens were

The difference may lie partially in the shift in the attention economy and social groupings from the 70s to now

70s issue I imagine being more like " how do I spend these extra cognitive hours in a world without screens and internet" and "what do I do w my geographically close sustained friend group for 6 hours'

Modern problem being more like "how do I keep their attention for maybe 3 hours max" and "how do I adapt the game to a shifting attendance group and online interaction"

The city can present a flowing matrix of challenge, information and adaptation more easily than the imagined wilderness.  << I SAID ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME THING ABOVE BUT I WAS DRINKING AND FORGOT I SAID IT

Characters/Players can be brought in and out more easily too.

Amusingly, if PCs and NPCs have actual jobs in the imagined world, that explains why they weren't present at the game or scene - they were at work.

In the next edition Failed Careers might be "Unstable Careers" or "Gig Economy Trap Careers"

Future Bastionland would definitely have twitter in it

"9. Dark clothes, lone wolf, won't work with any other hirelings. Thinks they're so cool." - Chris I feel attacked by this remark. Neutral face

Cosmic Angels - are these 40k Primarchs?

So you can have Kermit the Frog and a Primarch in the same world?

Lack of Ghosts

Actually if this was REAL British Paracosm role playing it would have more ghosts in it CHRIS

Fuck you could do a Gerry Anderson "Supermarionation" source book for EB. Hidden humanoid mockeries rocketing forth to save Bastionland in bright primary vehicles

Have fun trying to work out which internet personalities these are based on

A Mass Coffin Auction does sound like fun.

The fact that cremation doesn't seem to exist in this megacity pretty much guarantees a gothic logistical structure of trains and necropoli.

The Bureaucrolabyrinth is good. Advancing d20 rolls remind me of Gardens of Ynn

Alien Kung Fu meta dice games - lol I would probably have based the whole game around these

Five Characters to Play Before You DIE and You WILL die eventually and maybe SOON

it's a LIST, you ignorant bastards like a list don't you? well this is a list AND a bandwagon
a trend, a trend of lists you mindless drones
suckle upon my teat



1. GOOD AS FUCK

Fuck evil. Adopt those orc babies and raise them to be good. Fuck treasure. Fuck XP. Fuck unlicensed murder. Give the gold back to those orphans. Kill the devil, turn the dragon vegetarian save the world and keep your goddamn armour shiny while you do it.

In a game based on craftily gained material advantage where stealing gold literally gives you super powers, where a huge torrent of the motive force of play is imagining yourself as a super-powerful badass with no limits on your actions, the most important lesson you can learn is to _play against the game_

You have to make the game mean what you want it to mean. Its not the job of a bunch of rules to imbue your imagined world with meaning, its your fucking job.

Caring too much about the shit the game tells you to care about is a mistake. To be outside things teaches purpose and the hardest, strangest problem you can set yourself is being really good in a D&D world.

(Unless its some wiener-fiction like Dragonlance or whatever, in which case, disregard this rule.)

The deepest paradox of D&D is that characters who have enough wierd shit going on in their head that they will actively do stuff that does not get them XP, for reasons of reasons, are the best characters.

That is, you have to make a character whose reason for being, whose anima, is greater than any of the written rules used to provide a reason for them to exist and grow.

You can't really teach intellectual or imaginative independence. The more instruction you give people telling them "Hey fucko, be more independent!" the less independent they become. You can't _make_ people think for themselves, once you've told them to do it it's too late, the motive force has already come from outside their head.

The only way to teach independence and imagination is to provide areas of silence and darkness which MUST, perforce, be illuminated by the self-generated creative thought of the player. Teaching by paradox is a good way to do that. The paradox creates a zone of silence or cognitive incoherence which can only be resolved by the player taking independent action.

Will Sir Stabbington really return that treasure to those Gnolls just becasue they have legal right to it? You bet your fucking ASS he will because he is GOOD AS FUCK.

To play D&D well you have to be able to say "Fuck D&D! Fuck everything! I'm doing this MY WAY, even if I don't know what that is yet!"



2. GOOD BUT CRAFTY

Once you have mastered the central paradox of D&D, you are ready to begin the lesser, but still vital lesson of not being shit at it.

It's still important for you to be broadly, or at least nominally, good. It gives you a point of view and sets you in moral conflict against the world

(Unless its fucking Dragonlance or whatever)

But now we have told the game to go fuck itself we can re-assess our concept of 'good' into something slightly less insanely retarded. Now it can mean 'pro-social' or just 'not a massive rapist'.

Craft is the heart of the thing. Once you have learnt to oppose the very concept of the game itself, now you must translate that same lesson into material logic.

There is no weapon so powerful as the world itself. To one versed in the way (and I can't say 'Tao' because that guy fucked it up), the entire procedure of a world is a tool.

A trap is not a trap, it exists to be found, but more than that, it exists to be found, disarmed, moved and used decapitate those guards as they run out of their room.

A castle is not a castle, it is a handy wrapper for treasure and XP, thoughtfully containing everything you need in one convenient place.

A monster is never a monster, it is food, an ally, a gullible mark, an organic trap, a divertable piece of combat power.

A dungeon is not a dungeon, far from being unknown it is the most-knowable place, a knotwork of closely nested choices which can be understood, un-knotted and re-created to your purpose. Corridors exist to channel your foes, not you, locked doors keep them in, not you out. As a key transforms a gate into a tool, so does the Player Character transform the dungeon into a place of work and play.


3. A DOG

A dog becasue it will teach you to relate to the world in a totally different way. Now you can't use tools, or even communicate easily, plus you are small.

But you have a sense of smell. Now you have to learn to put together a picture of the world through a different sensorium, and irritate the DM by asking exactly what everything smells like.

You are vital to the group, part of it, yet silent and subservient to it. A decision process you formerly tried to influence through words and action, you can now only observe as a dog that is happy to help.

Curious isn't it? The fear and madness and rage for order. All those personalities clashing and combining. All those complex thoughts and feelings intermeshing across dual levels of reality. Now, finally, you see it from the outside, were you really like these people? So loud and anxious and desperate for control? Before you were a dog.

Now there is only sensing, action, and response.

There is nothing for you to worry about and no way for you to rule, you see yourself from the outside as well. The wordless mind of an imaginary dog can encompass more than that of a thought-addled man.

Remember the lesson of the dog. The lesson of the idiot mute.



4. GENDER-WEIRD

Now we have dealt with basic concepts we must turn to the lessons of social justice and diversity.

The lesson of social justice is be as totally fucking wierd as you can to the maximum extent always. The lesson of diversity is that if you can fit your identity on a graph, its not an identity, its a group.

(I'm not going to make this 'playing the opposite gender' becasue everyone can do that.

(Unless you are in the deep south or bible camp or something and everyone can't do this, in which case you may replace being gender-weird with just playing the opposite gender.))

You are not a _group_, you are not a _type_. You are yourself alone.

You have to be so fucking _odd_ that people don't even know how to fuck with you. You must terrorise the imagined world into submission, yet you must do this by understanding its rules and placing yourself outside them.

The true hero is a twisted figure of burning majesty and alienated awe, a CRIPPLED GOD.

If we have already learnt to play against the game, to make the world a tool and to place our-self both outside and within the social world of the Players, now we must learn to respect and understand the social reality of the imagined world in the same way. We must be both within and without it.

You can't be deeply, distressingly wierd in a society without understanding that society. You must make yourself a maligned figure of terror and awe. You must feel the eyes of the world upon you.

This is out of respect. Only this figure can imbue this imagined society, this purely fictional population made up of random tables and DM accents, with any of the numinous power of a real society.

And believe me it must have numinous power. Society is the greatest monster.

As worship of a totem imbues it with power, so to does creation of the CRIPPLED GOD imbue the imagined world with power. Like a wound creating flesh. Power enough to harm.

And your imagination must be capable of doing harm, of hurting your, and others, or what is the point of playing with it?

It's not that harm is good, but that nothing of great beauty can be created or experienced without power and there can be no true power without the capacity to harm.


5. TWO GOBLINS IN A BIG COAT PRETENDING TO BE THE SAME PERSON

I did this once and it was HILARIOUS.

Twelve Issues of Fantastic Four - #1

1. ENTER THE OMNISTRUCTURE (Part One)

After an incredible alien beast attacks the metropolitan museum of art from the inside, (narrowly foiled by the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing, who is assisting Alicia Masters as she escorts a group of schoolchildren around the museum) the Fantastic Four find that the paintings of Jackson Pollack are in fact portals to a separate reality called the 'Omnistructure', portals which are now being flung open!

Reed wants the portals shut down, but that can only be done from inside the strange, dying reality to which they lead. On top of that, Ben Grimm has lost an entire class of children to an alien dimension, something he specifically promised their headmaster would not happen.

Reed tells Ben that *whatever happens* the protection of the earth must come first, even if it means the children are not rescued, even if it means the Fantastic Four themselves are trapped within this alien reality as the portals close. Ben agrees but later swears to Alicia that he will recover the children, no matter what.

On penetrating the Omnistructure, the FF are enfolded in consuming darkness and grope their way towards the only dim light they can make out, flickering signals of a gigastructure of trans-carbon, a highway of pure diamond transmitting the final thoughts of a dying intelligent star. Reed attempts to communicate but his logic-bound arguments have no affect on a doomed stellar intelligence, last of its kind, bound within the sarcophagus of its once-teeming city hive of thinking stars and knowing that its fate will be to watch the inevitable extinction of its own reality.

Johnny Storm takes rashly matters into his own hands and, against the advice of Sue and Ben, hurls himself boldly into the dark, before igniting his Nova flame!

For a moment, Johnny burns with the brightness of a miniature sun, and like a candle flickering in a haunted house, he illuminates a tiny volume of this failing cosmos. The Fantastic Four look 'down' to observe the spiralling strands of the linear lagrange cities hanging in mid air beneath the darkened highways of light, and beyond them the fernlike surface of the fractal worlds, flexed bands of ultradense matter springing from a central neutronium trunk and weaving through the cosmos, ivy-like traceries whose leaves as they bend flex the sliding continents upon their gigantic surfaces, producing alien tectonics and imponderable alien life.

Yet in this brief spark of light, no life do they see, as the fantasticar dives to recover the falling Johnny Storm, now utterly drained, the Fantastic Four observe 'below' them only ruined continents and the empty shells of cities larger than all the cultures of earth.

But. On seeing this final spark of light and the brave but futile sacrifice of a form of life itself doomed to die in only a handful of decades, the failing stellar intelligence observing from the darkness of its dead and blackened home takes heart and, with a roar of defiance, directs the last of its vital energies into the webwork of cosmic fibre optics around the Fantastic Four!

The Omnistructure explodes into light, the vast tangled spirals of the lagrange civilisation gleam like a scatter of shells and the 'leaves' of the fernlike world fractals glow like emeralds and sapphires streaked with atmospheric white.

The FF may have only hours to accomplish their mission before darkness falls again, and this time it will be a night without an end. Spotting the disordered vectors of the nearby city fragments, Sue Storm leads the FF on the trail of something that must have moved away from their current position not long ago, something large and powerful enough to brush the pieces of a city out of its way like a man swatting at flies, something that almost certainly has their missing children, something heading, not for the surface of the tendriling worlds, but to their dark underbelly and the pale orb-like environments of the decay-based civilisation that is revealed below the surface of the curling worlds.


(I took almost all the exclamation marks out! But really! They should end! Every! Other! Sentance!"

DRUNK POST - NEW WAYS TO END A MARVEL FILM

Ways to end a marvel film that do not involve a giant fucking thing hovering above the earth

Extra points if it stays away from the whole grimy industrial city aesthetic

First options comes curtesy of Nathan Ryder:

1. The North POle during a solar flare. The Northern lights are going crazy, there's a huge tunneling device drilling into the ice for (sorry nathan i forget exacty why but there could be all kinds of shit down there, I'm going with ancient city).

Solar flare radiation keeps glitching Iron mans armour, presumably also communications so that means NO ONE IS COMING TEAM. Ice is alleady beautiful and cinematic, ad amped up aruara borealis, a gigantic vertical tunnel in the ice and whatever the fuck a giant tunneling machine looks like.


2. Giant redwood forest, cyclopean pillars of nature streatching off into the distance. Secret ninja tree-base. Everything quiet, maybe TOO QUIET, then armies ninjas attack by running vertically down the trunks of the gigantic trees. The trees get set on fire, turns into a crown fire and whole thing looks like a scene straight out of hell. Villian starts laughing at captain america cause at least he fucked up one of Americas WONDERS OF NATURE.

I can just imagine the Red Skull chortling: "this tree was older than your 'Declaration of _Independance_, and YOU destroyed it Captain _America_. Cap freaks out, gets Thor to summons storm to stop fire. Thor freaks out, accidentally brings on tidal wave. Fire drowned then brutal showdown in the half-drowned ruins of the forest with everyone leaping between the burned up trunks floating on the surface. Ninjas are undead and climb out of the black ooze. Team wins but Thor cries at the end.

3. Microverse. Ant-Man shrinks everyone and they battle an army of robotic ultron-ants. maybe the Avengers just have to make it across New York when they are the size of pinheads and it starts funny but turns into a surprisingly-serious ODDESSY and hawkeye dies saving everyone from a Godzilla-Rat in the pharonic tomb-complex of the New York sewer system. The earth mightyl heroes learn an important lesson in humility, Thor questions meaning of heroism & summons tine lightning. In the end team saved president, gets tiny medals, returned to normal size by Reed Richards in SHOCK COURT CASE as marvel get the FF rights back.

4. Hell. Cap DIES saving LOKI in a shock twist in the pre-credits stinger and Hela takes his soul. They have a funeral but Thor CANT TAKE IT and twists Lokis arm (literally), swears he will INVADE HELL and recover the soul of Captain America. Team seems up for it. Meanwhile in hell, Cap finds numerous souls of discrased soldiers from every human conflict, decides suffering has gone on long enough and turns this rag-tag bunch of misfits into a team to escape death itself.

Stage is set for a WAR IN HELL and Marvel can afford the rights to Wayne Barlows paintings so it actually looks good. Avengers win, in the end of credits stiger Cap stops Nazis leaving hell, "Sorry Gunter, you guys have to stay." Audience laughs.

5. Europa. DAREDEVIL investigates what seems to be a simple case of kidnapping but is surprised when THOR shows up and things rapidly escalate from there. Turns out is SUPER ALIENS trying to awake an ancient army hidden deep in the europan ocean. (Yes exactly like that Warren Ellis comic though marvel can probably afford the rights to that too). Team ends up on Europa fighting a HIDDEN ALIEN FEET and WAKING SUPER RACE. All seems lost until Thor summons unexpected help from a nearby storm: Jupiters RED SPOT. Lightning leaps between Jupiter and its moon destroying alien fleet. credits stinger: on earth an ancient hero wakes from his slumber: HERCULES. Messing with Jupiter has upset ZEUS. Sage is set for HILARIOUS SEXY GODWAR in next Thor film.

6. THE SARGASSO SEA OF STOLEN SHIPS. Kang the Conquorer (Joseph Gordon Levitt) has stolen shitloads of ships from all over history and brought them together into a kind of armada-city in a timelose sea (totally unlike that China Mieville book) the Avengers follow him there with the help of his future self (Joaquin Pheonix), but which of the timelost sailors will help or hinder the team, and what will the Mexican government do when a new city of ships from every point of human history turns up off its coast?

7. Fucked-Up Detroit

Its a cliche for a reason.  And the reason is it looks cool as fuck.

Taskmaster loses his memories with all the shit he learsn, what better foe for the Avengers than a Hawkeye-style 'normal guy' who still manages to take them all down, with the help of an underclass that they ignored? TOPICAL.

8. The White House. Time for some DARK REIGN shit. People finally get tired of the property damage every time the Avengers do anything and the government authorises NORMAN OSBORNE to start a government-sanctioned Avengers team. The Avengers are ON THE RUN. But then it turns out the predsident is a skrull and they need to expose him, except doing that looks exactly like an assasination atttempt leading to the Avengers fighting the US ARMY on the streets of Washington. Thor fights the USS Nimitz battlegroup. The Avengers can win, but will they kill US soldiers doing it? And will Cap spaz out if they do?

9. Avengers Tower? (O.K I'm running out of ideas) After the MASTERS OF EVIL detonate an anti-powers bomb over New York the Avengers are de-powered. HAWKEYE is now the most competent member of the team and has to lead the rest on a DIE-HARD type tower runaroud to use cunning tactics to take out the still-superpowered bad guys. Turns out its your heart that makes you a hero after all.

10. Thors Well Oregon

Becasue it has the word Thor in it and looks amazing. And there the Avengers fight THE X MEN. Come on, get the fucking rights back Marvel! Maybe Professor X is down the hole.


You should all share this and add as many as you can in the comments ond on G+ as maybe someone from Marvel will see it and we will not get ANOTHER FUCKING FLOATING THING THAT IS FALLING.

Savage Races

ORC
+2 CON 
SPEED 30
VISION, you have darkvision
SKILL(S) Intimidation
ADVANTAGE on any save caused directly by man.
WEAPONS Simple bludgeoning weapons
LANGUAGES Orc, Savage Common

CARNIVORE. You can farm beasts and prefer to eat those or hunted game.

FEATURE Hard to kill. You roll Death saving throws with Advantage.

Race Base Height Height Modifier Base Weight  Weight Modifier
Orc           4'8"               +2d6            110 lb.     × (2d4) lb.

You grow an half an inch and add d6 pounds every level. If you grow to over 8 feet high, change your size to Large,

AGE 3d6
Average lifespan 40 years

SUB RACES
    
You are  BRUTAL ORC (+3 STR)
You can never raise your INT by any means. It never go above what you roll in character generation.

You are CUNNING ORC (+1 STR)
You are proficient with Simple ranged weapons and have the Stealth skill.
You understand, but do not speak another common racial language. Orc, Gnoll, Goblin, Human Common, Elf, Dwarf or Halfling.




GOBLIN
+2 INT 
SPEED 35
SIZE Small
VISION, you have darkvision
WEAPONS Simple Light Melee Weapons
LANGUAGES Goblin, Savage Common

OMNIVORE. You can survive on almost anything.

FEATURE You can move through creatures one size larger.

Race   Base Height Height Modifier Base Weight  Weight Modifier
Goblin          2'7"        +2d4                   35 lb.        × 1 lb.

AGE 4d6
Average Lifespan 50 years.

SUB RACES

You are a CREEPY GOBLIN (+1 DEX)
You gain proficiency with blowguns, nets and whips.

FEATURE Hamstrings. If you inflict lethal damage on a humanoid creature  one size larger than you and are holding a bladed weapon, you may convert this into a slash that cuts their hamstrings, crippling them but leaving them alive.


You are a TRICKSY GOBLIN (+1 CHA)
You know two more languages of any race, and can imitate the voices of those races to a fair degree.
You are skilled in Performance and Deception.


GNOLL
+2 STR
SPEED 35
ADVANTAGE You roll against fear with advantage if a failure would mean letting down your group or exposing them to danger.
WEAPONS You are proficient with Polearms, Swords and Leather Armour.
LANGUAGES Gnoll, Orc, Goblin, Troll

CARNIVORE. You actually prefer eating intelligent creatures.

FEATURE Smell. You are skilled in Perception when it comes to smell. If you gain the Perception skill from any other source your bonus when you smell is doubled.

Race Base Height Height Modifier Base Weight  Weight Modifier
Gnoll     6'6"                +2d6               130 lb.     × (2d6) lb.

Average lifespan 35 years


SUB RACES

You are a HUNGRY GNOLL (+1 CON)
Like most Gnolls, you like eating more than you like killing
Your speed is 40. You are proficient with the longbow.
You have a Halberd OR a Longbow with 3d8 arrows.


You are MURDERING GNOLL (+1 INT)
Also called a 'Flind'. Unlike most Gnolls you like killing more than you like eating.

You have a Unique Gnoll weapon called a Flindbar, in which you are proficient. This is a pair of chain-linked iron bars which you spin at high speed. With this weapon you can attack twice per round for d4 damage. In addition any target of equal size holding a one handed weapon must make a DEX save or have their weapon torn from their hands.

This weapon is a sign of high status amongst Gnolls and other Gnolls will respect it, if not you.


MANTIS MAN
+2 DEX
SPEED 30

CARNIVORE You seldom hunt other intelligent races for food. You do find Elves utterly delicious though.

• You never wear armour.
• You never need to sleep.
• Your antennae mean you take no penalty for fighting at close range in darkness.If unarmed you can attack five times, four claw attacks and a bite attack.
• If holding a weapon you can attack with the weapon and a bite attack. You can only ever hold up to two weapons.

You always begin at two years old. As you get older more of your natural abilities become active. This happens as you age, not as you level up.

AGE  ARMOUR  CLAW/BITE DAMAGE    SPECIAL ABILITY
  2           13                         d2               
  3           13                         d3                                   leap
  4           15                         d3
  5           15                         d4                                venom
  6           17                         d4                           dodge missiles


LEAP You can leap 20 feet straight up or 50 feet forward. You cannot leap backwards.
VENOM This bite causes parylisation for rounds equal to the extent by which the victim failed their save.
DODGE You can dodge physical missiles by successfuly rolling your unmodified DEX against the To-Hit roll.

LANGUAGE Neither your strange mind or your insectile jaws are well constructed for understanding or using the language of others. In a time sensitive situation you must make a standard INT roll use or understand spoken language.

Race          Base Height Height Modifier Length Length Modifier Base Weight  Weight Modifier
Mantis Man     6'6"              +2d6              10             2d6               130 lb.         × (2d6) lb.

Average lifespan 35 years.

"Ever so quietly we gained on them"

The following take from "Beneath Flanders Fields: The Tunnellers War 1914-1918" 

(Most paragraph breaks are mine.)

"We decided to try and enter the enemy tunnels. Cutting away the soft wet  clay and removing debris in frantic working an entrance was made in about  20 minutes. We put on our Proto sets - oxygen apparatus for breathing in  mine rescue and gassy areas. taking four sappers and my sergeant, all armed  with revolvers, knuckle-knives and grenades we crawled into the German  tunnel and started up the gallery. Now, Proto sets are alright for working  in an ordinary civilian mine gallery, but crawling along or bent over in a  war time tunnel of 4 x 3 feet is not so good -  and fighting in a Proto set  is an art to be learned.

Although the German tunnels were a bit larger than our own, the size was  still very small. So, in the dark with our torches we crept down the German  tunnel towards the blown in face. We found no bodies there. We returned the way we had come and went further up to find out more of their system.  Going towards the German front line for 40 or 50 yards we came to a fork, with another tunnel leading at an angle towards our lines, so we knew than that this must lead to the workings we had blown in at point A. We went down the tunnel and found the face blown in and the bodies, or parts of, two Germans. We also heard out party clearing an entrance and this was done in a few minutes.

As we had gained so much enemy tunnel I decided to try to have a go and destroy as much as we could without too much loss to our own men. I instructed the party to prepare two heavy charges, and for an NCO and  sapper to carry them and follow us some distance behind. My party of six then set off back up the German tunnel knowing that we should most likely run into trouble as the enemy would certainly send in a rescue or fighting party after two explosions.

With myself leading and my sergeant behind me followed by four sappers, all in single file, we had just started down their main tunnel when we heard and then saw torches coming in the distance towards us. Their heavy boots made such a noise and they were shouting or talking very loud. The atmosphere in the tunnel was still thick with dust or gas from the explosions. Not knowing how many of them there were I decided it would be best if we came back and waited just past the fork junction to see what would happen.

We waited for a few minutes with our torches out and all quiet. Then suddenly there appeared through the semi-darkness with their torches blazing in front of them, seven Germans, first a sort of NCO armed with a revolver, then five armed with revolvers and grenades, and the last was a junior officer also armed with a revolver. For a moment I thought they were coming down the tunnel straight at us, but no, they decided to go down the other tunnel. They still were making a lot of noise considering the job they were on. My thoughts went to my own two men who were coming up the tunnel with the two charges - they would run right into the German party. We waited until the Germans had gone a few yards past the fork so as to get up the room to get up behind them, then we kept in our stockinged feet silently up behind the enemy in single file.

Ever so quietly we gained on them and in a few seconds I was only about four yards behind the last man, the officer, and then all of a sudden they saw the torches of my other two men coming towards them. Thinking they were their own men from the face they shouted in German, and they all stopped. Then, as no reply came they jabbered a bit amongst themselves for a second or two, then the NCO in front fired a shot down the tunnel. Back came a shot from my boys right on the second. So now, being only a few yards behind the enemy I put on my torch and so did my men behind me. The Germans were taken completely by surprise, absolutely trapped, with their enemy in front and behind them. The man in front of me, who was their officer, turned round half facing me and with my torch shining in his face, he had his revolver pointed at me in a second; but he sort of hesitated, no doubt struck dumb by the grotesque sight of a hooded body coming at him.

It must have been an awful sight for them to see us in a Proto set in that dim semi-darkness. 

I shot him before he recovered from his shock. At the same time keeping my body down to the floor level to allow my sergeant in a crouching position to shoot over me, and the others behind to fire over us. This was something we had practiced in training.

The German party never had a chance, their NCO was shot in the leg and my sergeant kicked his revolver out of his hand, but he rolled over, grabbed his gun again and was starting shooting, so the sergeant shot him again. The fighting did not last more than two or three minutes, then one of the Germans shouted 'Kamerad' and we soon disarmed the three enemy left standing. But the Germans fought well and hard, and if they had not been subject to such bad luck in getting trapped, they might have won the fight and killed the lot of us.

The casualties were Germans: one officer, one NCO, two men dead; three captured alive, one very badly wounded; Canadians: three men wounded, one badly. The last two sappers of my own party in the rear never fired a shot but both got hit themselves. We knew the enemy would be sending another larger rescue and fighting party so we laid our first explosive charge on a time fuse 50 yards up the main tunnel from the fork, dropped one near the fork itself, and ran as fast as we were able with our Proto sets still on to our own tunnel entrance.

We had just reached the entrance when both charges went off and knocked us all flat on our faces with the enemy tunnel caving in at the back of us, catching the last sapper of our party and trapping him in falling debris and timbers; we pulled him out but one of his legs was broken.

Getting back into our own tunnels we laid an explosive charge. This completed the blowing of the enemy tunnels and we knew we had stopped all the German works in that direction for a few weeks to come."

Lieutenant John Westacott

2nd Canadian TC

Westacott later had another more deadly encounter at Mount Sorrel, when he and a complete section of his men were trapped underground during a surprise German surface attack which captured the British front line trenches. Unknowing, the Canadian tunnellers emerged unconcernedly from a shaft at the end of their shift, to be spotted by the Germans.

Diving back down the shaft and sounding alarm bells as they went, they blew in several other entrances to the tunnel system, and waited. The Germans piled down after them and one of the most grisly battles of the war took place.

Fighting with grenades, pistols, rifles, and hand-to-hand with knives, bayonets and even razor sharp spades in the tiny galleries, the encounter was horrific. Westacott himself was almost to lose an arm, whilst sixty out of eighty of his shift were killed or wounded. The struggle lasted almost twenty-four hours - and the stopped just as suddenly as it had begun. When the tunnellers plucked up the energy and courage to tentatively peep out of a shaft again, they discovered that the Canadian infantry had recaptured the trench.

Jesus Likes Your Backpack

Many things have been said and some are below the jump. But first, the backpack.

I want you to imagine you are playing a game of 40k in the middle of a church. There is no-one else around. The table is in the middle of the building.

Mini’s might be like sculpture, but the battlefield is more like a cathedral. Like this – 

The informational capacity of this image is more like architecture than sculpture

They both have to carry information in a similar way. They are information-producing spaces. The information is a narrative.  In the cathedral the story is the religion. It never changes, but you are meant to. 

The battlefield is a story you create and reshape moment by moment. But you need to get that information either way or the whole thing has no point. 

They both need to work on multiple scales. Not many forms of art need to do this. You are usually expected to be only one distance away. The mini can be in your hand. Close. On the table, arranged either on its own or as part of a group. It must stand out or lock in with the group in an intuitive way. It must clearly show informational capacity both at short range as a discrete thing and very far away from you as part of a mixed group.

A cathedral has to work on similar scales. Sculptures in there must work up close to give direct information. They are also part of an overarching schema, they must harmonise with a group of other sculptures when seen from a great distance. They must also work as part of the structure of a large building.

The cathedral is a space you transit through, saints and the like look down on you from above. The battlefield is a space you create and change as you play. In both cases there is a kind of movement through the space, one literally with your body, the other with your intent and minds-eye.

If you trace the line of sight from one of the saints in the windows to the mini’s on the table then the line goes pretty much through your head. The saints are looking down on you from the same angle from which you look at the table. It’s a weird fucking angle to be interacting with something at. About 75 degrees.

And that’s why the Imperial Guard need better backpacks.

So far as I have been able to find out (let me know in the comments if I am wrong) Mini’s are the only form of sculpture, of a human form, in which you are expected to interact with the thing from behind and from above.

Most of what you see of you miniatures on the table is them facing away from you. Yes you can, and will see them from every other angle as the game goes on. But the primary, the assumed angle is from behind and from above, at about 75 (I think) degrees.

This is the same angle from which the Saints view you. Which explains why a great many religions are obsessed with certain headgears, robes and haircuts. It’s because God is looking at you from the same angle. 75 degrees. From behind. He wants you to have a distinctive reverse silhouette so he can pick you out of your squad. In case he needs to grab you. 

A good mini can, and must, hold much of its informational identity when seen from this angle. The designer of the Space Marines knew this. He gave them a cool nuclear backpack based on that of a roman legionnaire.

And then there was an even better idea. Give the bad Space Marines their own evil backpack.

Look how odd and interesting these things are when seen from behind, without any context. They are strange amulets.

Interestingly, a 40k model and a fantasy model have to do slightly separate things with their god-angle profile. A 40k model will be with a loose group, continually re-arranged. It must carry, match and mesh with that group identity. It must bind the squad together instantly, at a glance. You need the information now, you cannot waste time thinking about it.

A Fantasy mini, by contrast, will always be considered as part of a large automatic block. It is more like a piece of architecture from this angle than a sculpture. It must fit neatly with its regiment and form part of a large already-cohesive group. The informational transmission of the mini’s from the god-angle is different and I would expect the 40 mini’s, generally, to have a more powerful and more expressive god-angle profile because of it.

And that’s why the imperial guard need something on their backs. There is not much interesting stuff going on back there. They do not have a powerful god-angle profile and this makes them less charismatic and less useful sculptures.

If you look at the expensive Forge World Imperial guard Mini’s, they have one thing in common.

Kried stuff, the packs are on the bottom

these look tiny but they are better on the model

 They have been given, or given the option for, cool things on their backs.

In addition to this, the Krieg helmet, combined with the backpack, makes a much bolder god-angle profile than any other guard unit.

I don’t know how fully GW, or other companies, think about this. They seem to do so with war machines, which often receive an exciting profile of this kind. With troops they seem to go on and off. (If anyone has any info on this please do let me know.)

There are no god-angle photo's on the GW website that I could find. And no-one seems to photograph their mini's like this. Which is strange as this is how they use their mini's. But everyone thinks of them as sculpture when they hold them and then forgets how they are used.

I fantasise about a GW R&D meeting in which the first thing they do is decide on the boldest and most powerful god-angle profile. What do they wear on their backs and their heads. What is the body shape. Only then do you think about the front of the body. The you decide on the technology and aesthetic. Then simply write the whole culture and history to account for the back and the top of the head.