Ten Masks of the Creatures from Before Time

1.

The gaps in broken glass and falling leaves

delineate the angles and the face

whose shiftings cannot blur, as wheel-spokes merge

or fighters hands trace vectors in the air,

but freeze each sectored movement in the eye.

2.

Once gleam, twice reflected telescoped gold,

like sun motes hum in the predators gaze,

the cagelike iris of the wolf that counts,

arranging constellations of sweet time.

Seconds celestial, quickly eclipsed.

3.

The cold, enfolded shadow blazes pale,

weeps molten moonlight tears that slowly pool,

a face of silver cast on umbral bone.

The winters smiling face on paling weal

and skulls slow-sung farewell to tidal sail.

4.

This masks packs fractured spiderwebs on glass

which holds the slow-constructed droplets eye,

gaze staring blankly from their inverse world

of harried girl-craft faces and a sky

shining like the ghost of a carapace.

5.

The skin here is finer than a fly’s wing

and folds around the features like that shield.

Expressions flick and twitch, a fly-leg prance,

deceptive weapons locked in silent wield,

a trance remembered dance it cannot sing.

6.

The eyes of approximate millions glare

from venom-spelling reptilian skin,

the snake of Nox (onomastically; Night)

a daemons tapestry of keratin

the legions chained up in her nails and hair.

7.

The smoke from burnt iron cores of blasted worlds

writhes, denser than the floors it seeps on, gawps

and talks, with words unfurled pennants of iron,

these tongues coronal to a boiling face,

sourceless, centreless, timeless as the race.

8.

Pinclutch of unclassifiable eyes,

Facial geography crystal splintered.

This mask is latticing the tongue in light,

igniting solar lips and bright gnathite,

bones; setting suns like shadows dis-interred.

9.

A hive of thoughts is twisting in the glass:

knots rays inside this anti-prism mask.

Omniphagic Gorgonite mouth, alas

Unstopped by its fettered portal casque

making lemniscate noms of space, and mass.

10.

This mask is the skull of the dragon, death,

who came before all days and noticed hours,

breath spilling out an absent numbing mist

bower, an architectured void that no-one drew.

This first masks fist is weft and screwed with power.

Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls.

Sometimes it’s hard to hear the signals of a parallel world.

 

It’s been a while since I received any news of my parallel self and his R.P.G ‘River ofShadows’. It looks like in the intervening time some kind of science fiction expansion has come out.

In the future mankind has colonised every available star system with slower-than-light colony ships. Civilisations communicate with each other continually but slowly. Everything is hyper-civilised, overdeveloped and boring. No-one is allowed to do anything interesting or dangerous as they live in a perfect climax civilisation.

If anyone wants to be original or take a risk the only thing to do is try to explore one of the cold worlds. These are exo-planets lost in the lifeless voids between stars. Dark, ancient and cold. Many terrible things are buried there by timeless dead races beyond the comprehension of man.

Because governments are boring only radicals will explore the dead spheres. They scrape together scrap-tech with private capital, jury-rig a disused colony ship and head off in cryo sleep to the space between the stars. There is nothing out there so they have to take all the energy they will need with them. They know they will return in a thousand years-plus, relative to when they left, everything will be different. They don’t care. If they come back, they will change everything. 

No-one makes tech to survive the alien weather systems and awful mysteries of the cold spheres, so they have to build or cludge it themselves. 

The odd thing about this game is that all of the explorers are assumed to be hot punk girls. No explanation is given for this. 

Suits the girls are riding.

1.      Gas giant turboliner luxury evac suit re-fitted by pirate ice merchants after mass-disaster. Some bloodstains, wood-panelled interior, nice drinks selection, internal anti-personnel weapons for use against the poor, perfect credit history.

2.      Ex-Mil ice-moon halo-jump assault-suit prepped for low atmosphere high-angle entry and rapid heat exchange displacement vanes for high-velocity melt-through of tectonic pack ice and undersea deep-pressure assault. Disposable. Un-used.

3.      Post-nuke search and rescue suit with active Kirlian-Faraday defences against necrotising cryptowraiths. Ablative crystallising radiation slough-skin bleeds industrial-diamond-substitute.

4.      Antique trans-sanity Culverin MEGGIDO-class apocalypse suit. Confirmed three reality breeches closed. No fails. Discharged with full honours and multi-faith blessing. Sold as surplus during government shutdown over complex tax issue.

5.      Experimental Tomb-Analysis jacket. Produced as marketing test-prototype by futurist clade for predicted market of sunless explorers. Market failed to arise. Suit highly modified by billionaire performance artist as commentary on the creative tension between visions of the future and the now.

6.      Half-torched coronal-rider cybernetic array for maintenance of heliosphere vampire-satellites feeding endless thaum-hunger of core world climax Civ. Vaporised scarwounds in packed-ceramic overlays have little effect on survival in ultracold tomb-world environments.

7.      Active nuke-engine exhaust repair bot with scooped braincore and botch-job suit-within-a-suit life support pocket scavenged from crashed hydroponics resort. Chassis made to cludge fixe the Ex-Jets of near-lightspeed colony ships on journey between stars, without de-stepping the torch.

8.      ‘Naked Space’ field rainbow suit riding ultra-compressed electromagnetic kill-waves of original weapon mounting. Formerly trans-orbital ‘silencer’ for city-killing stealth-ship energy weapon. Weapon core and mounting removed. House-sized EM silencer re-fitted with auto-motile tractomorph claws. Drags counter-rotating tach-rifled gun barrel like a crippled tail.

9.      Stygio-abyssal armed wanderer. Tracked for ultra-slow transit of subducting tecto-murder zone. Full translation and appeasement AI for intended treaty-comms with ultra-violent Squidlikes below the dark photosphere. Semi-flexible syntactical tentacles added for reasons of Peace. Accidentally transported rare human bacteriophage on chassis that wiped out Squidlike ecology. Effective genocide. Mothballed in shame.

10.  Scratch-built kropotkinite ultra-savantic PunkSuit developed by briefly existent anti-authoritarian AI crystallised by Noospheric flashmob. Suit designs spat out before violent dispersal by thought police. Built vengefully of re-purposed corporate Lux-Tech with brandnames inverted and replaced.

But you can still totally tell they’re hot because…

1.      Impact-jinxed medical-array holo-field accidentally spits out glimpsed bodyslices like a fucked projector. Images hang like a halo in the O2 exhaust around exit vents and pipe fractures.

2.      Punk pilot made naked figurehead of idealised self for sensor prow of own exo suit for easy identification and political statement. Carved from adulterated chem-ice perma-frozen in tomb-world chill. Apparent ‘sweat’ on own naked form shows melting, indicates dangerous temp change if sensors non-functional. Figurehead melts at end of each mission, re-carved again for next insertion.

3.      Pilot is dancer from full-bodylanguage Logo-culture. Speaks with limbs as well as voice. Convinced no-one can understand her without seeing her. All flat outer surfaces masked with cheap paper-thin LED screens showing endlessly gesticulating body of pilot from every possible angle. Screens persistently glitch and madden.

4.      Self-named exo-suit painted with bomber-style glamour portraits of pilot-owner as branding exercise and good-luck charm.

5.      Pilot has own face projected on front of mech-head so partners and following cyber-dogs can see facial expressions during radio chat. Emotional valancy adds to cognitive bandwidth during key communications. Dogs and colleagues can follow eye movement and trace line of sight for non-verbal instructions and to spot attention patterns. Has taught mech to shrug

6.      Self-designed knight-style heraldry on suit-front and projected holo-pennants updated with relief of pilots achievements, notable actions, sexual conquests.

7.      Pilot either Positivist Neo-Hindu or aping mores of same. Own figure embossed onto suit-hull in endless tessellated patterns. Takes part of numerous gods in divine story-cycle, violent, sexual, numinous, hermetic. Mech effectively temple to self.

8.      Pilot ripped out sensor dome and replaced with zorb-ball of nano-active smart water. Defends against cold, heat, all EM frequencies, exudes and compresses to defeat physical attacks. Pilot floats naked or semi naked in centre of clear blue sphere like the pupil of a giant cyclopic eye.

9.      Sensor tentacle-tips implanted in the heads of human-scale android sculpts of pilot dressed either in radical fashions, or not at all. Android dummy sculpts either swoop through air carried by extended pseudopodia in back of head, or walk across cryo-blasted zero-plains on apparently naked feet, or in heels. Spy arms puppeting move-style of creator.

10.  Main comms vane, heat exchange or primary gun turret massively re-modelled as sculpture of pilot. Beautiful impassive archeotectic features pass pack and forth endlessly scanning dead landscape. Lips open to vomit heat or high-velocity rounds.

if they are corrupt, everything beyond them is also corrupt

I tracked down more of that analysis of the weird 'River Of Shadows' game made by my alternate self from a parallel world. yet again, it fails provide any meaningful answers and just creates more questions. I feel bad about Jervis, at least he is alive here. But I hear Richard Burton and Peter Cushing are still big over there, so whatevs I suppose.

"The Milus/Coppla 40k script.

The artistic influence of John Blanche on the 1^st edition is obvious and has formed part of the 'ROS' style ever since.

It is not known by many that Blanche's services would have been unaffordable without the disastrous implosion of the Milus/Coppla/Chambers '40K' film production.

After the astonishing worldwide success of Flash Gordon, producer Dino DeLaurentiis, seeking an original property to exploit, met with Andy Chambers, a prime mover in the Games Workshop company. Games Workshop had secured the lions share of the work of John Blanche and Blanches twisted dreamscapes played a major part in persuading De Lauentiis to make Chambers '40K' screenplay his next project.

Rumoured to be set in a dystopian future, Chambers screenplay, Blanche's artwork and De Laurentiis's capital, secured the attentions of John Milus and Francis Ford Coppla as screenwriter and director respectively.

The swift ejection of Chambers, the disastrous production, the accidental partial lobotomisation of Max Von Sydow during and accident with a misfiring 'Bolter' prop, the millions lost and the suicide of Jervis Johnson have all become the stuff of Hollywood legend.

It is unlikely that Stuart was able to view any of the remaining rushes. However he may have seen Terry Gilliams controversial 'making of' documentary 'Tears of The Emporer' in the brief week of its release before being permanently withdrawn from theatres under the threat of legal action from Von Sydow's estate.

Nevertheless, it was in the wake of this disaster that Blanche did some of his most notable work for 'River Of Shadows', earning himself a narrow, but deeply regarded reputation in the field of RPG's.

The 'Games Workshop' company folded in a debt helix and has never been heard from since.

The Collected Poems of Wisława Symborska.

'I knock at the stones front door.

“It's only me, let me come in.

I don't seek refuge for eternity.

I'm not unhappy.

I'm not homeless.

My world is worth returning to.

I'll enter and exit empty-handed.

And my proof I was there

will be only words

which no one will believe.”'

The linkages should be are obvious and direct to any reader. Despite several examples of obvious and uncredited theft on Stuarts part, Symborska has refused to take any legal action, though no reason has been given for this. She has denied any allegations of a relationship between the two.

The Muqaddimah

There is, in the game, an alignment system, running roughly parallel to Dungeons and Dragons, which, in the 1^st edition features only two choices. Most observers have assumed that the un-named alignments are simply Law and Chaos, taken, as with D&D, from the works of Michael Moorecock. However, I have traced the original typewritten alignment descriptions to these two passages in the Muqaddimah, a 15^th century Arabic text by Ibn Khaldun.

The first paragraph describes alignment A, the second alignment B.

“Human souls are of three kinds. One is by nature too weak to arrive at spiritual perception. Therefore it is satisfied to move downward towards the perception of the senses and imagination and the formation of ideas with the help of the power of memory and the estimative power, according to limited rules and special order. In this manner, people acquire perceptive and apperceptive knowledge, which is the product of thinking in the body. All this is (the result of the power of) imagination and is limited in extent, since from the way it starts it can reach the primary (intelligibilia) but cannot go beyond them. Also, if they are corrupt, everything beyond them is also corrupt. This, as a rule, is the extent of human corporeal perception. It is the goal of the perception of scholars. It is in it that scholars are firmly grounded.

A (second) kind (of soul), through thinking, moves in the direction of spiritual intellection and (a type of) perception that does not need the organs of the body, because of its innate preparedness for it. The perceptions of this kind of soul extend beyond the primary (intelligibilia) to which primary human perception is restricted, and cover the ground of inward observations, which are all intuitive. They are unlimited as to their beginning and their end. They are the perceptions of saints, of men of mystical learning and divine knowledge. The blessed obtain them after death, in Purgatory.”

It should be noted that Stuart did not choose to include the third paragraph, describing prophetic souls, until the controversial 3^rd edition."

“I should have lived before Kennedy died”

Managed to dig up a bit more of the commentary to Appendix P for that parralel world RPG 'River of Shadows'. Including some stuff about CharGen this time. It's all frustratingly incomplete.

Millers Crossing – The Cohen Brothers

Millers crossing is an origin point of, and continual influence on, Stuarts hat obsession. His belief that character generation must begin “from the head down, or, if possible, from the hat down” has been repeated in multiple interviews.

The connection of hats with a society obsessed by status, honour and deception is clearly influenced by the film. Character type and hat type have always been regarded as the same thing in every edition. It has always been possible to identify NPC types via hat types. (Unless a deception is being attempted.) Loss of hat has always been a character fate slightly worse than death. Total Party Hat Loss or TPHL is the nightmare scenario for any game. Games almost always end after such an event. Friendship groups outside the game will usually break up for a year or more after a TPHL, sometimes permanently.

Most readers will be familiar with Stuarts obsession with hats and hat-related cultures (indeed the 25 pages of random hat tables in the first edition could hardly leave one in any doubt of this) and his often repeated remarks that he should have “lived before Kennedy died”. However, few know that due to the disproportionate size, and unusual shape of, his head, Stuart has never been able to wear a hat with any aesthetic success. The cumulative psychological effect of this frustrated desire must have been a powerful engine behind the development of ROS.

Afghanistan, a Cultural and Political History by Thomas Barfield

The rivers run dry into the sand. The routes are embargoed, the roads overgrown by grass. The gem lies uncut from the stone. Chains bar the roads, drones haunt the skies. In the final corners of the earth and the Sargasso of empire, the only export remaining is war.

The development of conflict itself as a kind of product, an investment of last resort, seems unique to the game. Stuarts cross-linked equipment lists which connect the prices of items above and below the earth have never been bettered.

Critics have claimed that the equations used to link the lists together in a reciprocal manner are unstable, following the pricing arrangements long enough will lead to wild swings in costing and ultimately lead to the PC's becoming net importers of gold into the underspace. However this instability-leading-to-collapse is clearly a deliberate part of the design.

Stuart may be the first RPG creator to use notion of the Vertical Archipelago to explain apparently inconstant economic and environment factors in the game space. In nations, like Afghanistan, with dramatic mountain and valley ranges, the shifts in elevation and the micro-climates created by steep valleys means that goods produced by very different environments can be combined in very small areas.

In particular, Barfields description of ripe, locally grown melons being sprinkled with fresh falling snow in Kabuls winter market seems to have been stolen directly from the book.

A Paradise Built in Hell – Rebecca Solnit.

The Anarchist City of Solint ( with the reversal of two letters in the name) was clearly named after the writer. The desperate red-flagged flavela, crawling starfish-like in the ruins of the dystopia it will one day become has been a favourite of players since the 1^st Edition supplement 'Traitor Of The TimeCity'.

Solnit's (the writer) book also inspired the unusual social system shown in 'Traitor'. The citizens of Solint (The city) live every day knowing that the city they are fighting to create will eventually become a vast and corrupt Megopolis, which will then be destroyed in a cataclysmic war whose weapons will shatter time itself, driving the citycorpse in splinters back into its own history like bullet fragments in flesh.

They are also continually assaulted by burnt and voided living memories. Victims of the city's destruction in the far future. Warped and harried ghosts, hurled through the fires of their own destruction to desperately haunt an age long before their own. Mad and grieving they hunt their own ancestors through the ruins.

Despite (or as we can see from Solnits (the writer) book, because of) the continual physical, moral and psychic threat under which they live, the citizens of Solint (the city) are utterly heroic, selfless and brave. That this effect was achieved without numbing the more human, individual, personality-driven aspects of the setting is worthy of note. Later versions of the same supplement have not shown the same elegant synthesis.

The Insurgent Archipelago by John Mackinley

Enemies in the final levels are usually complex formations driven buy the unexpected blow-back from earlier, successful missions. As the players defeat enemies and force order onto the game-world, they discover that the imposition of order, regularity and system does not remove chaos but instead fragments it into strange new forms living in, and expanding, the proliferating gaps in newer more complex systems.

Dungeons invert to become city’s. Castles twist slowly into the earth and become new dungeons. By this point the PC's have assumed incredible new powers but their increased knowledge of the unseen consequences that can result makes them afraid to use any of them to the fullest extent. The randomised knock-on effects of high level spells make them all but impossible to cast. The last lines of high level verse must be curled back into the first in order to avoid catastrophic loss and to avoid risking the end of the game. This is almost impossible to achieve, due to the lyrical density required. Many players choose to leave the game at this stage.

A Commentary on Appendix P

A version of myself from a parallel world ended up making an RPG called 'River of Shadows. I couldn't get my hands on a copy. But I did find this chunk of analysis of Appendix P, which seems to be a list of books that have influenced the game design along with a commentary on the influence of each book.

Empire of the Summer Moon by C.S.Gwynne.

The horrific and sustained level of violence in the mid-to-late stages of the game are clearly inspired by Gwynnes relation of the Indian Wars.

The fact that in early drafts of the game all PC's were referred to as 'settlers' shows the clearest link. Though all such references were utterly expunged in the 1^st edition.

Stuarts controversial zero-sum approach to cultural and political development has attracted criticism, though it is difficult to tell if this is an ironic statement on Stuarts part. This may be the first development of 'ghost protocol' rule systems that play such a large part in later editions.

Blind Descent by James M.Tabor

Stuarts noted obsession with large underground spaces is well documented. The random tables for vast subterranean Karst formations give us some of the most poetic and lucid prose of the first edition. Many players recall being inspired to start their first game simply to explore these ex-luminous negative spaces.

Is is a source of almost universal frustration that the tables are almost impossible to use coherently. Later hacks and adaptations have produced workable versions, but always at the cost of the poetic element.

Stuarts self-devised system for 'easily and and intuitively mapping 3-dimensional underground spaces' using pipe-cleaners and beads has never been successfully used by anyone.

The Theatre Work of Edward Gordon Craig

Few players will fail to recall images very similar to this one

and this one.

Once again we see an obsession with vast underground spaces, the human figure (and human actions) isolated yet, somehow, focused by the rich negative space around it.

Few are aware that Craig's influence applies not only to the interior art, and creative inspiration for the Karstic tables, but also to design. This image of Craig's illustrated Hamlet shows almost exactly the same page layout and design sense as the 1^st Edition.

Though parts of the 1st edition are given as a Socratic dialogue, between designer and player and between GM and Character, attempts to present it as a dramatic work have always ended in failure.

Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack

A random roll for gender at character creation and again at every third level when in the presence of magic, is the most direct of Pollacks influences in the game.

Stuart caused controversy when a transcript of an alleged Internet chat emerged in which he railed against Pollacks 'hippie-ocalypse' and ranted for several non-punctuated pages about a wide variety of apparently unrelated political topics. Stuart has denied any connection to the transcript.

Pollacks influence is clearly shown in the magic system. The use of extended improvised poetics and the rapid power exchange between the player and game master, sometimes peaking in a total and immediate reversal of roles, is one of the most unique features of the game. Many players got there first taste of running a game after an unexpected use of magic and some of the most famous campaigns have experiences multiple, unplanned reversals of this kind.

Personal Memoirs of U.S.Grant.

MCLELLAN! Ah, who does not recall the first appearance of MCLELLAN in their game. That remarkable and engaging enemy/ally figure does more than anything else to add a much needed humanity to what is often little more than a disturbing palimpsest of strange encounters. The dice matrix used for generating Random Falstaffian Counterpoints of Occluded Motivation are one of the most exciting and most-often copied parts of the game. Here, if nowhere else, we can truly say that Stuart has added something to the hobby as a whole.

The Air Loom Gang – Mike Jay

The re-working of almost all villains in the setting as imaginary telepathic machines, manned and created by schizophrenics, is one of the strangest and most disturbing aspects of the game. Few first time players will fail to recall the final door in castle Roscoe opening to reveal, not the cackling Vampire Monroe (who had taunted the players during the whole level) but the shadowy, clattering form of an impossible machine, manned by the insane.

In fact about 80% of players who were introduced to the game by the 'Roscoe's Folly' adventure simply stopped playing after the first level. It is of interest that almost all the designers and writers for later editions of the game were drawn from the remaining 20% from the same adventure.