Battlemallet Planet

We’ve not finished moving house and this last weekend called for a trip to the Midlands to collect things. You can do this all on the M1, but I decided that was for wusses who are also wimps, so I took the A1, got lost and ended up in Nottingham. No big pain – I went to Warhammer World. Think of it as a tiny museum that is 90% gift-shop, 100% Warhammer.

There’s an exhibition. £7.50 for five rooms. For a lifer like me – nose pressed against the Games Workshop window in Colchester aged six – that’s incredible value for money. It’s a mixture of miniatures and dioramas. Big dioramas.

I’ve not taken photographs. Partly my temperament, partly because other people have done it, partly because it’s like dancing about architecture. The point of a diorama – of any sculpture – is its three-dimensional solidness and the implication of frozen time and intercepted movement. Photographs are cool – sometimes really cool – but the real things are sublime. I was reeling, howling, giggling. Literally dumbfounded. The largest diorama is 20’ x 10’ and two storeys tall, made with easily £50,000 of toy soldiers. Patrick Stuart's articles on the aesthetics of toy mans are top reading – treat them as a lecture series, take a trip to the Warhammer World exhibition space as primary reading for your end of term essay.

The macro diorama is viewed from a balcony stairway that goes around the outside of the exhibition space. You enter on the higher storey to divinely survey a battlefield of immense proportions. This is the right place to start you – that cinematic, scenic vastness can only be experienced once and any prior exposure to the diorama would diminish the impact. But this confounds the dramatic tempo of the piece, because you then encounter the most significant conflict – between this guy and this thing – at the very highest spire of the diorama, very early into your exploration. Atop the highest spire is the dramatically correct place for their conflict to take place, but as you descend and circle the piece you are guaranteed not to encounter any single event as dramatically significant again.

With that said, the macro-diorama (and others, one depicting an underground conflict between ratmen and dwarfs, another a mountaintop battle between space Vikings and bugs) makes excellent use of verticality and terrain features that obscure sight-lines to create sub-scenes: what is the background to one area becomes the foreground in another. It invites a three-dimensional exploration, revealing an extended moment. The simple semiotics of warfare makes the interrelatedness of these scenes and the possible consequences of different moments immediately apparent (a Genestealer crawling from a vent while the ground-crew of a Thunderhawk make final flight preparations: dwarf miners with candle-topped hats emerge into a chamber filled with Skaven broodmothers.) Inevitably this puts me in mind of the sublime level design of Dark Souls, multi-tiered, infolding, nautilus-like, secretive, though some older games – Shadow of the Colossus, Prince of Persia– have the same tease and reveal visual journey, the same solid understanding of 3d space. Or Romantic landscape architecture, where gentle undulations of the land would reveal and obscure different features of the grounds as visitors 

walked towards a country manor.

Before the first exhibition room proper are a few cases of history. The first models cast by Citadel, the first Warhammer rules set. Ancient dioramas that were used in White Dwarfs of old, a time when entire universes were defined by the whims of hairy Midlanders. They are miniscule in comparison, expressionistic – a single scene, the moment of crisis. Undead breach the dwarf fortress gates. Elves ride forth from the woods to slay the lichmaster. Sanguinius lies broken, the Warmaster leers, the Emperor ascends to destroy him. That scene is less than a cubic foot. The seed within a crystal forest.

Aged seven, I press my nose up against the window of Games Workshop. There are two dragons, one white, ridden by an Elf lord, another Green, ridden by a goblin shaman. The goblin dragon has purple warts.

Aged eight, my birthday, a card from my parents. The illustration is the box art from Titan Legions: an Emperor Titan makes war against an Ork Mega Gargant while armies of millions clash in the ruins of a city larger than is possible. Inside is a gift voucher for Games Workshop – just enough for a box set. I buy the Warhammer 40,000 2^nd edition box set. The cover art is by John Blanche – a red and yellow armoured Blood Angel brandishes a primary blue power fist and a boltgun against hordes of onrushing Orks. He doesn’t meet our gaze – he’s looking for things to kill. Inside are twenty Space Marines, twenty Orks, forty Gretchin, a cardboard Ork dreadnaught. I grasp the rules, though I hardly play with them. The books, referencing twelve sided dice and Electoo monks and John Blanche Gothicism are portals.

Aged eleven my mother dies and, without understanding that I’m doing it, I focus myself on things that I can control – homework, computer games, learning a future history that has never existed. There’s no internet yet, really. There’s White Dwarf and conversations with friends, and over-excitement in the store with the elder-statesmen employees, venerable at the age of eighteen.

Recently my father returned a selection of my possessions long since forgotten in his house. This included that eighth birthday card. Now I can see how crude and ridiculous the fighting machines are: the phallic plasma cannon of the Emperor Titan, the distorted perspective that means the warring armies are discharging their weapons over the viewer’s left and right shoulder rather than at each other. I’ve framed it, and it will go up somewhere in the new house.

I live! I die! I live again!

This is a post about having a child.

In some ways the baby is like a drug. I am addicted to her. The high when she smiles, or coos, or gurgles, or looks surprised, or does something new (no matter how trivial, banal, or derpy) is just magnificent. It's a rich, mellow high, like a great wine, a Christmas dinner, seeing a friend after a year apart and picking up where you left off. It's a high you feel good about enjoying. The crash, of course, is brutal. I don't know why the NHS doesn't just automatically diagnose all new parents with postnatal depression: even if you have naturally robust neurochemistry and a cheery demeanour, the combined assault of sensory abuse and sleep deprivation will shatter you. Then there are the other similarities between a child and drug abuse. You stop seeing your friends. You stop taking care of your other needs, like washing yourself or getting dressed. All your money and energy goes into feeding your habit.

Then there are the ways that having a baby is cosmically weird. This entity, which wears a human face but bears no resemblance to any human I have interacted with, wriggles and writhes and gurgles with an animal sentience. My relationship to her is profoundly strange. Sometimes she is an abusive, bipolar partner, alternately granting me affection and then horrible, nerve-shattering emotional abuse. Most of the time she is like a patient, and a prisoner, and my beloved. Basically she's like the writer from Misery. I am Nurse Wilkes. (Now it is I who is the metaphor for heroine). Eventually my baby will stuff a burning manuscript in my mouth and beat me to death with a typewriter. Teenagers, amiright?

Can I recommend having a child? Honestly, no. No. All the things that come with having a child - you're not ready for them. You would hate them. The loss of freedom and the vertical escalation of responsibility is not something you are ready for. It will unmake you. It will dissolve all your certainties and grind your life into paste. It will kill you. It will resurrect you. Rebuild you out of your splintered remains. The new you will be happy. It doesn't matter if the new you is more or less happy than the old you - the old you is dead, dust in the wind. They cannot be compared.

If you think that you are ready to have children, you're wrong. You're no more ready to have children than you are to be dead - because after death and children, you no longer exist. Something new does, that thinks it is you.

I enjoy the memories of the thing that I was. And I love my baby. I'm getting used to the person I am now. It's all a bit much.

We saw Star Wars

*Here be spoilers*

Seeing films in the cinema is more complicated now. The baby is not the best moviegoing accessory, prone as she is to shrieking like her legs are being sawn off, and projectile vomiting (a good three foot range.) We deposited her on the grandparents, and she spent the duration of the movie happily asleep, lashed to her grandfather.

My thoughts having seen it:

Episode VII is like drinking a pint of Speckled Hen after lent -  it doesn't matter that it's a thoroughly average example of the form, it's exactly what was missing, so it feels brilliant. The best and worst I can say for the film is that "it does the job." It's a workmanlike retread of Star Wars tropes, the Hero's journey, magic samurai and World War 2 dogfighting. Turns out that's enough.

It's a kid's film. The morality is black and white (with the concept that a person can change from one side to the other, rather than exist in a grey area), it runs on narrative causality, and the geopolitics are at the level of complexity a Trump voter could understand. That's all great. The last time a Star Wars movie had believable geopolitics it was a right dog's arse. Space fairytales are rad.

JJ Abrams style is more readable than I thought. +Zak Smith had a good discussion thread that identified some of the signs - travel is so easy and communication so fast that space is functionally very small, and locating a person is only ever a matter of knowing where they are, not undertaking a journey to get to them. (I wonder - is that something an iPad and Satnav child would even notice?) I don't think Abrams is good at incidental texture either - while the plot clips along at a fantastic rate and much more happens than in any of the original trilogy movies, the incidental and often banal details of the OT (things like briefing scenes given by unnamed military personnel, the many different technicians failing to repair the Millenium Falcon in Empire, the multi-stage ritual of entering Jabba's palace) act as narrative greebling, suggesting a scale to events that extends outside the bounds of the movie. Abrams manages it for Rey, but fluffs it completely with the Resistance and the New Order.

Kylo Ren is really beautifully portrayed. Top scenes - removing his helmet, and trying to pray the lightside away. He reminded me of Malfoy trying to be the man who can kill Dumbledore in Half Blood Prince. Hotvader is definitely in. The concept that being bad is also a lot of mental effort, that people are naturally inclined against, is a very nice one to see added to the lexicon of villainy.

Starkiller Base is nowhere near as cool as Death Star. Dieter Rams would hate Starkiller Base.

I think that's the extent of my original or semi-original thoughts.

Children are Lovecraftian

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they enter the universe from outside it. They are an imposition of existence out of nothingness that was not and now is. I existed for twenty-seven years before my daughter was part of the universe. She will never, truly, comprehend that, because her universe began to exist only when she was born.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they manifest themselves within the flesh of an adult human and wrench their way bodily into the material plane in a nightmare day-long ritual of pain and gore. Have you even seen afterbirth? Google it. Tadah! Now you know how Shoggoths look. (Or DnD Black Puddings).

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are (at least to begin with) a profoundly abstract consciousness, a minimal, machinelike, binary dot of need or satiation. They comprehend nothing and experience everything in ways that adults have forgotten.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are vampires. Fucking vampires. They feed on your energy and love and use mindrays (and oxytocin) to enslave you. I am a ghoul now. I am a sleepless thing eating bugs and worms. I exist to serve the beast.

Lovecraftian in the sense of - they are a physical manifestation of deep time, and the knowledge you will be superceded and forgotten, and only through mimicry and memetic transfer can you hope to raise feeble dams against the onslaught of entropy that will drown the fortresses of man.

We took the "Make more meeples" action

Eleven months ago, on the train to Manchester, my girlfriend called me and told me she was pregnant. This was unexpected. I was travelling to Manchester for a two-day training workshop on public sector commissioning protocols as they applied to arts organisations, and to meet with a Mancunian theatre with a particularly excellent approach to youth engagement, and for another meeting with an artist-led company with a great reputation for participatory arts practise, and then a daylong meetup of the This +5 Sceptered Isle OSR community. I was not prepared to hear about our fecundity. I skipped out on the OSR meetup. Then (if you've done the maths you'll be way ahead on this one) about two months ago we had a baby.

I say "we". My girlfriend did most of the work. The terrifying, mind-shattering work. I'm surprised that more of the bible isn't about childbirth. Or the Iliad. Literature in general. The canon. Anyway, two weeks postpartum, as if to prove that she is a mad hard bastard who could put a Glaswegian longshoreman into a coma with just her outgoing personality, my girlfriend applied for and got her dream job. Now we're moving to York.

We have a baby, who I alternate between calling Bugglesnuff and Professor Wiggles, and we're moving to York, and I'm going to be a stay-at-home dad. It's all a bit new. All a bit... original. I suspect I might have a thing to write about.

The two types of monster manual you meet in heaven

Like everyone else in the LOTFP G+ community I picked up +Patrick Stuart and +Scrap Princess's Fire on the Velvet Horizon and +Rafael Chandler and +Gennifer Bone's Lusus Naturae, which are excellent windows onto all four creator's brilliant work.

In a game of Shag, Marry, Avoid, played with monster manuals, I would marry FotVH and shag Lusus Naturae. (What would I avoid? I'm a monster manual whore. I eye up the rubbish third party 3e monster manuals at my FLGS, and those are some well-thumbed volumes that weren't exactly lookers to start with. I guess I mean that I would shag Lusus first.)

Lusus is immediately compatible with you. It's easy going, it has loads to offer, and it's really obvious that it's ready to play. You know as soon as you set eyes on it you're going to find something fun to do with it. Maybe you'll return a few times, try out a few things you've never experimented with before. Maybe you'll hit it off and find yourself being drawn closer and closer after each session, slowly building something more meaningful than just that rush of adrenaline, a connection with the implied plot that gradually infiltrates your campaign. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just going to be a one time-thing - one monster that you can drop into your next session, a few recurring baddies, some nice flavour for your setting. This is one to try out and see what you and it can get up to together, because whatever happens satisfaction is guaranteed.

FotVH is not a one-time thing. Opening FotVH you know that it is going to change you. You might break off a long-running game just to make time for it, just to make sense of a single one of its ideas and find out what it means to play in the way this book implies you need to play. You'll find yourself making compromises  you never thought you would make, adapting your campaign in order to better respond  to it, accommodate its idiosyncrasies and needs. Ultimately it will make you want to be a better person, to be good enough to receive the gift of its strangeness and light.

There are two kinds of RPG content I want. One is the shaggable stuff - the stuff that is immediately, obviously fun and ready to play. Lots of +James Raggi's stuff is like this, most of +Zak Smith's stuff too, all of +Rafael Chandler's (Pandemonio is the most fuckable RPG I've ever read), Metzger's Metamorphica, anything that Ken Hite and Robin Laws talk about... anything that is ready to rock, doesn't want you to change, doesn't put up any barriers between you and having fun. The marriagable RPGs are rarer - Patrick Stuart produces nothing but*, lots of Zak S's stuff is as well, +Greg Stolze's Unknown Armies - the kind of RPG that cracks your skull open and sticks its hands into your brain and rearranges the pieces so that suddenly you realise you have always been wrong, that sort of thing doesn't come along often. Probably just as well. One heart-breaking romance at a time is just about all I can keep up with.

*Pat how much money / shells of extinct sea creatures / crystalised eyes of arctic amphibians will it take for you to write Exosuits of the Hot Chicks into a starcrawl RPG with some kind of armour-sculpture-beauty-power stat system and get Zak S to illustrate? Because that not existing is one reason causing the heat death of the universe.

Forgive Us - thoughts on play

On the weekend Team Anti-Capitalism, the years-old spurts and fits Unknown Armies game I'm part of met up from the different corners of the British Isles for a long awaited get together. Except that +Pete Wolfendale was suffering from velvet brain worms or some similarly horrific mental complaint, so instead I ran Lamentations. I didn't have prep time and also before the game I had to move half a tree and a bunch of gravel into a skip, so what happened was I ran Forgive Us by Kelvin Green.

Spoilery thoughts below:

1. This is a Warhammer Fantasy Role Play module, right? Everyone knows this? It's not on the cover but that's what it is. I mean, that's a great thing. Nurgle is the best plague God. Who even knows about other plague Gods? Except old testament Jehovah I guess. But he doesn't have Plague Bearers. There are no Plague Bearers in this module yet but you could fit them in. It would be like taking apart an Ikea bookshelf and using it as a standing desk or a cupboard or what have you.

2. This is a really perfect module for a one shot. I read it in about twenty minutes and the players went from plot hook to clusterfuck in about three hours. That included the players reloading their save after they got to the end and Nottingham was a flaming hellscape with face-fucking tentacle monsters everywhere and they hadn't got a clue what was going on and they didn't even go in the vault. So we reversed time, let them fiddle with the vault, then two of them died in a pit trap and one of them ran screaming into the chalk caves below the city. Pretty good.

3. This module has the structure of a three panel comic. Panel one - hook the PCs. Panel two - they explore the Dog and Bastard. Panel three - The Thing. Keep it snappy and don't forget the point of panel two is to get to panel three. If your players really chaff at losing characters maybe don't drop this on them? Because surviving this module would involve not experiencing it.

4. You could start a campaign off the back of this module. That would be good. The mooks who die in this one are only there for the prelude. Then run the campaign using All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

5. Don't skip out the second adventuring party. My players didn't even say hi to them, but having this other group of jerks rummaging through the thieves' complex helped keep the players nervous and honest and on point. Also good for visual things - torches lit in the other buildings, a man with wounds down his arms after an (unseen) encounter with the dog thing.