ISOTYPE

Nowadays we take this kind of graphic for granted, as a staple of the more highbrow kind of serious news outlet:

Number of cars in USA vs. rest of world, 1914-28

 The style has a name. It is ISOTYPE, a movement that most people probably don't even know was a movement, let alone its connection with social democratic ideologies in 1930's Germany. If you've ever been told in a statistics class that icons should illustrate quantities by varying in number, not size, you've learned one of the main principles of ISOTYPE design.

The influence, indirectly, on my own 52 Pages approach can't be underestimated.

Lifespan of animals

Lifespan of monsters (under attack from adventurers)

Maybe it's a little incongruous to illustrate rules for adventures of swords and magic using a Modernist graphic language developed in the 1930's. And maybe not - considering it's not the real ancient world or Middle Ages our games are simulating, but fictional products of 20th century fantastic writers. ISOTYPE is industrialization, but also does surprisingly well at accompanying the standardization of pulp literature into rules and monster statistics.

More stuff:

Gerd Arntz collection of ISOTYPE icons.
Links to essays on ISOTYPE.

Take Your Scrimshaw Dice And Shove Em

I know it's bad enough to play a dice game where players are encouraged to bring their own dice to the table. I know this because I was having a conversation with the ghost of legendary bluesman Slippery Okra Van Buren and when I told him he just shook his head and offered to hold on to my wallet for safe keeping.

I know it's worse when players then get possessive about their dice and develop all kinds of rituals and superstitions. I have some news for you. Your "super special lucky die" is actually a loaded die due to inevitable manufacturing defects. You are not blessed by Gary Gygax's ghost, you are cheating at roleplaying. In fact, sometimes I think the "sometimes roll high, sometimes roll low" mechanics of yore are a blessing in disguise because they route around dice bias.

The World Series of Dice is not having any of it.

But hey, I try not to get bent out of shape about it. And then along comes the character who bought these dice that only Abdul Alhazred can read from across the table.

OK, so those last couple of 3D printed ones look cool. But leave them in the display case, wouldya? You're not doing yourself any favors, either; your most lightweight side is the 1 and that's going to constantly roll to the top. And everyone else, it's bad enough you bring your own dice but now I have to trust you to read them off from their 6 inch legibility range? And don't you know that special symbol is robbing your natural 20 of its game-galvanizing power, as everyone sits there going "Uh ... is that a 1 or a 20? Oh, a 20. Uh... cool."

Your dice can be pretty ... but first and foremost they're tools of the game. And everyone else at the table gots to be able to read them.

Does Violence Make Sex OK For You?

A couple of things have me thinking recently about shock-value. The main one is my new-found awareness (via a thread on the RPG site that has since derailed into a piggy-pile of hate) of Ed Greenwood's now-infamous description of the sexual proclivities of his NPC, Alustriel. Which in turn fueled a piggy-pile of its own some years ago on ENworld.

So, what's behind the "creepy" and "icky" and "squicky" feelings that not very explicit descriptions of a super-powerful free-love wizard-queen and her perpetual elven hot-tub orgy conjure up in so many people?

Well, some of it surely is principled prudishness - "I don't want to see any kind of sexual depiction, ever." Some of it is a kind of horror-of-the-nerds - "You can have all the sex you want, but don't mix it with my gaming!"

But what if instead of a goodly queen and her consensual pleasure jacuzzi, you had descriptions of a cruel demon empress, genitally tortured male slaves, raped women forced to bear demon babies? Would you see the author of those scenes described as a "dirty old man"? Would he be accused of projecting his own sexual fantasies into the fiction?  Or would this stuff be considered kind of staid, traditional, in a game that started out with a naked chained female sacrifice on a cover? You tell me. 

Writers of that kind of "extreme" scenario may get called out on sexual politics, but they're also taking a more usual step than you might think in fantasy gaming. And it certainly avoids the cardinal sins of being uncool, and hippy-dippy, and happy-smiley. I mean, that Elfquest orgy - so embarrassing!

Again, you tell me. Do you give stuff that mingles sex with violence a free pass because it's edgy, bold, transgressive? Or, actually, because it's strangely traditional in the fantasy and horror genre? Or, also, because the motion-picture rating cliche is more true than you'd like to admit - violence is more OK by an order of magnitude than sex - to the point where violence can actually make sex more acceptable? Perhaps the real revolutionary is the one who cuts sex free from its pulp-fantasy whips and chains and altars.

Consider this. Some creators mix depictions of sex with violence because "that's the way it is, man."  Some, on a kneejerk level, because it's part of the genre. Some, no doubt, do it because that's what sexually excites them. Still others, to force a more existential kind of confrontation. But there have always been those who do it because on some level they think sex is bad, they think violence is bad, and the best way to reinforce the badness of sex is to mix it with violence and gross-outs. Like so:

All of this sets me up to write the next entry: How to shock, and why.

The Fantastic Through Weirdness

Moving beyond written setting elements to create surprise and wonder for your players, we have already seen the ease and limitations of the random way.

The way of Weirdness is just to pull things out of your imagination. The better and more informed your imagination, the more wondrous things appear. Think of a Renaissance wunderkammer ....

The museum of Olaus Wormius

Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and the pictures that inspired it ...

Lord Dunsany's jewel-like story vignettes ...

Each one perfect in its self-containment, the artistically described miniatures of Weirdness are best described from the surface going inwards... beginning with an impression, a synaesthesia, an emotional feeling, a sensory package that only then takes form by association.

To take an example: the image of rainbow colors on a black background. What does that bring to mind?

Gems against black velvet
Bright eyes, multicolored, curious in the night
Small bright-eyed skittering creatures, hoarders of gems
Halls of black volcanic rock, the creatures barely visible unless they open their brilliant eyes
Smoke thick in the air, black and billowing, multicolored sparks of magic, fireflies
Bright cascade of tones, hurtling in the void
The Rainbow of Midnight, unnatural, a black-skinned queen resplendent in gleaming enamel and polished stones
Darkness and serenity, then sudden bedazzlement, a brittle, tinkling surprise quickly enough gone

We have here the set design and cast for a whole area in an adventure; its appearance, creatures, ruler, hazards, inconveniences and treasures. Self-contained, without deeper meaning, the variety can be sustained for one session or two before boredom sets in and we're off to the next.

The trouble with this method? The same as with random generation, but on a larger scale. Random generation gives you a seeming variety that eventually resolves into a gray mud, like an array of randomly colored single pixels. Whimsical sensory environment generation gives you bigger pixels - about the size of mosaic tiles - but with enough time and distance the variety here, too, resolves into patternless gray.

We need a way to arrange the pixels, to pick meaning out of the random impressions. This is the deeper meaning of Resonance, and the method of the fantastic I'll explore next.