Mid-Month Miscellany, or, Hey man, are you down with all the voices in your head?

So, the gig is tonight!

I am going to play the whole set. I’m really proud of this! Considering that I had not played guitar for more than a couple hours per month, if that, for the last ten years or so, I’m really really happy with my overall progress, both in terms of learning the material and in terms of having the stamina and calluses to play through the set without cheating on any of the chords!

Here’s the set list. I've linked nearly everything aside from No F in Juice (No effin juice) because I don't think it's been recorded and As Yet Unaimed because we are just teasing it for 30 seconds to a minute.

1. Bag Lady (original) into Garbage Man (original) into As Yet Unaimed G minor tease (original) into the end of Stairway to Heaven (Led fucking Zepplin)
2. Publisher’s Clearing House (original)
3. Because Mother Said So (original) into Sinister Exaggerator (the Residents) If you aren’t familiar with the Residents, I have to stop here and strongly suggest you take LSD at some point and explore their catalog.
4. Gypsy Song (original)
5. Ignorance & Apathy (original) into As Yet Unaimed (original) into Shamabala (Three Dog Night) into Dear Prudence (the Beatles)
6. No F In Juice (original) into Pinball on the Water Duck (a mash up of an original, Pinball Wizard by the Who, and Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, which is every guitar player’s first riff).
7. Sittin' on the Porch (original) into Am I Evil (Metallica) into We are Here (original)
8. Seventeen (Sex Pistols)
9. Druid Krunch (original) into Thank You for Sending Me an Angel (Talking Heads) into Fisheye (original) into Hot Babes (original)

We have an hour and the music in the set is 57 minutes with NO pauses. Me and the other guitar player ran through it with no more than five seconds between songs earlier and it went pretty well. I wanted to play I Wanna Be Your Dog for an hour instead of any of this, but sometimes we don’t get what we want.

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Speaking of being your dog, I do not know exactly why, but I kind of want to write a short story where aliens come to earth and after seeing pugs and French bulldogs and fucking toadline bullies, decide in a fit of pique and poetic justice to conquer us and breed us into forms pleasing to them but agonizing to us.  Maybe something a little like All Tomorrows but probably less a work of speculative science fiction and more focused on the emotional and physical particulars of the horrendously brutal shit we do to creatures we claim to love.  Perhaps with a dash of On the Uses of Torture by Piers Anthony.  Not generally a fan of Piers, he's kinda creepy (though, I guess, pot meet kettle), but that particular story was pretty good.  

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Last week one of the guys in this band gave me a disc and was like “hey here’s that Area 51 stuff!” My understanding was that he (dude currently playing drums for us) along with our keyboard player played together in this band called Area 51. I have heard both of them mention it over the last few weeks.

I listened to the disc. First song I was like who the fuck is this guitar player, he’s nuts! What is this silly super intense envelope filter he turns on here? That chorus effect is really tasty and this guy knows how to lay back when he should. Is he doing this whole part with pick scratches?  Hahaha! I was like, damn this is creative and pretty good! So I asked the guys who was playing guitar.

It turns out I was in a band I have no recollection of.

This should not surprise me. The time period this recording is from is right around 1994-95. My life was in freefall in this period.  Reality and I had only the most passing acquaintance at the time. It was seriously fuckin' chaotic. Much of that chaos was self-inflicted - I'm pretty sure I'm playing through all borrowed equipment because I'd sold most of mine off for dope, so I guess it's no wonder I don't recognize the tones.  And the band itself only lasted a couple of weeks, it was something that got pulled together really hastily as a favor to a couple of guys after their guitar player and singer bailed at the last minute after a show was already scheduled.  We only played one gig.

But it was really weird to hear my own playing and not recognize it.  And it was a really nice surprise to like it - usually the interior critic doesn't give me much of a chance to enjoy my own work.

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Recently kyana at noise sans signal posted something I can’t get out of my head and think is brilliant. Kyana quotes another blogger’s post which I will meta-quote below:

Saw Socially Appropriate Noesis post by Liche's Libram and couldn't help but think that the list of things we consider "sane" that they present as an example of sanity, to quote in full:

"• the world makes sense
• everything will work out in the end
• bad people will be punished and the good will be rewarded
• but if good people suffer there’s an unknown good reason for it
• I am one of the good people
• causality flows from past to future
• the adults know what they’re doing
• I can trust my senses most of the time
• my emotions are mostly appropriate responses to my situation
• people have meaningful subjective experiences and laundry machines don’t."

would work as cross-out list to represent the eroding sanity quite well in a games where it is important.

As I read this I kind of went through it and automatically started self-assessing. The thing is, I think many of us are walking wounded who have at least a couple of these crossed off.  On the other hand, perhaps only a complete psychopath would have nothing struck through.  Bah, I don't know.

Still, I really want to try this at some point; I don't know if I'll use it as sanity mechanism or more as a method for helping a player settle into character.  Roll a d10 and cross off that many of these, that's what your character believes.  Or maybe it's more of a on a scale of 1-5 how much do you agree with the following statements kind of a thing.  Not sure yet.

I do think that this would have to be handled carefully, and I probably wouldn't try it without player buy in.  

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I have started work again on the World with No Extras, but it’s been going harder and slower, I think mostly because most of my current creative energies and time have been channeled into getting my chops up for this gig in late September and re-learning the material.  But I am working on Heliotrope Hill, and hopefully will have something to post at the end of September  / start of October.

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I'm interested in the phenomenon of urban exploration and how much like dungeoneering that truly is.  Again, it’s been a long time since I’ve done much urbex, but some of the places I visited were very very much like dungeons in that they were large enough to get lost in and contained elements of physical danger.  Three places in particular keep sort of floating into my head – the Peabody Estate, the Elgin Mental Hospital, and the Hinsdale Tunnels.

The Peabody Estate, especially, was very much like a dungeon in retrospect.  When we explored it, it was totally derelict.  Someone had bought it and started converting it into condos or something, but a lot of the original architecture was still there as well.  So you'd go from being in a half finished modern bathroom, lift a piece of hanging drywall and crawl through the studs into a massive chapel with ornate walnut woodwork.  The place was absolutely massive.  We tried to explore the basement but it was flooded to chest level with icy, murky black water.  We were dumb but not quite that dumb, and decided to stay out of the basement.

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A phrase that has begun to haunt me is, “The weather has changed.”  Seasonal changes seem to have a profound impact on me and the summer into fall change is one that always seems to bring a very strange combination of frisson and a profound sense of loss.  The beginning of autumn in the Midwest is spectacularly beautiful.  The last few weeks of September and the first few weeks of October are my favorite time of year, a time in the Midwest when everything is golden and crisp and so perfect it almost makes up for the rest of the year.  I tried to capture the feel of it in a piece I did for a game Dave over at Grand Commodore ran.  The piece is called Autumn in Troutbridge and is an early entry on this blog if you are interested.

Another sense in which the weather has changed is in the sense of climate change, and it seems to me that I may not get my golden month for very much longer.  It feels like 2023 is the first year where someone can shout the end is nigh and it doesn't even raise an eyebrow.  I’ve grown more and more pessimistic about the way we deal with climate change; it just seems to me that the forces demanding continuous growth are just too entrenched in our society for us to do much of real substance about it until that society collapses.  See the Termina entry from Max Cantor’s Weird and Wonderful worlds for what I think our society has become.  The only metaphor I know for explaining the cognitive dissonance of a civilization in which we simultaneously have more knowledge and more possibility than ever before and in which almost all of us feel like something truly catastrophic is about to happen is the rock at the top of the mountain.  I think most of us have a sense that the rock of western civilization has begun to roll downhill, and it is simply too big and too heavy for us to stop it.  We will have to wait until it comes to rest on its own, and before that happens, it is bound to crush whatever is in its way.  This is something I very much hope I am wrong about.  I would love for this to be a much more graceful and intentional degrowth, but man it's really hard to see that happening.

Of course, even without climate change looming, EVERY year may be the last year, just as every day may be the last day.  When this particular seasonal change between summer and autumn comes, it’s like this idea, this piece of intellectual knowledge, leaves my brain and becomes something I can feel in my body.  It is a terrifyingly beautiful feeling.

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I recently happened upon a piece of art by a guy named Erik Thor Sandburg and the graphic, surreal nature of it reminded me a little of the MUZAN E  (無残絵), (“Atrocity Prints”), Ukiyoe from the late Edo and Meiji period, specifically the EIMEI NIJUHASSHUUKU (英名 二十八 衆句) by Yoshitoshi and Yoshiiku.  This also brought to mind SHIN-EIMEI NIJUHASSHUUKU (The New Atrocities in Blood) by Kazuichi Hanawa and Suehiro Maruo, a much more contemporary work.  I became aware of Maruo’s work when I saw it featured on the first Naked City album in about 1990, but it wouldn’t be until much much later – probably around 2008 or so – until I saw more of it.  My wife and I were in a Japanese bookstore (we have one near Chicago, which is pretty fuckin cool) when I saw a print of Shin-Eimei Nijuhasshuuku.  I thought about getting it, but my wife thought it was pretty distasteful.  She's probably right.  She usually is.

But I've always been fascinated with what I think of as extreme or transgressive art - whether that's visual art like this or written, things like The Story of the Eye by Bataille or Eden Eden Eden, Pierre Guyotat's novel about the French-Algerian war.  That piece had a major impact on me and I've tried to do a write up on it a few times along with Lord Horror, but someone over at 3am wrote this and I think they did a better job than I could:

Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden (1970) is a modern epic. Published fifty years ago, it was written by a thirty-year old author in the south of Paris over the course of six months. The book’s thematic preoccupations with slavery and prostitution, and how the two overlap through history and the present, continues to generate a delirious rupture across the space of literature. Having passed away on February 7 of this year at the age of eighty, Guyotat is unable to witness the anniversary of Eden Eden Eden‘s half-century, yet the work’s monumental legacy still causes scandal, admiration, and tremors through what he described as the ‘Great Prostitutional Pandemic’ of our age.

One single unending sentence, Eden Eden Eden is a headlong dive into zones stricken with violence, degradation, and ecstasy. Liquids, solids, ethers and atoms build the text, constructing a primacy of sensation: hay, grease, oil, gas, ozone, date-sugar, dates, shit, saliva, camel-dung, mud, cologne, wine, resin, baby droppings, leather, tea, coral, juice, dust, saltpetre, perfume, bile, blood, gonacrine, spit, sweat, sand, urine, grains, pollen, mica, gypsum, soot, butter, cloves, sugar, paste, potash, burnt-food, insecticide, black gravy, fermenting bellies, milk spurting blue… are but some of the materials that litter the Algerian desert at war—a landscape that bleeds, sweats, mutates, and multiplies. As the corporeal is rendered material and vice-versa, moral, philosophical and political categories are suspended or evacuated to give way to a new Word, stripped of both representation and ideology. The debris of this imploded terrain is left to be consumed—masticated, ingested, defecated, ejaculated.

Maybe I'm just a sicko, but I think this kind of work has undeniable power.  I've posted a number of Muzan-e below, but you will have to scroll if you want to see them.  They are very much NSFW.

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The epigraph from Eden Eden Eden.  I gather it's Tamasheq and translates to "and now we are no longer slaves."  If I ever get another tattoo this might be it.

Further Adventures of the 400 Rabbits

July was a busy month!  I ran a few sessions of Lacuna, wrote a short story I think is pretty good, and did a bit of painting.

Towards the end of the month, I picked up some more stuff for Adeptus Titanicus and painted it up in the colors of my custom Legio.  Legio Solis has access to some fairly esoteric weaponry, including conversion beamers of all sizes.  I grabbed one of each of the Warhound, Reaver, and Warlord Conversion Beam weapons.  Here they are:

I also added two Knights Styrix. The volkite weapons they carry around go hard on void shields.

Here are those two knights:

These guys are the newest addition to the Centzon Totochtin, the "400 Rabbits."  These two are Cuatlapanqui (the Head Opener, left), and Papaztac (the Nervous One, right).

I am in the process of retconning my custom lore a bit and I am sure I will change some names around on my older knights.  I have learned a bit more about the "real world" mythology that I would like to incorporate. This knight household wears the same colors as the Legio Solis and are not considered a distinct entity, as is so often the case with knight households and titan legios.  Instead, the knights from this loyalist forge world are considered part and parcel of the Legio, although a distinct sub-group, referred to collectively as the 400 Rabbits.  They often act as scouts and skirmishers alongside smaller titans such as Warhounds and Dire Wolves, though from time to time they come together and act in concert to fell a much much larger enemy engine.  They Knights Styrix play an important part in those pack tactics as the volkite weapons they wield are exceptionally good at stripping away void shields, leaving such engines to the tender mercies of the rest of the rabbits, who go for the kill.  From the conversion beams of the Knight Asterius to the shock lances and ion gauntlets of the Cerastus Lancers to the simple but effective chainswords of the Knights Questoris, even a Warlord or a Warmaster can be brought down when the knights work together. Here the are the members of the Centzon Totochtin so far:

I will be adding others, I'm sure, along with a few more Titans.  I'm actually excited for a GW release for the first time in a while!  The upcoming Legions Imperialis release means they are going to be converting a number of resin kits to plastic, coming out with a new weapons sprue for the Warhound that includes arm missile pods, and offering a variety of terrain.  It looks like I am going to be able to finish building my city board after all and I am psyched for that!  I'll probably also eventually add a Warmaster and perhaps another Warlord or Reaver to the Sunkillers in addition to more knights...but the board will come first.  I have a couple of the FW city tiles for Titanicus, but they sold out before I was able to really get what I wanted, and they have been out of the city Imperialis terrain for months now.  I'd also really like to do one more traitor legio to balance things out a bit - I've always liked the Legio Fureans, but it's really hard to choose - I like the colors for most of the legios both loyalist and traitor, and of course I could always do my own.  If I can find colors I am satisfied with I might even try the Legio Tritonis.

Alongside that, I'm going to try to develop the lore around my custom Legio and the forgeworld they come from.  The Ad Mech in general have always kind of grabbed my interest - one of these days I should throw my Mechanicus army up here.

In other news: I have made very little progress on the Scarlet City project, I am sorry to say.  I have been on a kind of hiatus from the Dungeon23 project the last couple of months.  Just too many other things happening.  I know, I know.  But starting in August, it should calm down again quite a bit, and I will pick up right where I left off.  I looked my Notion site over again earlier this week, and everything looks good there, thankfully.  I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to try to make up the last couple of months or not - I guess that's probably too far out and I'm better off just sticking to what's right in front of me and trying to do one character a day.  I've got about 150 characters so far - I'll keep trundling along and hopefully, at some point towards the end of the year, I will double that number.

A World With No Extras VIII: Life is a State of Mind

It has been a while since I’ve posted - you can thank the Cook County Sherriff for that (to steal a Joesky line). In all seriousness, I’ve managed (I think!) to get together a group to play Lacuna Part I – so most of my available brainpower has been...

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...so the main blog-related thing I’ve been doing this month is working on my d23 project; I’ve finished off The Chop. Here, I set out to do “more normal” characters, Just Regular Folks, you know, and instead I wound up populating it with freaks yet again. And yet again, some of the characters from my fiction have shown up. I’m really glad I’ve decided to do this with a wiki-style tool – the webs of relationships have gotten exceptionally complicated, and I’m winding up with a six-degrees-of-separation kind of thing. This is sort of intentional – if you have been following this project, you will recall that one of the things I was trying to do with it was make a web of NPCs such that when the PCs took an action, the effects would ripple through the entire community in some way, and would even have recursive effects as what the NPCs did in response to the PC action caused their own ripples. I am starting to wonder what it would be like if I wrote a book where I just had a single character do one thing and then followed all the ripples and recursions out ad infinitum. Might be interesting! Or, quite possibly, it could also bore a reader to tears. I shall have to be quite careful if I try it not to be too precious about it.

Anyway, on to some of this month’s freaks.

First is Rebel Cell 94 – there are a few characters from the fiction here, one named Eli who I expect most of the folks familiar with this blog will know. Some characters who were only names in the past have been fleshed out a little. For example, there’s Christopher Trane, for whom I took inspiration from Ted Kooser’s poem Tattoo:

What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.

I’ve been reading a lot of Kooser recently – he has a kind of quietness to him, but that doesn’t stop his poems from being like dripping daggers held in the fist themselves.  And that poem captures the essence of Christopher Trane far better than I could, I think.

Rebel Cell 94 tries to operate in total secrecy, but they have been betrayed – Richard Darian and Harv Stroud grew up with a man named Thomas Byrd, and he was accepted into the cell on their word. He is a spy for the Cruel Duke by way of one of his retainers, Camryn Ramsey, who may be familiar from the last post about Sovereign Mount. Thomas has sold them all out both for fear and for monetary gain, and thus this particular rebellion is doomed, though they have not met that doom quite yet in this version of the city.

Another group that calls the Chop home is Ars Diabolicus – a group of artists who are obsessed with extremes, with transgressive art and achieving the sublime through excess. They create material meant to shock those who consume it into different modes of thinking and to take a long hard look at the conventional wisdom of the day. In addition to Faolán Delaney, another character from the fiction, we have Mallory Compos and Elyse Bradshaw, lovers who have formed an avant-garde jazz ensemble called Succubus, and the visual artist Harrison Stephens. His work is exceptionally disturbing – sometimes because of the material it depicts, babies being branded with hate symbols by smiling wolflike beings, an infant in an amniotic sac being injected with some puzzling substance by a sinister, hooded, skeletal revenant, half human half insectoid things feasting on decaying flesh, the world depicted in repeating tessellations of cock and cunt, and on and on. But even when his subject material is much tamer, his work still radiates a sense of menace. A burning refrigerator – what’s inside? A window into an empty bedroom at night. Harrison’s works are both prized and loathed by the critics.

Making up part of the Cross Street Merchant’s Guild, brothers Felix and Alex Mendoza look very similar but could not be further apart spiritually. Felix is an honest businessman, the older son who inherited their father’s business and who works as a tailor, taking both custom fittings for good clothes and mending clothes that are falling apart. His brother, Alex, meanwhile, is both a money lender and launderer. The kind of people that come to Alex for a loan are the kind that can’t get a loan anywhere else, and his rates are usury. But: he is connected. He knows Jace Blanchard from the Red Cartel, and helps convert Jace’s funds into “clean money.” Because of this, he is also afforded a bodyguard from the Cartel – a man named Brixton Orr. Brixton is beautiful, the kind of prettyboy that many men dislike and envy on sight, all ice blue eyes, square jaw, smooth but muscled model’s physique, and the sort who obviously spends hours on personal grooming. The pretty boy brooks no insults however, and is a supremely qualified combatant, skilled in all types of weapons as well as unarmed fighting, and is not in the least bit afraid to defend his honor.

Any or all of these people might be found from time to time in Blue Heaven, one of the Chop’s seedier drinking establishments. Blue Heaven also features live entertainment – sometimes it might be music, and other times it might be a strip show. Blue Heaven is not picky about its patrons, and both male and female strippers are featured in different parts of the establishment. The bouncer, a man named Zion Walters, has an impressive collection of tattoos, all done by Ryder Duran (who you may or may not remember as one of the residents of Shattering Stone). The dancers that work at Blue Heaven love Zion – there isn’t a single one of them he hasn’t extricated from some fucked-up situation with a patron who thought touching went with tipping.

Rounding out these places is a church – the First Church of the Holy Gyre. This is a place of contradictions – it’s run by a con man named Bexley Hunt, who is a classic grifter, and the operation itself really was set up to be his ultimate grift. However, by fate or by some dice of the gods, he has had a living saint, a real living saint, take up residence in the church. This man is Chance, and he is a humble gardener. He spends his days tending the garden in the inner courtyard of the church. Every now and then, a parishioner is sent in to seek advice from him. Chance has a way of putting someone completely at ease, and no matter what question they ask, he seems to be able to reply using the garden as a metaphor for the infinite circumstances of life. People who come to him seeking wisdom leave with the tumult in their hearts stilled, replaced by the idea that life is a state of mind, and their mind is at peace.  The idea that Chance may be incapable of understanding anything at all aside from his garden simply never occurs to them; His statements somehow manage to convey the essence of being present, and being mindful. In short, those who speak to him understand that they should focus on being there, fully present and engaged in one’s life.

Next up for WWNE: Heliotrope Hill, an arts and theater district..

A World With No Extras VII: Noblesse Oblige

I have made a table of contents for this project for anyone who comes across a later post and is interested in the earlier ones - you will find it on the righthand side towards the bottom of the blog.

This month has been rough in terms of maintaining my commitment to this goofy d23 project I have going on. As of today, April 29th, I have 25 character created for the month of April and most of that has been done in big, herky-jerky, catchup sessions. Cram sessions almost. BUT: I can always go back, dig in, and clean up – the most important thing is to get the work done in the first place, to get it out of my head and down somewhere where other people can see it.

It has been a busy month – workwise things are really starting to pick up and, having changed jobs recently, there’s still a lot for me to learn. I don’t get very much creative time; when I do it is usually interrupted every 15 to 30 minutes. I’m not trying to make excuses here, but those are definitely contributing factors. The other big factor has been a sudden glut of inspiration in fiction writing, which has spawned three additional stories thus far. So it looks like the Scarlet City is turning out to be pre-work for a novel after all. Still, I am going to continue working through the d23 aspect of this – it’s been fruitful so far and it may still wind up being a worthwhile RPG accessory.

This month I worked on Sovereign Hill. Quite a few characters from the fiction I’ve posted here live in this neighborhood. The Rude Duke of Solitude Spire lives here, as does the Baron of Barren Manor, and a host of smaller noble houses. The Duke remains a distant figure, hardly described, but some of his servants have stepped into inky flesh at this point – Camryn Ramsey has been a retainer for Solitude Spire longer than much of the city has been alive. Few can remember a time before he was one of the men behind the Ruby Throne. He is a scheming, underhanded, lying rat. He must be to have maintained his power for so long. He also happens to be able to put people immediately at ease around him, in spite of his reputation, and to make himself seem fair in all dealings. This is the result of long experience in the political intrigues that surround the highest office in the Red City.

A cadre of assassins is hidden here – it forms the base from which one of them, a man named Blackmouth, operates. The cadre is led by a geriatric woman called Grandmother; though she is ancient, none would dare gainsay her except perhaps, for her employers – and even they might think twice before doing so.

A six year-old girl named Darling also lives with the cadre. The cadre operates in Archetypes – some of which may be familiar, others alien. There will always be assassins named Blackmouth, Fog, Dust, and Komodo. Sometimes an assassin who is the exemplar of one archetype will become the exemplar of another. One day, Darling will become Grandmother, if she lives that long, but in the meantime, she is Darling.

Darling was taken from House Calix at the age of five, going willingly with Blackmouth after she saw her parents and therefore her future laying in tatters at her feet. Darling’s House was destroyed a year ago – a Ducal order of familial extermination for the crime of supporting a rebellion that Blackmouth carried out. There is still one servant left who is loyal to House Calix – Soto Collins, the former major domo. He is a man of many talents. Though he is unaware that Darling still lives, were he to find out he would stop at absolutely nothing to see her fortune restored.

In the meantime, he survives by the grace of House Hardin. Angel Hardin, Master of the House, is a small man, standing at just over five feet tall. He has wiry hair that grows in a great tuft from his head and deep set, intelligent brown eyes. He is urbane, cultured, and always seems to know exactly what to say.

Hardin genuinely thinks the nobility should be the servants of the people, and his presence at the Duke’s court is meant to encourage further work in this sphere. His wife is in full agreement. The other nobles think this is a dangerous idea, but Hardin is convinced it is the morally correct position. He is not in favor of a democracy, heavens forefend! But he is in favor of an enlightened nobility that serves the people. House Hardin is a formidable power, and this has kept them from being crushed for propagating these dangerously radical views. He uses Soto as a go-between to communicate with others about this sort of radicalism. Were he found out, no doubt one of the assassins would come for him, or perhaps the Duke would lean on House Cyprian to carry out this mission.

George Cyprian is in his early thirties, a serious man who recently started managing the affairs of House Cyprian. Looking over the books, he found he didn’t like what he was seeing. He outed a number of the family’s servants - including a few long-time retainers - for corruption, and had them put to death. This worked - those remaining ceased their embezzling almost immediately and the House’s fortunes have begun to turn around.

George’s main goal is to bring his House to the peak of economic and political power. What he inherited was in shambles - the execution of his father and subsequent disloyalty by the servants had crippled the house. 

George has begun to suspect that his wife, Zara Hardin-Cyprian, might not be entirely faithful herself. Zara does not love her husband, but she recognizes her duty to her house and does her best to maintain appearances. Angel and Frida, her parents, did their best to ensure she was aware of the responsibility the nobles had to the common people, but it simply has not stuck. Zara wants what she wants, wants it now, and sees no reason to deny herself, especially not for struggling commoners.

Zara is currently pregnant for the first time. She does not know this yet. The child might be George’s, but it is also possible that it belongs to her paramour, a man named Desmond Greer. She is desperate to keep this relationship a secret, as it could mean not only death for her and her lover, but dissolution of the alliance between the houses. In spite of this, she feels compelled to continue seeing him.


I have a few more to do, but I am planning on getting caught up on those today. Hopefully next month will be a little more consistent! Next up is The Chop – a rough and tumble middle-class neighborhood that produces people as varied as the cuts of meat that hang in the butcher shops and abattoirs and give the place its name.

Miscellaneous Illustrations

I've been having a difficult time with writing recently so I decided to use some of that time to do some visual art.  The paintings have been fun - I think I might continue to do a few more of those and then see if I can get a panorama.  At first I was thinking about trying to do the painting equivalent of an ambigram, but decided against it for now - I might still try.  I also might flip them all upside down anyway - it takes on a kind of Boschian feel when I look at them that way, like something from the Hell portion of the Garden of Earthly Delights triptych.

Red City I

Red City II

A while ago I bought a set of rapidographs.  I had a set when I was a kid and I really liked working with them.  I can't remember what brand they were, but this time around I got Koh I Noor "official" rapidographs.  And I got them out and got them ready and then didn't do anything with them for eight or nine months.  When I finally decided to use them, two of them, the biggest and the smallest, had developed some kind of clot that I just could not get out - tried soaking it in water overnight, etc etc.  The only thing I didn't try is a sonic cleaning and that's because I do not have a sonic cleaner.  But no luck.  Finally I just thought, screw it, I'll buy new nibs for these, and then I learned that they had been discontinued.  Such is life.  At any rate, the two medium thickness nibs, .25 and .35, worked well enough for me to just use those, and I may poke around to see if I can still find replacement nibs for the .13 and the .50.

Hypnogogia

I often have these incredibly vivid hallucinations when I am falling asleep.  Usually it takes the form of strange, monstrous faces and creatures surrounding me.  It scared the hell out of me when I was a little kid, but now I kind of enjoy the show.  At one point I started trying to write them down in poetic form for a sort of weird ass artpunk monster manual (see the Propheticum Somnium Hallucinationes if you are interested).  What made it tricky was that I had to allow myself to get deep enough to experience that hypnogogic state, and then rise enough to consciously transfix the image in my mind so I wouldn't forget it.  I stopped doing that but am considering starting the practice again.

A World With No Extras VI: Effort Over Time Stacks Up

I am going to forego the links to previous WWNE posts.  At some point I'll make an index.  Probably.

I have set a few goals for myself in terms of writing - one poem and one story per month, and this bent-ass version of Dungeon23 I'm doing where I make a character every day instead of a room.  Goals have been met. I wrote my poem for the month early; I wrote a couple of them, actually, but am split on posting them. I have been working on my story for the month, something semi-autobiographical, and I'm actually happy with the total output (over 10k words) but I’ve gotten to a point with it where I feel kind of blocked and am reconsidering my approach – I may do just random vignettes sewn together from bits of my existence that I find myself compelled to revisit because they evoke such strong emotions in me without trying so hard to string them together in a way that creates a meaningful overarching narrative. Or I may reframe it in third person - that might free me to access some of the emotional content I'm having a hard time with.  Bah. I don’t know. In the meantime, I’ve done something I often do when I feel kind of blocked up in one art, which is to switch up. I’ve been working on some visual art – kinda trippy pen and ink stuff, hopefully I’ll have something to show for it in another couple of days.

It really is interesting to note how consistent effort stacks up over time. The below bit just sort of touches on the relationships between a few of the characters I wrote up this month – there are a lot of other characters and a lot of other connections – I found the bit here almost effortless to write because it had all basically been done for me already, little by little. Maybe I really will do a novel at some point, lol.

The place I’ve written about this month is called Shattering Stone, an area of Red City that is, if anything, even more heavily disinvested in than Devil’s Torso. There’s a small patch of woodland in the center of Shattering Stone where a tent city has sprung up. The folks living there are often referred to as the Troglodytes, or just the Trogs. Most of these folks are simply not functional. They are deep in mental illness or substance abuse and live mainly in their own pain.

Wayne Copeland has been experimenting with entheogens for most of his life. He grows Salvia Divinorum, Fly Agaric mushrooms, and Morning Glory on a muddy patch of land behind the tents. He is no longer grounded in consensual reality and lives more or less in his own world where he communicates with numinous powers. While he is very rarely violent, he is unpredictable, and he scares Elia Landry, who stops by the Trogs encampment with some regularity to check on her brother Makai; every time she does so it hurts her to see the state he is in, but she cannot stop. For his part, Makai is grateful for his sister’s attempts to help him, but he is determined, along with Marshal Callahan, to drink himself to death.

Marshall was once a pretty conventional person; he worked at a salaried position, was married, had children, the whole thing. One of those children went missing, only to turn up dead months later, her poor body used and abused beyond reason. The stress wracked the marriage. Initially there were recriminations on both sides. This drove a wedge between him and his wife, and thus, when the body was found, they were unable to trust each other and could not grieve together. Instead of sharing and lessening it, each retreated inward with their own hurt, where it grew and grew. At the end of the marriage, they had not only not spoken to each other for several months, they had stopped even acknowledging the other’s presence. One day, Marshall wandered out of his nice house and into the street without a single backward glance. He has been trying to kill himself with booze ever since.

The Trogs are mostly older – kids who are homeless often wind up at Rack House. This is an abandoned mansion, a remnant of older, more prosperous times. There is no electricity and no running water, but as one of the kids that stayed there said, “Who the hell needs that shit anyway? We have each other.” They are runaways almost to a one, almost all of them fleeing from some intolerable circumstance at home; some of them have gone from the frying pan to the fire – Alana Merritt, a pretty girl with piercing blue eyes and raven hair who is a budding alcoholic, is being carefully targeted by a woman named Kaiya Fleming. Kaiya is a procuress. She was the one who kidnapped Marshal’s daughter, who was sold to Johnny Sharpe for the entertainment of his most distinguished clientele. She is a predator through and through, though it is only her experience as prey that made her so good at finding the right levers for exploitation.

While all the people who stay at Rack House are kids, Rocco Manning is really still a child. He’s thirteen years old and ran away earlier this year after finding out that his father, Luca, is a crew boss for the Red Cartel. Rocco despises his father and what he does for a living so much so that he would rather take his chances on the streets than accept having to live under the same roof with a man he considers a beast.

One of the ironies of Rocco’s relationship with his father is that he has run away to the neighborhood his father works in, though neither is aware of the others presence. In an abandoned factory in the middle of Shattering Stone there is a secret trap door. This leads to a facility where the Red Cartel manufactures and prepares drugs for traffic, a place Luca thinks of as “the office.” Luca has regular meeting with Quinton and Kiss Barnett, but he also sells product to Gabriella Riva’s Grey Disciples, to Dylan Faulkner, and even to Lee Riggs from time to time. Luca is highly trained in chemistry, and though he never talks about it, his initial motivation for learning was to help others; he wanted to develop new drugs that might have saved his mother, who died of cancer. Her sickness forced him to drop out of school to take care of her, and he had a series of low paying and demeaning jobs that barely supported the family as she got sicker and sicker. Watching the progression of the disease, combined with being denied his dreams began to twist him, and when she died, he broke altogether. He was an easy target for the Cartel leadership, and compromised himself willingly, seeing the drugs he ships as one of the only things that grants surcease from pain of existence. Luca’s people are working on several strains of benzodope, everything from “tranq” which relies heavily on xylazine and turns those who use it into something resembling the walking dead complete with rotting flesh, to “grey death,” a mixture of heroin, oxycodone, benzos, and carfentanil that looks like powdered concrete.

This is all produced under the auspices of Jace Blanchard, who is part of Cartel leadership. Jace does not fear being caught. He has a pet assassin, a woman named Luna Owens. Luna is a true psychopath. She simply does not feel empathy and does not see anything wrong with killing. She is physically strong, but more than that, she has an instinctive understanding of leverage, and knows how to get maximum power out of her frame. Her preferred method of attack is ligature strangulation; she wants to feel you die. She finds the sensation pleasurable and it makes her feel powerful. This is innate to Luna; it’s simply how she was born. She may have gone through life without ever actually killing anyone though, were it not for coming into contact with Blanchard, who recognized instantly that Luna was acting in a socially acceptable way; the key word being acting.

Next up: Sovereign Mount. This is where many of the folks who really run things live, the four noble houses – so I might actually characterize the Duke a bit, though I’m not sure about that yet. I know I will be characterizing the Duke’s assassin cadre – Blackmouth being one of these, along with a man named Dust and at least two women – Grandmother, who runs the show, and Darling, who is only six.

Oh!  And I am working on a totally homegrown dungeon as the penultimate encounter area for the players in my current campaign.  So that will probably be coming sometime in April as well (FINALLY SOMETHING GAMEABLE!)!!!!

A World With No Extras V: People are Portals

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

People are portals.  Someone said this to me at one point and I thought it was a fascinating statement.  It's true.  People are portals, and the labyrinth I’m creating for Dungeon23 is the maze of their relationships.

For me, Dungeon23 is about discipline – making time to create something each and every day. I have always believed that this is immensely valuable when pursuing any endeavor, artistic or otherwise. Creating something when you are inspired is fairly easy. Creating something when potentially you don’t feel as though you have any new ideas, or otherwise “aren’t in the mood,” is much more difficult. February has been tough for me in terms of discipline. I’m not off track or “behind” at this point, but there have been a few spikes – meaning I have had a couple periods where I skipped making my character for the day, perhaps even a few days, and then “caught up,” later on. But that does in part defeat the purpose for me and I need to be very careful about it.  Sustained progress each and every day is the goal.  Practice is the point. No doubt most of you are familiar with the phrase “a practitioner of the art.” This is the first time I’ve set goals for myself w/r/t writing for a very, very long time, and I need to be very careful about not following through, but also forgiving of myself when I do miss a day. Both lack of follow through and lack of forgiveness for myself could lead to abandonment of the work.

Right now my Dungeon23 goals look like this:

• One Place per month (I used to use the term Neighborhood, but I broadened the definition)
• One Faction per week (changed from family to faction - again to broaden the definition)
• One character and that character’s relationships per day.

I have also set two other creative goals for myself:

• One short story per month
• One poem per month

The poem and the story do NOT have to be good enough for me to want to publish to the blog. It’s more important that they get done period than that they are any good, though of course I do my best. But a meet the crew scene ala Goodfellas featuring a 15 foot tall mosquito called “Needleface” and a talking orange tabby housecat named “Mickey Barcode” is totally fine.

Actually that doesn’t sound half bad.

Anyway!

When I started the project, I was using Excel of all things, with the idea that having each character on a tab would make it easy to find the details you wanted and that I could release the files via Google drive when I was ready. That lasted for close to three weeks before I saw that it was an amazingly bad idea.

At the moment I am using a wiki tool called Notion. I think it’s pretty close to perfect for what I want to do, which is to create all these characters and link them together based on their place, faction, and relationships. I was going to have a friend look it over to see if it worked for them, but I ran into a snag – as long as I am the only one editing and adding to this stuff, it’s unlimited and free. If I bring someone else in, I have a limited amount of data I an use before I have to pay. I did some looking into this, and checked with their support team, and from what I can see, it will NOT cost me anything to make the pages public once I have finished with them. So I think this will work. Here are a few screenshots – you can probably instantly see why this is better if you compare it to the screenshots I had in part II of the excel files.  Everything underlined is linked.

I may still make some changes; right now I'm going with a kind of early modern feel - but trying as much as I can to leave out too many references to very modern things with the idea that a DM could lift the whole thing and shift it to any time period and tech level they might want.  That is easier said than done, however, and it's difficult to keep references to modern technology out of the text.  In addition, I'm finding that creating a character without placing them in the timestream or world makes them seem a little flat to me.  But these are things for which I might figure out answers as I continue to wade forward.

The most recent Place is a neighborhood called Devil’s Torso. Filled with abandoned buildings that have broken-window eyes which look down on cracked and potholed streets. The police here are ultra-aggressive, acting almost like a crew themselves, but everyone knows they don’t belong here. Places of worship and places to buy alcohol on what seems like every block. There is mayhem at all times of day and night, filth, profanity, and ignorance, violence so casual it’s like enemies with benefits and amongst it all, dreaming, living, wonderful, beautiful, resilient: humanity.

Two major crews have staked out territory in Devil's Torso.  The Almighty Amaranth Nation is led by a man who is almost hypnotically charismatic named Quentin Barnett, and his sister, Kristin “Kiss” Barnett. Kiss took an orphan boy named Emmanuel to raise as her own, and has raised him to obey her every command using a combination of love-bombing and sadism. Emmanuel is the Nation’s current top gunner, a thirteen year old kid who is faster than anyone they have ever seen, and more ruthless to boot. Quentin, meanwhile, is looked upon almost as a visionary or prophet.

The Grey Disciples are led by a woman named Gabriella, who has begun to supplicate dark occult forces in strange bloodletting rituals to protect her from the repeated assassination attempts of the Nation. Whatever she’s doing, it seems to be working, as she strides fearlessly through what she thinks of as her city and miraculously survives no matter how meticulous her opponents’ planning has been. Her older brother is a priest named Ariel who despises the entities Gabriella has begun to worship; there is a deep rift between these two and it is growing deeper. Ariel is saddened by this. For her part, nothing makes Gabriella sad or guilty save for the plight of one of her soldiers - Pierce Montoya, who at 16 has been languishing in a coma for the last two years, wounded while acting as a human shield in the first attempt on Gabriella’s life. Gabriella pays the healers and ensures his father and mother have a roof over their head. This situation is the only lever by which she might be moved.

Ariel works for a collection of humanists who have founded the Crisis Intervention Service, an organization dedicated to stopping violence in all its forms, though they specialize in gang-related violence and domestic violence. They are responsible for the fact that Devil’s Torso isn’t a full-blown war zone. Ariel is good friends there with a woman named Meadow Wise. Her name suits her – her wisdom is widely respected in spite of her harsh demeanor. Meadow has a knack for giving the most valuable possible advice someone could hear right at the moment when they are open to hearing it. Those who have not experienced this almost divinely-inspired ability think of her as unfriendly and unforgiving, but nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the other counselors and people who work at the Crisis Intervention Service consider her a mentor and seek her counsel.

Some kids are recruited into a different kind of crew – the Red City Art Ensemble. This is a loose organization of developing, famous, and washed up artists. One of these, Ryder Duran, is a tattoo artist who has started to become sought after for her intense compositions, especially those that use the entire upper torso.  She is petite, with flashing eyes and an attitude to match.  She is covered with her own work.  Avi Bowman, an eighteen year old kid who recently joined the Ensemble, has intense fantasies about her. Avi has a talent for technology and his main work involves light shows, especially for live music, and he joined the Ensemble after watching Ryder dancing at an event he was involved with. He has managed to hide it thus far, but Avi is also a budding sociopath who could wind up being a serial date rapist. He keeps this part of himself secret, so secret, but he knows it is there. It is possible that instead of flowering into a real monster, he will bump into Meadow Wise, to whom he will be completely transparent, and who may be able to help him develop into something and someone else, someone who values the people around them and wants to make a contribution to the society which they share.

This month I'll be working on Shattering Stone, the part of the city where people wind up when they truly bottom out.

A World With No Extras IV: The Medallion

Part I
Part II
Part III

The Medallion, the red city's financial district, buildings thrown into a hulking, black, monolithic silhouette by the crimson light of the evening.  Once this was a place where the children of the lakes and prairies brought their riches in the form of cattle, to be bought and sold, and eventually to be slaughtered.  Now the cattle have been abstracted and those dwelling in the steel towers deal in debt securities and derivative instruments, moving vast and imaginary fortunes back and forth, and hoping that no one realizes the riches only exist because a handful of important men agree they do.  Not everything is so sterile, though - the blood of innocents has soaked the ground, tainting the foundation stones, and wealth sprung from blood brings vice.  The homeless crowd out-of-towners asking for alms and find occasional work as runners bringing something illegal from another neighborhood to the dwellers in the glass minarets. Lee Riggs is one of these, a twenty six year old kid with a fresh face, an honest smile, and a switchblade.  His partner Rob is a wizened old man who used to be the safecracker in a crew of drugstore cowboys.  Both are homeless by choice, having been rejected by society and rejecting it in return. 

The homeless are mostly ignored by the cops.  Kace Vang and his partner Fatima Grant think of them as too troublesome to find given the usual pettiness of their transgressions against the law.  They focus on violent crime, which, while comparatively rare in the Medallion, is still all too frequent given the sheer number of people moving through and the fortunes won and lost.  Their Sergeant, John Garrison, has charged Grant, who stands nearly seven feet tall, to make it her business to take a gun forcibly away from someone every day that she works.  While they are on duty, Kace and Fatima occasionally stop in to the Medallion Java Club for a shot of espresso and a bit of gossip.  Grace, the owner's daughter, pours an excellent cuppa, but they spend most of their time talking to Rory Hendricks, the manager, who seems to know a little bit of everything happening in the Medallion.

High above all of this in the concrete and crystal cloud-piercers lie the offices of Hopper Financial Services.  Joziah Hopper has inherited the reins of the company from his father Amiri, who is still alive and puts incredible pressure on his sons.  Thus far, Joziah has been successful.  He is one of those rare men who can carry a habit and a job at once, a highly functional addict.  He speaks to no one about his meetings with Lee Riggs or his daily ten bag routine, or his hatred of the industry and the people therein.  He tells himself the dope is to keep him going and to help him meet the expectations of others, the only thing he has that is his and only his, but the isolation of the lie he lives does nothing but add to the mounting pressure in his mind.  One day that pressure may crack him, and it is hard to tell if it will mean a swan dive from a tall building, or if it will be his younger brother Anderson who pays the price or Alaiya Nash, the escort he hires from the White Rose Club to keep his secrets and hang on his arm when the situation calls for him to have a companion.  For her part, Alaiya believes in nothing she cannot touch, and is gathering information on Joziah which she plans to use to blackmail him.  Perhaps this will be the trigger that leads to his ultimate breakdown.  Or she may try to blackmail Johnny Sharpe, the ancient proprietor of the service for which she works, threatening to expose what happens at his "private parties."  She has toyed with the idea but her intuition tells her Johnny is much more dangerous than his aged frame conveys, and in this at least, she is right.  Johnny's own experience with blackmail has allowed him to wield influence like a weapon, and he has strings attached to everyone and everything in the Medallion.

Johnny's bouncer, Dylan, has a daughter named Promise who is wise way past her young years, having been raised mostly by the patrons and dancers of the club, and having guessed at some of the few things she has been shielded from - such as the aforementioned "private parties."  Johnny wanted to have her attend, but her father vowed to kill him if he did so, and Johnny believes him.  She is entering her teens and has found a pair of boys she can twist to her any whim in the form of Winston Meyer, a formerly homeless kid who has been taken in by the folks at the Medallion Java Club, and Christian McCollough, a teenager working in the mail room at Hopper Financial.  They both vie for her affection and would do nearly anything if she told them to.  These kids, still developing the ability to understand consequences, can be exceptionally dangerous in the right circumstances, especially Christian, who seems to have no limits to the hate he has for the hypocrisy and hubris he sees in the adults around him.

Winston, for his part, gives a little of his pay to Nola Matthews every week.  Nola is mad; she sees everything exactly as it is, rather than paying attention to the misleading pictures words place in the minds of most men, and this has driven her insane.  She is regarded as a prophet by the homeless, who intuit her ability through the pronouncements she sometimes shares when lucid, and is generally looked after.  She is the only one who sees Salem Jones for what he is, naming him Deathbringer, Hollow Man, and Soulthief, and those with the wisdom to pay attention have started to steer clear of him. Jones sometimes appears to be one of the homeless and sometimes appears to be a small time hustler. His real hobby isn't passing dope to Lee Riggs but stalking and taking those who will not be missed.  People are his playthings and his hobby is murder; never does he feel more alive than when he has someone at his mercy in the streets he refers to as his playground.  Any one of the people above could become his prey.

I've finished the first of the files I created for the "World Without Extras" Dungeon 23 project I'm working on a little early - the idea was a character per day, and I've finished 31 characters thus far.  I have changed the goals a little, with each month being a neighborhood, and within that neighborhood having several "families" which could be blood relations but could also be those associated through a particular place of employment or some other uniting factor.  This month after doing the first few characters, I decided the neighborhood would be the Medallion, the financial center of the city.  The "families" involved are the Hoppers, a group of blood relations and associations who run Hopper Financial, the police of Precinct 10, the folks who work at the Medallion Java Club, an excellent purveyor of coffee, the employees and associates of the White Rose Club, an escort service, and a group of people I call the Thorn Street Irregulars, who are mostly homeless.

The paragraphs above describe a few of the relationships between these people, but there are many many more connections, and I expect the number of these only to grow as I begin to work on other places within the city.  Those of you who run games can probably already see a few "hooks" as it were, though none of these were intentionally developed as such, and are more the organic result of the relationships themselves.  I still do not know if I am making a gaming aid or laying the groundwork for a novel, but it's been nice to have something regular to do involving creativity and writing.  There have been a few times this month where I forgot during the early part of the day and had to make time to sit down and create a character and think about the relationships they would have later in the day.  Once I actually got up out of bed to make myself do it.

It will be interesting to see the end result of these efforts, assuming I can sustain them, which I have every intention of doing.  I have found that if you want to get better at something you should do it regularly, and my hope here is that I will be better at character development and finding relationships between characters as a result of doing this.  When I was working in construction, I had a day where I hit one of my fingers with a hammer and it hurt like a son of a bitch.  My boss, an old man who was full of folksy wisdom like "The drywall don't get any lighter as you get older, go back to school," and "Mass and gravity always have the right of way," overheard me cursing and told me to stop, and then heard me say something about how HE never hit himself with a hammer.  

He asked me, "How many times do you think you drove a nail before you hit your finger?" and when I wasn't sure, he said "maybe ten thousand?" and I allowed that might be about right.  

"Well," he said, "when you've hit your finger ten thousand times, you'll be pretty good with a hammer, too."

A World With No Extras III - The Rogues' Gallery

Part I Here

Part II Here

So far, so good. I've been able to keep up with the one character per day pace of my weird version of Dungeon23. I've made it a habit to keep the excel open and it's usually the first thing I do, after the necessities of course. A quote from Jim Harrison's Brown Dog is appropriate here: "The first step is to pee and make coffee, which I can deal with, and after that what happens is not in firm hands."

But even so, I have managed to stay on track and am even perhaps a little ahead of schedule.  Only by a few characters though.  I have also started thinking earnestly about the different neighborhoods, what they are called, what goes on there, what the history is, etc.  So some of that work is done before it need to be as well.

It's been an interesting exercise; I can tell that as the project gets larger, it's going to get difficult to find information in it.  I've run into this problem with the current dungeon I am running - even with a well thought through layout and good hyperlinks in the PDF, finding information about a specific NPC or room that the players interacted with in the past and which has become relevant has been a challenge.  Lots of long-ass pauses while I flip around looking for what I want.

I do not want this project to wind up the same way, and to that end, I have been thinking about possibly making a wiki - I'd create master pages for each neighborhood (each month) with all the characters and families (weeks) associated with that neighborhood linked.  Each family would likewise link to each character within that family as well as linking back to the neighborhood.  Each character page would link back to the neighborhood and family, and also hyperlink to particularly  important characters in that characters life.  

I wondered if anyone had a particular favorite wiki site or tool they would use for something like this.  Really, something like a SQL database would probably be ideal, and I have access to a couple of very sophisticated database tools through work, BUT I can't give that access out to others and I want this project to wind up as something anyone can use if they wanted to.  Does anyone know of anything fairly easy to use that doesn't have ads splashed all over it?

It also occurred to me that there IS a not dissimilar resource to the one I am creating.  The focus is a little different, but having lots and lots of ready NPCs is an ancient idea.  I am talking about The Rogues Gallery, a very old supplement.  To honor this ancient resource, I am including two pictures from it.  The first is by the inimitable Erol Otus.  I LOVE this guy's stuff, but I am certainly biased - he was one of the first illustrators I ran across whose style I could recognize as soon as I saw the work.

Erol Otus - The Rogues Gallery cover

Next up, Jeff Dee.  Stylistically not quite as outrageous as the guy above, but still instantly recognizable.  

Jeff Dee - the Paladin page of The Rogues Gallery

These two artists did a LOT of the art in AD&D, and just like John Blanche with Warhammer (though not quite to the same extent, given how visual Warhammer is compared to D&D) they really helped shape the "world" of D&D, or perhaps I mean the possible worlds of D&D.  Their vision certainly comes through in many of the old books.  I think and hope that a little of their vision comes through in my games as well.