The Lost Great Crystal Debate

 
In a late and desperate attempt to shore up my ‘relevance’ I have been scouring the internet for evidence that I exist, and have stumbled into the tragic gap left by the lost ‘Great Crystal Debate’ DOES ANYONE EVEN HAVE A COPY? If you would like to find out more, scan down the following chronological list of text, video and audio discussions, down to 2018…
 

2015 – Podecast

 
Back in 2015 Scrap and I played around with a ‘Podecast’ (i.e. each was at the antipode to the other), and ended up recording a brief run of unedited ‘conversations’ about a rather wild range of subjects which ranged from 2015 into 2016
 
 

Podecast 1 - the Experiment

https://archive.org/details/PatrickAndScrap1a

I honestly have no idea what is even  in this. Its eleven years old!

 

Podecast 2 - MONSTERS

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick2a

Contents include; Rhiannas new video. Ghosts and why they hold candles. Skeletons and skeletor - egyptian theories of the dead. He-Man. Gas-Spores. Nazi Aurochs. “I’ve been around some pretty smelly subcultures.” Eating living things. Godzilla. Forbidden Planet. Imperialism and microbiology. Scrap fades in and out around this point for mysterious reasons. Possible collaborations. Natasha Allegri. Stephen Pyne. The state of modern poetry. The Art of Not Being Governed.(He wasn’t a poet.)
 

Podecast 3 - BEAUTY

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick3a

Contents; http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/72404517/judges-take-a-shine-to-wow-winner. Zak hates nature. Snails. “The child of love and war is sex”. A thick silky coffee with cardamon. Crepuscular Rays. kelvin helmholtz. http://www.pncc.govt.nz/media/32138/citizensadvicebureaulogo.jpg http://www.firstlighttravel.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Maori-Rock-Art.jpg

 

Podecast - 4 BEES 

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick4a

Contents; 1.20 Scrap starts rambling about chromosomes. - (seriously, think about skipping this part). 4.26 Gives up on that and starts again. Begins a very dark story about Bees. 8.00 King Arthur and Bees. 9.55 The Demiplane of British History. 13.25 Brief ramble here. 13.40 Other Planes, verticality. 14.50 Hook Birds. 15.25 Dinosauroids - http://povorot.deviantart.com/gallery/9348116/The-Dinosauroids. 15.35 The first few issues of Prophet. (I think these are in fact the same guy.) 16.35 “Bees, have to get this back to bees..” 17.20 Evolution of pollen, and therefore bees. 17.45 Exploiting colony organisms. Pretending to be ants. 20.10 We are colony organisms. 21.20 The nihilism of not cleaning your room. 21.45 Emergency coping mechanisms. 23.09 Sudden change in conversation due to girlfriend interruption. The Death of Avril Lavigne. 24.24 Schizophrenia. The voices are probably real. Believing you are in the matrix. 26.13 “That’s kind-of like a hive..” 26.45 In stories no-one can ever be competent. 28.15 Destroying a city with super-speed. 30.15 The delay between conception and creation. 31.00 Cut-Up
 
 
 

2016 - Doom of the Podecast

Podecast 5 - relate-able content

-

https://archive.org/details/Podecast5
 
Contents; 1.30 - Dark gods. 5.00 - FotVH Images. 8.30 - Please buy my fucking books. 9.30 - Making relate-able and insightful points about a variety of role playing related conversation things. 10.30 - Alchemy. 15.15 - First impressions of the OSR. 19.30 - Motivations are monsters from inside you. 21.30 - Choices in char gen. 31.30 - Cognitive silence. 33.30 - Traditional originality, fire, hirelings and dogs. 37.30 - Ten minutes on dark AI’s & nightmare futurism. 46.45 - Language, objects & baby psychology. 51.30 - Lard, the currency of agency. 55.00 - Stories, memory and experience, the grand conflict. 58.30 - Fail states.
 
 
 

Podecast 6 The Wonderful Kererū

 

https://archive.org/details/Podecast5RemasteredAudio

The Wonderful Kererū appears only once in this Podecast but exemplifies the spirit of both participants, a fat, pompous, ridiculous animal snatching a whole twig from the tree of thought, eating a single flower and then throwing the rest away.
 
Contents; 0.07 - VotE. 2.38 - Weightlifters with no penises. 3.37 - Do you want to talk about pre-history? (We do not do this.) 4.36 - I cut a huge amounts of blathering out here. 5.00 - Scraps game. 7.10 - Complexity and depth. 9.30 - Scrap has a moment of clarity about the nature of Complexity. 11.10 - Where it actually starts to get interesting. 11.50 - The capacity of a post-apocalyptic world to create its own context. 13.10 - A new place to put adventures. 13.45 - “What’s his face? The guy who does Udan-Adan? We’ll probably never know his real name.” 14.15 - Our regular obligatory mention of Zak. 15.50 - Who did invent ‘the dungeon as a living thing? 17.28 - A Ghost in my house. 18.30 - The ‘blank slate’ game world & identity. 20.43 - Eve as the first D&D player, Adam as a Storygamer. 22.28 - Rachel Pollack’s ‘Unquenchable Fire’ I got the name wrong in the podcast. 24.26 - Our other regular segment on colonialism. 26.16 - Mention of Potatoes causes internet to drop out. 28.10 - It’s ‘Henry Moreton Stanely’ and I may well be wrong about Cortez. Have fun with Wikipedia. 31.45 - “You’re treating those children like subhumans.” 33.41 - Scrap is confused by the moral exchange inherent to Government. Sarah Horrocks would probably agree. 38.15 - “If only one culture has reliable deep-water navigation, that culture is effectively playing D&D with the world.” 39.45 - Cowboys on Mars. 41.53 - We expand our mentions of Zak to include his sister? Anyway, X-Men school-style Character Gen. 47.39 - Communicating on a Meta-Level. Maybe our players are friends. 49.15 - MY SPECIAL SETTING!! 51.00 - We cycle back to, or around, different contexts in which to place adventures.. 52.00 - The ancient civilization of Dan. 55.09 - The Halfmen of O by Maurice Gee. 56.55 - The Changeover by Margaret Mahy. 58.45 - Does the Conspiracy Theorist have a D&Dish world? No, not really. 60.01 - Pre-apocalyptic D&D. 60.03 - Stealing & faking art throughout history. 60.05 - Dirtbag Greys. The Burke & Hare of space. 60.07 - Changes in scale. Insect wars. 60.08 - The Author was ‘William Tenn’ and the book is Of Men and Monsters. 70.45 - Giants would be very vulnerable, and likely peaceful. 72.55 - The wonderful Kererū or New Zeland Wood Pidgeon. (A bird that flies through the glass in your window is also playing D&D). 76.00 - “Birds would be good D&D characters.” 81.00 - Evil Dolphins.
 
 

2017 - VotE!

The Secret DM — Veins of the Earth Interview with Patrick Stuart and Scrap Princess

 

http://www.thesecretdm.com/2017/04/veins-of-earth-interview-patrick-stuart.html

A text interview about the original ‘Veins of the Earth’.
 
 

2018 - Crystals!

What Would the Smart Party Do? — Episode 80

 
I am not even sure what we talk about here but hopefully Dirks art for Silent Titans gets a mention!
 
Direct MP3: 

http://media.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/content.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/WhatWouldTheSmartPartyDo_80.mp3
 
Page: https://smartparty.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/patrick-stuart-interview/
 
 

The Great Crystal Debate!

The missing interview!!

Back in 2018 I was making my (negative) views on CRYSTALS widely known, when who should step forth to challenge me but the fool and creator of the BREAK! RPG, Reynaldo Mandarinian. To settle the matter for All Time, we got into a SAVAGE hour long verbal dual which, since there seem to be no copies surviving online, I will assume I won.

If anyone out there has any records or copies of the Great Crystal Debate, please let me know in the comments. The world deserves to hear my (assumed) victory, and how crystals were defeated for All Time.
 
 

2019 - The Worm!

Ignite Liverpool — Talk on the Wapentake

I am slightly embarrassed to see myself physically incarnated in maybe my only physical in-person talk.

 

https://youtu.be/nr4KKZMpf6Q
 
Those of you familiar with ‘Silent Titans’ will know about the ‘Wapentake of Wirral’ from that book, based on a real historical incident in which a corrupt lawyer got his hands on the medieval documents giving ownership of a dark age court and used them to form a criminal gang and extort the people of the Wirral.
 

 

The Worm Orouboros with Tom Fitzgerald

In this interview the beloved creator of ‘Middenmurk’, sits down to talk with me about the excellent and under-discovered ‘Worm Ouroboros’ by E.R. Eddison. (One day I will read the Zimiamvia trilogy).

https://archive.org/details/TheWormOuroborosWithTomFitzgerald

2020 - DCO ReMastered

Loco Ludus — "Interview with Patrick Stuart" 

I have no idea what we talked about, but its 55 minutes long!
 
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/loco-ludus/episodes/Interview-with-Patrick-Stuart-ebgc3h
 
 

‘Udda Ting’ podcast

Henrik Möllers podcast is still going strong. In this one I think we talked mainly about Veins of the Earth.

https://soundcloud.com/henrik-moeller-180995804/100-veins-of-the-earth-patrick-stuart
 

The Magniloquent Moth

 

Part One show notes (full version at the link); Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered!), Patrick's talk on the Wapentake at Ignite Liverpool, Silent Titans, The world is a spell, Fear of a Black Dragon (DCO episode), Arnold's "Goblin Punch" blog and time traveling dinosaurs, Veins of the Earth, Fire on the Velvet Horizon, A Night at the Golden Duck, The audio starts to overlap in the second half of the episode, Time travel in RPGs, Continuum RPG.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-first-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707137
 
Part Two show notes CGP Grey's video about why your timeline is infuriating, Is the loose collective of RPG fans online a "community"?, A Distant Mirror, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Patrick's letter writing game (a literal play by post), FLAILSNAILS, Chris McDowall's conversion advice, TROIKA!, Half-Life Alyx, Tom Francis' games, Heat Signature, Tactical Breach Wizards, Deadliest Warrior Yes, there really was an IRA vs the Taliban episode.
 
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-second-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707139
 

 

2021 - Groan!

Appendix N Book Club

I actually remember this one and it was fun! I finally got to talk about something other than my own books! This is all about Gormenghast.

 
https://player.fm/series/appendix-n-book-club/episode-103-mervyn-peakes-titus-groan-with-special-guest-patrick-stuart
 

Zock Bock Radio

-

Apparently I am, (or was?) the Townes van Zandt of the OSR. I don’t know what that means but I will assume its good! Show notes in the link!

https://pesa-nexus.de/2021/08/29/episode-25-he-is-the-village-green-innovation-society/

 

Monsters and Manuals (Noisms), Video Interview

 

 
I am horrified by the sight of my own face so will rush past this one.
 
Blog post: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2021/08/video-interview-with-patrick-stuart-of.html
 
Youtube; https://youtu.be/sPhfvkRDxvo
 
 

 2021 -Demon-Bone!

Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Ahh blessed text.
 
http://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2021/08/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html
 
 

Her Christmas Knight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yClMXIjlrM&t=244s
 
 

Archons March On

Thanks to the commenter below who managed to dig this one up!

https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2021/08/interview-with-false-machine-for-his.html

Whose Measure God Could Not Take

This one covers the Demon-Bone Sarcophagus Kickstarter, Gawain and the OSR community.

 
https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2021/09/interview-patrick-stuart-of-false.html
 

2022 - The End!

 "Art" with Her Christmas Knight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOpKlStShCs
 
 

Then, Silence

Or at least, no interviews or appearances from 2022 to 2025 where I popped up in the ‘Weird Hope Engines’ zine fair.
 
Looking back on it, some of these bursts of extroversion were to help with Kickstarters, but it looks like the relative failure of ‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’ and the hangover from Covid really fucked me up more than I realised. I may have brought books out but I really didn’t leave the house for years. Damn.
 
Now, once again, I fitfully stumble into action, to prove to myself and the world that I exist.
(Seriously if anyone has a copy of the Great Crystal Debate let me know.)

2025 - Fantasy Art History

A sock resembling me did appear on the Abelard and Joe Fantasy Art History show;

An Interview with me about.... ART!

BEHOLD

 

Also I got nine days left on my Kickstarter!

Help me get art for my Kickstarter! Its not for my benefit, its for ART ITSELF!

Interview with Noisms about "Hall of the Third Blue Wizard"

 

The Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thirdbluewizard/in-the-hall-of-the-third-blue-wizard

Davids Blog - http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/

Matthew Adams Art for new Yoon-Suin - http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2021/06/yoon-suin-2nd-edition-art-update.html

John Martins 'The Bard' - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Bard.jpg

David on Russian Classical Music - http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2022/03/russian-inspiration.html

Rachmaninoffs Vespers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2NSfTXjEPI&t=179s

Matthew Adams left this comment on Facebook; "Ha, now I can tell mum and dad I am a genius!

But also, the look of concern on your face Patrick when you looked at the yoon suin art. Please forgive me! Though I admit I did laugh a little bit because I was expecting it. And you are not the only one to express concern or even dislike of my MS paint art.

David is mostly right about why I am doing a lot of my art in MS Paint and other old digital formats like PETScii. I enjoy working within the constraints those programs enforce, and there might be some nostalgia there as well. But there is also an element of burnout involved. A few years ago, just before the end of g+ really, the whole process of drawing on paper started to make me almost physically sick. I don't know why. Depression, anxiety, doubt, all played a part, and maybe something wasn't clicking creativity wise. But for quite a while the act of putting pen or pencil to paper was enough to make me vomit. Now I am doing more analogue drawing again, but it's usually within the constraint of designing rubber stamps."

More Interviews! More! MORE! MORE!

 LEARN!

The secrets of BROKEN FIRE REGIME

 with Her Christmas Knight!

My own Dark and Mysterious History

with David 'Yoon-Suin' McGrogan!

The secrets of PHILOSOPHY and THOUGHT

with MAX CANTOR

(creator of Maximum Recursion Depth 

coming out soon)

25 DAYS LEFT ON THE DEMON-BONE SARCOPHAGUS KICKSTARTER!!!

I Spek - All my Audio Interviews and Podcasts

My voice - surprisingly nasal. Here is a page of links, like a library of all the podcasts and recordings where I have been interviewed by, or talked with, someone else.

Zock Bock Radio - this was a long one about BFR but it covered a wide range.

Noisms from Monsters and Manuals - mainly about my personal history

Her Christmas Knight! - so handsome! Mainly about Broken Fire Regime

The Smart Party Interview - pre Silent Titans

Udda ting with Henrik Möller - mainly about VotE

Loco Ludus - general gaming culture

The Magniloquent Moth with Salinday, Part 1

The Magniloquent Moth with Salinday, Part 2 - another pretty wide ranging talk.

The Worm Ouroboros I talk with Tom Fitzgerald of 'Middenmurk' about the book, 'The Work Ouroboros'

The Great Crystal Debate w Kiel Chenier. Crystals, good or bad? = BAD

Podecasts

A series of conversations I had with Scrap

Podecast One

Podecast Two - Monsters

Podecast Three - Beauty

Podecast Six - Bees!

Podecast Five - Relateable Content!

Podecast Six - The Wonderful Kererū

Smart Party Interview with Me

Click the image or here.

If you have questions you can ask here, on G+ or Facebook.

I am sorry about not updating more actual meaningful content.

Will try to have something by the end of this week.

None Of You Care Enough About Textiles

As is becoming traditional for interviews, the more interesting and original the content, the fewer the views. I suppose that makes this your chance to be amongst the ELITE! One of the FEW.

I am an imperfect interviewer but I found all of this utterly fascinating. I interview Mun Kao and Zedeck Siew about their zine/ongoing artpunk D&D project A Thousand Thousand Islands and the conversation goes all over the place from Malaysian views of D&D, the politics of textiles, negative space in design, art-text collaboration and much more.

Zedeck on Tumblr
http://zedecksiew.tumblr.com/

Zedeck on G+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ZedeckSiew

Mun Kao on G+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MunKao


Mun Kao's Patreon, shame him into making more art and writing down the reading list he used to research South East Asian cultures for ATTI.
https://www.patreon.com/athousandthousandislands

Politiko - the card game, and app, about Malaysian politics;
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.centaur.politiko&hl=en_GB
https://www.loyarbarang.com/shop/misc/politiko2/
https://vulcanpost.com/638933/politiko-malaysia-mobile-app/


That Scandi game Trudvang Mun Kao mentioned as an inspiration.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1256540796/trudvang-chronicles

I Interview Ben L of Mazirians Garden

I found this one really interesting.

The game with Sebastian - the Dreamlands and I story https://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/... D&D, Escapism and our Hobby https://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/... Ben on the City http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2... http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2... Bens Old School Manifesto http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2... Playing Online http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2...

Some of Bens after-interview comments from the original Hangouts thread;

Hey, I realized after the interview was over that you were asking me for recommendations for current OSR artists that maybe people didn't know. I talked about Tumblr instead.

Here's some stuff I'm currently digging:
Definitely Dirk Detweiler Leichty whom you mentioned, he's just amazing.

Also Jonathan Newell's illustrations of his mad city are very cool.

Thomas Novasel was also doing neat city stuff not too long ago, in the kind of John Blanche mode. A lot of crazy towers.

Evlyn M is well known but does wonderful things utterly in her own style.

Probably the one person who people don't know, because he's not on G+ and may or may not speak English, is Huargo whom you can find on Facebook under "Huargo Illustrador". He did absolutely amazing illustrations for the Japanese version of Tunnels & Trolls.

These are all Huargo

AND...

THE FUCKING ENNIES ARE HAPPENING

I like Hot Springs Island, Rey & Kiel are good people, I listen to Jason Hobb's podcast and Fear of a Black Dragon. If you read or played or listened to anything on here and you liked it then vote for it.

I interview Bryce Lynch

I promise I will get back to writing stuff on here, just gotta paint this Space Marine assault squad first.

This is the Unbalanced Dice page http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pu... Who are they? We don't yet know. Shams Grog n' Blog http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/ referred to in the video. If anyone can find the mapping post that Bryce is talking about then let me know and I will put it in here. The original Bryce Interview http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2016... (I can never interview anyone but Bryce.)

I interview Melan (Gabor Lux)

HSI - The Guide & an Interview with Jacob Hurst

The thing you can mention to people, and thing which I in fact did mention to people at Gen Con while I was shilling it, the 'unique feature' about Hot Springs Island is that it has its own guide book.

That is; it has a guide book, written in the 'voice' of the campaign, as if it were an object that the PC's themselves found or came into contact with, and one you can hand directly to the players in the same way.

I was going to talk more about this but Jacobs answers to my questions were more interesting than anything I was going to write anyway so here you go....




THE DENSITY & FULLNESS OF THE GUIDE

Patrick - "There is a LOT more info in the Guide than the Dark - deliberate or maybe design oversight? If they are not familiar with the setting then I can imagine the DM saying "Hold on, pass me that guide...""

Jacob Hurst - "Kind of a design oversight I guess. The Dark was going to have a set page count of 192 for always because it was apparently a good page count for paper math with 8.5x11 pages. I don't know if this is actually true, but I'd seen a number of 192 page sketch books that were that size so I believed it.

Then I ran out of room.

If it's info I consider to be important it's in the dark.

Part of it too was to give the players the monster manual, and see what happens.

At gen con Zak broke open my awareness of myself when he was selling my books to people saying approximately "no one does this (the field guide)! Ever have a player who says oh that's an ochre jelly and it's weak against blah blah at the table, well this may or be true."

And I realized then, that that was me. I was that person who consumed the monster manual and knew all the weaknesses and then when playing I was "ruining" the game with my "out of game knowledge". And I would always get so mad, because who gives a fuck if everyone knows Trolls are weak against fire?

And after Zak said that stuff it made me think more, and I think that the problem is that the rpg business system is inherently broken.

Lets look at a multi-player video game. Everyone who plays buys a copy of the game. If there are 10 people playing a map, then 10 copies of the game have been sold.

With table top rpgs, if 6 people are playing, only 1 person is allowed to buy the game, because if the players buy and read the module or setting or whatever then they know all the secrets and "spoil" it (for themselves and potentially everyone else).

The field guide attempts to give everyone the fun info, but NOT the spoilers.

I still don't think that knowing Trolls are weak against fire can ruin a game, but I can now understand how that knowledge can enable players to pass through content at a rate much faster than a DM expects. So when they only prepped to the troll encounter and that was supposed to be the "final battle of the night" and you breezed through it in 5 minutes, it takes the wind out of their sails. And it's not really anyone's fault but the adventure creators who didn't give the DM tools to roll with variable "content consumption" speeds.

Now I may have

..........................

Now I may have totally failed at that, but that was the intended goal.

Regarding the DM asking to see the book, they might. They absolutely might. But they may also just smile and say "sure, go ahead and do that."

The parts of the field guide that aren't true aren't exactly defined, and the DM gets to decide.

For example, I didn't want any undead on the islands. In the FG under the shadows it says "These creatures are not undead and cannot be turned by pleas to the devine." for me, that's true. But when Donnie runs, he treats them as undead, and well... That's OK. Far as I'm concerned that's intended. "



PLAYERS USING THE GUIDE BOOK

Patrick - "Also, tell me more about the reactions of new players to the Guide Book, what did they do?"

Jacob Hurst - "Now, about the Field Guide. We played and tested the island a lot with people we know. We had done it a little with people we don't know, but we hadn't really had the "full field guide experience" 'till Gen Con, and it worked amazingly well. I'm even going to go so far as to say unexpectedly well.

When Donnie ran the games, the Field Guide would be found, as a treasure item, on a corpse. And then he'd slide the book onto the table. It's some beautiful theatrics really.

The player's viscerally know that it's important, because well I mean... here it is, on the fucking table in front of them right now. And it looks pretty nice. But in the game world it was on a corpse so you know... there's danger associated with it.

Because it's physically limited only one person can really be looking at it at a time, unless two or more human beings get physically close to one another. So the person with the book tends to become the "caller" at the table, or the "right hand man" of the caller at the table. Or the book gets passed around (again, physical interaction).

So when you have a table of total strangers, who are strangers to each other (like at Gen Con), it's fucking magic. Because it breaks the ice. They now have a reason to interact with each other both in game and out of game, and it's a semi-structured interaction because of the limitations of book being shared (both in and out of game).

"Wizard what IS that thing?!?!"

The main thing they all did with the information in the book itself was to identify and weaponize stuff. Which I mean... is the whole point!

One group had been sent to find the elusive Kujibird. They saw sleeping ivy in the book, and then decided to look for that plant, so they could then use it to catch the bird if they found it.

Basically we gave them a "goal" on the island, and then they'd use the information in the Field Guide to effectively plan their adventure.

One group was dropped off at the elven ruins with the mission of recovering elven artifacts, but they knew the ruined city was fucking dangerous, so they decided to not go to it, and go elsewhere. Because they knew there were other locations out there where they could accomplish their mission, even if they didn't exactly know where they were. So they fumbled around and found the Lapis Observatory instead of dying in the ruins of Hot Springs City.

Frequently too, the person holding the book would end up reading pieces of entries out loud to the group.

It really did work better than I'd hoped it would.



THE PLANTS

Patrick - "Who did the plants? They are quire botanically sophisticated, in a way rare to see in a D&D products and the en-culturation or the specificity of their processing and use is often quite complex as well..."

Jacob Hurst - Regarding the plants: Everything with Hot Springs Island began collaboratively. Having a whole section devoted to plants was my idea though, and I did the heavy lifting for them. When the 4 of us brainstormed up plants, my guidelines were "all of the plants need to do something. Even if that something is relatively mundane (e.g., 'they're fucking delicious')."

And from there we spitballed up the majority of their core attributes.

We also did some backwards, such as the peppers. And now I'm going to go on a contextual tangent.

One of my personal core ideas for Swordfish Islands was that I wanted a person to be able to play a birdwatcher. Or a "exploration oriented scientist from the Age of Discovery". Which obviously doesn't translate well into your standard fantasy faire. But I used to play Ultima Online (a lot) (Great Lakes shard), and in UO, when you opened a person's character window, there was a small scroll off to one side where you could write your character backstory. I made so many jokes with my friends that they were all the same: "My parents were killed when I was young and so I was raised an orphan on the hard streets of Britain/Trinsic/Moonglow/major city. I did what I had to do to survive and now I want revenge. Death to orcs! blah blah blah."

I've also tried to run numerous games of D&D where the players are super adamant about coming up with "elaborate" character backstories that can then be "woven into" the game. And then... they give me two pages of backstory that's basically the same shit I saw in UO (i.e., boring and nothing to work with). But if your game is totally combat oriented (4e) then can you blame them for gravitating in that direction?

So my whole thing was: Swordfish Islands needs to be a place where you can have a hell of a good time and never have any combat, but it's still an RPG, and deadly and full of treasure and problems. And the real problem needs to be, not finding treasure and interesting things, but making it off the island with them in one piece. A problem of "abundance".

And this is the place from which the plants really came from. I was super obsessed with the idea of making a random bird generator so you could, for example, be a wizard who's life dream was to catch a glimpse of this elusive bird rumored to have been seen on the islands. But doing the generator the way I wanted was going to be stupidly hard, and ultimately pretty boring. So I went with plants.

I love plants. We always had gardens growing up (flowers at my house and vegetables at my grandparents). I was an Eagle Scout in Boy Scouts and for my Eagle Project I "wildscaped" an area in a local park (planted native plants that local animals like). And Poison Ivy is my favorite Batman villain.

Also, around the time we started on all this, I was really into the idea that when the Spanish conquered the "New World" and started bringing back all this gold and silver, they basically destroyed their (and everyone elses) economy due to inflation.

So I combined these and said: Let's come up with plants that do something, and some should have the potential to totally, and utterly fuck up your game world (like Jelly Moss).

But to get back to the backwards peppers, we came up with Blindfire vine first. A plant monster that eats you and turns your body into delicious fruit, but because I'm from Texas it was like... let's do spicy peppers! Spicy peppers are so much better than fruit 'cause you can eat them, AND weaponize them (thank you capsaicin!). And my grandpa always competed in chili cookoffs... hey guys, what if on the main island there's an annual(?) chili cookoff, and so they send adventurers to the island to collect the best tasting and hottest peppers? Ok well we should have some other peppers that aren't on a monster plant, but maybe they're only found on the island with active volcanoes 'cause you know... lava/heat/peppers?

And so cachuga peppers on Hot Springs Island were born. A sandbox hook that can be weaponized by creative individuals.

Jelly Moss was a "hey guys, what about a slime mold? Those look fucking cool. Wanna draw something like this Gabe? Fuck yeah! Ok... what does it do? Well they're slimy obviously, slime is sticky... so glue? Good good, but bigger? What if the glue is so good it works as well as nails. Oh that's fantastic. Especially for a fantasy type world where nails are having to be hammered out individually by hand. Dude.. that could totally fuck up an economy 'cause it'd put all these blacksmiths out of work. And their guild would be pissed and paying people to stop that from happening, but the carpenter's guild would probably love it and be paying on the other side. Hahaha yes... ship it!"

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Regarding "Botanically sophisticated", well, I cheated. Once we knew what all the plants were, and we knew what they did, I got a bunch of sciency books, and looked for the ways in which plants were described that seemed in line with the plants we had,. I sorted all my plants by type (bush, tree, grass, etc) and then flipped and read and was like "ooooo, vaguely pyramidal, that's a cool fucking phrase". Yoink!

This brings us to another aside. Photography is a bane to doing things this way. If you pick up a field guide now a days on plants or animals, what you typically find is a beautiful glossy picture of the plant or animal and its name. There's no written description, or if there is it's either the most basic shit. All the space devoted to writing now is devoted to what the thing does or how it lives because photography "solved" the what does it look like problem.

So if you want to do this, you have to find books about plants and animals from the time before cheap photography/color printing. If you're really lucky you can find some books from the 1950s-1970s where they publishers were still providing the detailed written physical descriptions AND nice images. But these are rare.

Also, the internet is pure fucking garbage for doing this. And it's all really interesting to me. Like... it's the most amazing time to raise a kid ever right now and yet lacking. My mother got my son a subscription to a kids nature magazine. There was a "find these animals on this page, in the big picture on that page." One of the animals was an eastern meadowlark. So I immediately pulled up a video of an eastern meadowlark singing so my kid could hear it. This is amazing. The number 1 question my kid asks when I'm on my phone is "What are you finding for me?" which is wonderful. And yet, at the same time... we're poorer in a way because I can find this meadowlark song, but I'm not really equipped to process and recommunicate it. How do I describe the song? I don't know. But I can send you a link so you can experience it yourself.

This all sort of ties into that "what the fuck does an elephant look like?" thing that Scrap(?) was sharing the other day with drawings of elephants over time by people who'd never actually seen an elephant.

And all this, imo, is really important when it comes to writing fantasy stuff because no one has seen these creatures or plants or places that don't exist. And as we become more and more reliant upon pictures and recordings and whatnot, I think that it may become harder and harder for people to describe their worlds because they've never had to do it.

[gets down off soap box] Thanks for listening to that.


As usual - SHOP IS HERE.