Dark Souls 2: in light of B/E Dungeons and Dragons

I wouldn't be running a Lamentations game if it wasn't for Dark Souls. I wouldn't be running fantasy at all - it would be Supers or Grimdark or Steambots or fucking in the apocalypse. No dungeons, no random result tables, far less giggling from behind the GM screen.

Dark Souls lit a fire, then branded me. It's an S&M kind of game. I've written about it before. It took ninety hours of my life and made every other kind of fantasy - that is, fantasy with hope, with answers, with concessions to the participant - seem hollow and wan. Now, belatedly, I'm playing the sequel.

Exploration

You need to explore Dark Souls, because I can't tell you or show you what makes it so beautiful. But it has these features and they are ones I constantly fail to realise:

Vistas. God the vistas. You can see for miles. More even in DS2 than the first. Oceans crash against ruined coastlines. Mysterious lakes open underground in a forest of infinite fossilized trees. Hell gapes. The ruined thrones of Gods fade, still magnificent, buttressed against decay but sliding downwards still.
Deep, dark, dank. Dungeons are filthy, miserable, oppressive, terrifying, deep, dark, down, down, pits, filthy pits, filthy murderholes, hopeless tombs, inescapable tombs, charnel holes, horrible, horrible, nightmare, horrible. Death Frost Doom comes close, followed by any other dungeon module after I remind the players that if all their torches go out they will inevitably die trapped in a cave beneath the earth.
Infolding. Spaces in Dark Souls are puzzlebox complete, wrapped around themselves in snake-knots. Progress is, in part, a matter of solving the space. Physical awareness is necessary and also challenging. In DS1 whole levels connect to each other through hidden shortcuts. That's missing in DS2 and the game feels weaker for it - DS1 is a mega-dungeon, DS2 is a series of modules connected by fast-travel.
Verticality. More so in DS1 (so far) than DS2, levels rise and plunge. You are climbing towards heaven or descending through hells without end. Fortress walls and deep culverts, the walls of gullies, stacked halls and basements and sub-basements and caves and tombs and mires and mud and hells. The best DnD module I've read in the last year is Deep Carbon Observatory, and this is one reason why I love it.
Tease. You see something shine on the far side of a locked grille. You see a chest in the middle of an open room. You see a trap, laden with cheese, and the game says "surely no-one could be fast enough to get the cheese without getting caught." What now you see, soon you will climb or descend. Teasing is much, much harder in pen and paper, because players have things like rope, spiderclimb, and crowbars. I'm still working out how to do this properly.

Skill

You need two sets of skills in Dark Souls. One is mastery of the combat systems. The feel of twiddling a joystick obviously doesn't translate to the feel of rolling dice, but the aesthetic quality is something that carries between - combat is nasty, brutish and material, based around the reality of steel clattering from stone when a swing goes wide.

The other skill is awareness. I'm finding DS2 much, much easier than DS1. Part of that is that my combat skill is far higher after ninety hours playing the first game. Much more of it is that I have spent the last year designing dungeons that reward careful (but rapid) consideration of the environment and punish thoughtlessness. This is how Dark Souls gets you. Some fights can't be won - so run from them. Some ground is bad for making a stand - so abandon it. When an arena is surrounded by archers you must circumvent them, find a way around behind, stab them in the spine. Is a target obvious? Watch for enemies coming from behind, or above, or from another angle you didn't predict. Don't take the built environment at face value. (So there's a cage-elevator - can you stand on the roof instead of inside it? Do you really want to be inside a cage?)

Asymmetry

Dark Souls does not care that you aren't ready for it. The challenges put before you do not follow a neat progression curve from simple to complex; evaluating when you are outclassed is part of the challenge. Get it wrong and you'll die. It also doesn't care if you find a way to abuse the environment, your skills, your abilities. Within the scope of what the game simulates everything is permitted; your ability to exploit that is also part of the game. These are two faces of the same coin. This is DnD.

Experience and progress

The XP system is DnD. Killing monsters earns you their souls, which you can cash into stat improvements when you return to a bonfire save-point (in DS2, you can only cash them when you return to "civilization"). Souls can also be spent buying equipment, a kind of reversal of the Moldvay system that XP is derived from the amount of treasure recovered.

An element I didn't notice when I played DS1 is that progress between stats and acquiring and improving equipment is ambivalent - an investment of a certain quantity of souls into equipment is worth as much to your chances of success as an equal investment into improving your stats. It breaks the sense that there is a strict linear progression to make a character more potent. I wouldn't have noticed this if I had been playing a more "balance" minded DnD system (which is perverse, because DnD 4th states explicitly that progressively owning more powerful magic items is a necessary component of character progression). The OSR vibe seems to reject the notion of an objective measure of power for a character - Carcosa is a great example of this, where 1st level characters can potentially kill Cthulhu if they get their hands on a sufficiently powerful laser tank. The use value of a power, upgrade, item or whatever else a character might pick up is what we look at to determine how much of an improvement it is for a character, not numerical values associated with it, and its use value is in part a function of the player's ingenuity.

World

There isn't one world in Dark Souls, though in DS1 the thing that stands in for it is called Lordran and in DS2 the thing is called Drangleic. It is a Viriconium, materially inconsistent but held together by metaphorical and thematic gravity; it is also a world unwinding, spooling down, decaying. In both you are undead, sentenced to an eternal return, fumbling through never-to-be-explained mysteries in a twilight world. There is a sense that you have arrived far after the point at which all the great battles have been fought - you are vermin in the rubble. (If Athas had a more evocative past it would be almost as interesting as Lordran.) Time and space are put together wrong, worlds slide over one another - this is part of the game system, with players able to summon allies into their game from other worlds, or unexpectedly invaded by savage murder bastards. If you attempt to reconstruct the game's continuity you will discover that characters have arrived in this part of the world from different points in time relative to one another.

Again, experience it. Watch some YouTube videos if you can't play it. The feeling is of a world larger than you, a world that is entirely indifferent to your success. In DS1 there is a prophecy that, technically, you might fulfill - or not. In DS2 you are adventuring for purely selfish reasons. These worlds do not pander. They do not accept you. You are an interloper. If there's one thing I'm pretty happy with in my DnD-ing (and which I think Basic promotes while, say, Pathfinder does not) is the sense that you are a small agent in a large world.

The other games

Dark Souls is at least three games. The first is the belt-sander of fantasy horror that you press up against while playing solo. The second is the co-operative boss-fighting mode, a design a bit like Monster Hunter or MMORPGs. In both games there are bosses that are functionally unbeatable without assistance from online allies - in DS2 these come really early. You can practice against bosses by making yourself available as an ally for another player in their game, and beating bosses is also the most effective way to regenerate your humanity, a status you require in order to summon allies to your game. And while visiting other player's worlds you will transfer tactics, secrets and ideas like gene transfer between bacteria.

While this is the closest to playing in a "party" that Dark Souls gets, it feels very little like the adventuring party in DnD. There's no conversation; parties are short-lived groups of players coming together with characters who exist in entirely separate worlds. Maybe the drop-in play of Flail-snails games or Pathfinder society resembles. The joint-play experience foregrounds combat and repetition - while it is very helpful to have another player join you to help explore, they are essential for boss-fights. As far as RPGs with satisfying placement and target-selection based combat goes this is more like DnD 4th or Iron Heroes than Basic.

The third game is one I haven't experienced yet and probably won't. The PvP elements that make much of the solo game a nightmare metamorphose into a competitive duelling mode. High level players seek out worthy opponents to fight with their max-leveled characters. This is transcendence of the fighting system out of the base fundament of the game - the people who play this way are resolute masters of the systems that make up the game and they are using it as a playground, a stage.

Necromantic Bumpercars

Play Cave Evil at a big group event. Someone is going to be eliminated in the first half an hour, and it's a ninety minute game, they need somewhere else to go. This is good game design.

Page six of the rulebook: "You are now an evil wizard!" Yes! You are an evil wizard. You absolutely are. You are a necromancer. You dwell in a crushed complex of ancient necropolises, a geologically-compacted strata of aeon-dead hell cities, a seeping place of hellfire and gore floods and liquid madness slime. Your servants are demonspawn and necromonks. Your nemeses are other necromancers.

Relatively this means you're an ethical everyman. If a gorebeast eviscerates an undead mammoth in a cave and no-one is around, does it make an ethical difference? (This fits in with the brutal metal aesthetic - an ethically quarantined zone of mindless violence perpetrated on the mindless and the violent, a reflexive self-punishment of the brutal by the cruel, the kind of self-contained atrocity that makes moral opprobrium infantile and claims of rebellion laughable.)

Production values are just high enough that you won't chunder. Once you pop the pieces they won't fit back in the box. If you want a board printed on board, not paper, that's sold separately. The money's gone on the art. Every card has a unique monochrome illustration of bones and gore and pseudopods and tusks, and there are about 666 cards.

It plays as you expect it to play. The really good news - you can dig tunnels. Thank Christ. This shouldn't need explaining. Spells are equippable items, and the ability to carry items, use them, and cast spells are all separated out. This creates monsters who can cast spells but need a friend to hold them, and also allows for items like carts (bone carts, gore carts), which carry other items and are obviously brilliant. Also some items are statted up as monsters so they can affect the movement speed of the unit they're in or take up space in an army or wander around on their own. The random event cards can stack as deep as chaos permits. In the last game everyone had to pass a minion to the player on the right - then a traitorous monk murdered its master and Neil was eliminated from the game.

The game uses d12s because fuck the system. I have been misusing the timer for the game and failing to summon the Great Old One early enough. My favourite is obviously the Black Old Goat - once summoned he runs around the table auto-tunnelling new sections of the board and obliterating anything he touches.

One of the necromancers you can choose to play as has the ability to split into two smaller wizards. It is a constant dilemma.

Book Weevils

When the first Rust Monster was created by Vorn in the chemical wedding of Primordial Iron and Primordial Rain, disjunction entered the cosmos. The Hanged God of Murderers and Chieftains perceived a future without metal, in which the feeble bureaucrats and their papyrus-and-charcoal remembering cloths would rule a world of miserable clay and straw. He feared this gross inversion in which the strong would bow to the weak and the sword would crumble before the stylus. Most of all he abhorred the libraries, those gatherings of remembrance cloths in which the weak schemed and plotted, spreading their minds across pages and pages of incomprehensible marks and generations of never-communing bodies, and feared that without the righteous vengeance of angry iron these blasphemies would spread throughout creation.

In his rage he made the first Weevil and their papyrivorous breed has persisted since.

Book weevils are no stranger to the libraries of the world. Not only do they feast and breed among the stored knowledge of centuries but their shells can be ground to create a potent and long-lasting ink - ironically, many book weevils dine on paper imbued with the ground hides of their ancestors. Book weevil shells are worth three times their weight in silver to an antiquarian, scholar, priest or wizard to create this ink.

To protect their precious knowledge from book weevils, a wizard may wish to prepare the spell Protection from Weevil. This is a level one spell and cannot be memorised or cast, though a wizard must record it in a spell book. The wizard writes out the spell as a scroll using ink made from book weevil shells, then inserts it among the bundles of books he is protecting. Book weevils will be drawn to consume the scroll sheet before any other paper, and will wither and die shortly afterwards. The spell will protect 500sp of books for one week per level of the caster - it could protect a larger library for a shorter time, or a small library for a long time. At the end of this time the scroll is completely consumed.

If a book weevil eats a spell scroll or spell book other than Protection from Weevil it undergoes a metamorphosis. It gains HD and an INT score equal to the highest spell level it has consumed, swelling in size and mutating rapidly as it absorbs the magic. In addition it gains the one-use ability to cast any spell it has eaten, just as if it were using a scroll. Its ability to make good use of a spell depends on its INT score - an INT 2 weevil casting "Identify" will not have much success.

If a weevil consumes any of the following spells it gains the ability to use them once per day, unless it consumes the spell again, in which case it gains an additional use:

• Bookspeak
• Light
• Spider Climb
• Speak with Animals
• Stinking Cloud (projects from the butt, like a bombadier beetle)
• Explosive Runes
• Web 
• Secret Page
• Dig
• Cloudkill (projects from the butt)
• Speak with Monsters
• Permenancy

The spells a book weevil can use are visible on its shell, though only a Magic-User using Read Magic will be able to tell what they are at a glance.

A dead book weevil that has not cast all its spells has several uses. Segments of its shell casing can be used as spell scrolls for the various spells it has yet to cast. Alternatively if the casing is ground up into an ink it is worth 200sp of components for preparing scrolls or transcribing spells per level of unspent spell on the weevil's casing. A weevil with nine HD and nine levels of unspent spells on its casing can be used in a Summon ritual to guarantee an audience with an avatar of the Hanged God. You don't want to do that, though.

Weevils despise denizens of frozen, northern countries (with which Vorn is associated) and artists who labour for many hours to produce beautiful books, and will do everything they can to consume their precious works.

The Planes

A piece of cloth, a length of thread, a needle. Start there.

The cloth has two dimensions - length and breadth.

The thread has one dimension - length.

The needle allows the thread to jump instantly from one location in the length and breadth of the cloth, to another, by traversing a higher, third dimension.

In three dimensions we pinch the cloth so that two points are adjacent in the third dimension, though their relative positions on the cloth remain the same. The needle draws the thread and connects them. We release the cloth and it returns to its original shape. Now that same, single dimension string emerges in two places on the two dimensional cloth without appearing to traverse the distance between them.

Do this again and again. Dozens and dozens of threads appear and disappear, dancing back and forth through the cloth. They reveal their single dimension again and again at different points across the cloth to give it colour, to differentiate sections within it, give them structure and content. Gradually we create a tapestry, and give the impression that the differences, colours, structures are all features of the two dimensional cloth. This is not true. Then cloth has colour and form because it is interwoven by many, many, single-dimension strings.

The world is a four dimensional fabric and everything within it is the result of other, immanent dimensions revealing themselves, like threads of complex colours emerging through the fabric, then returning into the place outside it and emerging again and again at an unlimited number of points in space and time. A mountain is a point on the thread that is all possible mountains, and so is every other mountain, and they are separated from each other not only by their position in the four dimensional world but also the distance from one another along the thread. Each instance of fire is a point along the line of all fires.

In dimensional travel an adventurer exploits this fact to defy the four dimensional world and travel between points that are distant in space or time. A dimensional gate, and spells that allow faster-than-light communication or travel through time, acts like a needle. The magic has two stages - first, it either creates or reveals two points in four dimensional space that are adjacent in the higher space beyond our cosmos. Then it alters the energy state of one of the single-dimensional threads that connect the two points to permit four dimensional entities to travel the miniscule distance in higher space needed to move between the points.

This is incredibly dangerous; even slight corruption of the energy signal will result in hideous (but hardly ever fatal) mutilation and mutation of the subjects travelling across the gate. Altering the energy state of a dimension can have catastrophic side-effects as well, as changes ripple throughout all the other points in space and time where that dimension is immanent, potentially unleashing chaos throughout the cosmos as changes propagate without limit. And the four dimensional world is not infinitely flexible - by contorting the world in higher space in order to bring two distant points adjacent it is entirely possible to rip and tear it in others, creating black holes that will consume material entities, and allow entry for the unimaginably strange things that live in the higher space beyond.

The single-dimension threads that give our world texture also exist outside four dimensional space - the realm into which the threads disappear when they pass to the far side of the fabric. They are suspended in the higher dimension which contains the four dimensional worlds that constitute our (and all possible) worlds. In this realm of infinite infinities almost everything is chaotic and uninhabitable void, but there are also unlimited domains that have form and coherence which a four-dimensional entity could understand and conceivably survive in. Bundles of dimensions knit together to create planes of endlessly repeated and iterated forms, weaving strange properties into a cloth that mimics the function of the four standard dimensions and gives the impression of space and time. In places the planes intersect with four-dimensional worlds. A mountain beyond the plateau of Leng might open onto a plane of infinite mountains, each one subtly distinct, each one a concatenation of the dimensions that gave the first mountain its form.

A connection between a plane and the world is almost always a naturally occurring feature - some wizards speculate that a planar conjunction is the point at which a particular set of dimensions enter our world for the first time. By finding these connection points and making themselves aware of the plane beyond, through magic, scarification rituals or drug trances, an adventurer can pass outside the normal world and traverse a space outside space. Planar travel is at once safer and more dangerous than dimensional travel.

The plane of water is an infinitely vast and deep ocean filled with drifting predators and eyeless killers on a scale beyond earthly reckoning. The infinite, yet relatively tiny area where it is adjacent to the plane of air is filled with vegetation, plankton and drifting civilizations afloat in cities carved into the chambers of nautili and the shells of gargantuan horse-shoe crabs. An infinite distance
below this the cosmically black ocean bed crawls with crustaceans the size of cathedrals feeding on the carcasses of amorphous creatures vaster than empires. The mariana trench opens into this plane and allows passage for its most miniscule entities into the material world - creatures like krakens, aboleths or the avanc.

The labyrinth plane is the nightmare and the dream of every adventure. It is a land of dungeons, of cells, chambers, pits, tunnels, catacombs and crevasses sewn together without human logic. It extends in all directions, passages and tunnels sometimes leading on for hundreds or thousands of miles before doubling back or simply ending in a dead end, and in other places intricately and almost intelligently laid out to resemble palaces, temples and lairs. The few living denizens are brutal and hardy predators that can survive for aeons without feeding, then emerge from hybernation in a storm of teeth, limbs and hunger. The undead are everywhere, mindlessly patrolling or organised under the command of greater creatures that use their tireless labour to hunt out exits into material worlds. There are cruel and unnatural traps that would be useless to protect an actual trove, death machines that swing into life on unpredictable triggers in defence of empty alcoves, generated by the inevitable logic of the plane. Treasure is abundant but often absurd - a shining statuette may reveal itself as a solidified mass of slime, a gleaming sword sets the wielder on fire and turns their beard into mice, and a whole chamber tiled with black flag stones is actually made from gold, hidden underneath a layer of radioactive black paint. The greatest dungeon makers of the ages pride themselves when they discover a connection from their dungeon into the labyrinth plane - though they seldom return.

The Westerland is an infinite wilderness of mountains, forests, cold rivers and lost ruins. Any adventurer who heads West has into the unknown has a chance of arriving here. It is a land with a thousand civilizations, each one a tiny city state founded by some long-dead adventurer who carved herself a little stable ground among the turmoil. Nomadic groups travel across this plane in great migrations once in a generation, arriving with news of distant cities, with never-before-seen trade goods, with lethal weapons and vile appetites. In the Westerland there is always a ruined keep, there is always a mysterious cave, there is always something unknown. The wilderness cannot be trained.
Dimensional travel across a plane is impossible: there is no way to bend a plane in higher space to connect two points within it as it is not coherent four-dimensional world. But planes connect to many worlds, and it is possible for a traveller to cover a great distance within a plane, enter a world and travel through that, and re-enter the plane at a far distant point. The secret roads between worlds and planes are among the most jealously guarded secrets of archmages, demons and gods.

It is possible for a group of travellers to walk those roads in complete ignorance. To a group who become lost in a worldly wildnerness they may notice nothing as they leave normal space and enter the infinite Westerlands. A group could quest for years before deciding to turn back home, only to discover there is no road and they have no home, and they are far away from the world they once left. They hear of a magical shining doorway at the bottom of an ancient ruin, but as they carve their way deeper and deeper down they begin to suspect that there is no bottom to the ruin, only ever deeper darkness, limitless depths of cruel and inhuman traps and passages. Lost and confused they strike out in search of some missed branch in their path only to emerge through a ransacked tomb into a desert of ash. The carved faces of long-dead kings lie buried in the black sand, and fat white worms dance around them in mourning.

For those who travel the planes there can be no return home. Merely stepping beyond the mortal world changes them. They know what every sentient entity has feared since birth - that the universe is so vast as to render every achievement of their species below meaningless, and that the universe is itself only one among unlimited trillions, and the collection of those infinite universes is utterly insignificant compared to the infinite planes beyond, and that if most of the world is hostile and most of the universe is empty and most of the planes are chaos, how much more hostile and empty and chaotic must be the higher realms that hold all those numberless infinities?

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - Francis Wayland Thurston, investigator

Sometimes an Orc is just an Orc

I've been murdering Orcs this weekend. Hundreds of them I'd say - thousands, perhaps? I've set some on fire, and loosed giant dog monsters onto others. Some of them I mind-controlled first before sending them to their unwitting end against their fellows. I have manipulated their politics and sliced their throats, pinned them with ghostly arrows, made their heads explode.

I'm playing Shadow of Mordor. It's really quite good.

Chris Plante wrote a rather good piece about it, describing it as compelling but morally repulsive. To quote:

"The concept of this game is shocking when you think about what's actually happening. As an ultra-powerful white dude, you use fear and extreme acts of violence to manipulate an enemy's behavior, destroy its militaristic structure, and ultimately gain control of it in the form of living bondage despite being outnumbered by the thousands. Really, chew on this: This is a video game about a spurned man terrorizing an entire foreign culture, literally killing, branding, torturing and enslaving hundreds of living beings. And really they're only tangentially connected to the man's real enemy: another ultra-powerful white dude."

Chris also loves the game, by the way, describing it as incredible fun despite what he sees as moral repugnance. I only mention that because when I was searching for his article I discovered many incredulous forum posts (mostly Reddit) appalled with his criticism, then proceeding to characterise him as a handwringing antifun social justice warrior. I assume that anyone reading this has a better reading-comprehension level and understanding of cultural criticism than the redditors, but hey, I don't want to mischaracterise Chris. But I don't agree with him either.

As a symbol in the construction of narratives I find Orcs, particularly the Orcs portrayed as they are in Shadow of Morder,  to be almost entirely meaningless. They have been reduced below the level of a trope - in fantasy fiction they aren't even wallpaper, they're wallpaper paste. Used as they are here they are simply so bland a cultural artefact as to be morally inert.

When Tolkein invented the modern fantasy Orc he was reconciling contradictory tendencies; on the one hand, he was borrowing from Nordic mythology the racially-evil Svartalfs (dark elves or dwarves) to help him achieve his poetic epic for England, a tale of triumph by divinely-inspired mortals against apocalyptic adversity; on the other, in the story he was telling he needed a credible geopolitical military by which Morgoth and then Sauron could do battle against the knights of Numenor, the Elves, or Gondor. The resulting species / culture / entity has a reality only as large as the pages of Lord of the Rings. As M John Harrison describes in his essential essay "What it Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium", a story is a device whereby an author exercises his beliefs and interests, and while we can speculate beyond the edge of the page all the content we find there comes from our self, not the author. Orcs aren't real, they're a device.

Those Orcs as originally conceived are racially evil but geopolitically organised. They have material and territorial ambitions but their personal motivations come from mythic cycles and folk tales in which the arbitrary violence of the natural world is externalised to malevolent humanoid entities. This makes them utterly unlike anything you will find in real life. While there have been violent, destructive and cruel human civilizations, they have always contained an internal logic that makes sense of their actions in relation to the environmental conditions around them, and they have contained the capacity for beauty, kindness and love. The Orc race exists solely in antagonism to other races - it has no internal construction, only boundless cruelty, malice, cravenness and ugliness. It exists purely to realise a narrative conflict between mankind and the other. That's why it was invented. That's all it can do. Look inside it as a literal rather than a narrative construction and it makes no sense.

This tension is a classic conflict point in DnD. At some point a group of players will come across the women and children in an Orc settlement. The Monster Manual tells us that Orcs are Evil. Do the party therefore murder all the Orc babies, destined to grow into monsters? In roleplay we construct a world in our heads following the rules of the world as we understand them - narrative, physical, or some other logic. In narrative logic there are no Orc women and children - Orcs exist as strong, ugly, violent, male stand-ins for the universal forces that seek to undo human work, ready to be killed in an act of aimless yet somehow universal justice. If we encounter Orc women and children then physical logic intrudes. Presumably Orcs have a domestic society and a material culture. Presumably they make war for a reason. Presumably they could be raised to be gentle and kind.

Monolith Productions, the developer of Shadow of Mordor has gone to great pains to reinforce Orcs as absolutely evil. So far I've only encountered male Orcs and I'm confident this continues to the end of the game (I presume that the Orcs in this version of Middle Earth are born from gooey pods in the earth as they are in Peter Jackson's trilogy.) The AI barks for the Orcs always see them revelling in cruelty or spouting off about how great they are, like psychopathic frat boys. They spend their time in constant infighting, betrayal or murder, and when one of main character Talion's brutally murdered victims is discovered, his compatriots write him off as having been pretty rubbish in the first place. The only actions they take in the games are violent (against one another or the player) or cruel (to the mysteriously immortal slave humans dotted around the landscape,) They exist purely for the player to exercise power against them and realise their narrative purpose - as a universal evil, a function of reality, something as inevitable and thoughtless as your child drowning in a pond, a snake biting your lover's heel - yet physicalised, something we can enact a crude justice against.

An old metaphor is like a coin passed around so long all the writing has worn off. Everyone knows how to use it but nobody knows what it says. Just so with these Orcs. Tolkein said his piece sixty years ago, and whether or not he intended it his Orcs were metaphors for the soldiers in both World Wars, and the industrialised urban workforce, and the many forces changing the pleasant English countryside. They were the West Indians arriving on the Windrush and the grant of Indian independence. They were the twentieth century crashing down on a man who was otherwise isolated in a shining fortress of words.

By the time the Orcs arrive at Shadow of Mordor all the meaning has been battered out. Orcs are bad. That's what Orcs are for. Where you have a hole in your fantasy story that requires a bad thing, put an Orc in it. Shadow of Mordor has all the politics of a Saturday morning breakfast cartoon, and it gets that third hand from other sources. Interpreting the Orcs as a culture is like interpreting the Masters of the Universe as the UN - something you can do, but a shallow vein for enquiry and not one you'll draw revelations from. Whatever violence was done to Orc culture was done by Tolkein when he invented it.

If I find anything morally repugnant, it's that I and a huge number of grown adults have spent dozens of hours engaging with a narrative with all the moral complexity of a children's cartoon. That's not new though - that's just videogames.

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On an entirely unrelated note - wouldn't a wrestling game featuring Shadow of Mordor's procedurally generated enemies and nemesis system be utterly perfect?

The Attack Book

When wizards go to war they do so with many weapons, both covert and overt. One such tool of infiltration and sabotage is the Attack Book.

To construct an Attack Book, the wizard must first spend one year cursing his adversary by reciting his name at the crack of dawn and spitting into a bucket. When this bucket of spittle is collected it is mixed with crushed beetle shells to form an ink. For each level of his nemesis the wizard must write one section (16 pages) of refutations of his opponent's philosophy and theorems for the book. It is then bound using troll leather.

When an Attack Book is inserted into its target's library, it immediately reduces its value for research purposes by 1000sp. The Attack Book begins to usurp neighbouring books, subtly corrupting their information content so that they are misleading, fallacious or otherwise worse than useless. The target wizard may seek for answers to his growing confusion by rummaging deeper and deeper into his library, bringing out ever older tomes and exposing them to the corruption of the Attack Book. The Attack Book continues to reduce the value of the library by 500sp per month.

When the library has been reduced to worthlessness, the Attack Book and its slaves will assault the target wizard, launching into the air and buffeting him with their spines and folds. After they have killed their target, Attack Books return to the shelves or stacks from which they came; they will instinctively attack any magic user other than their creator. Once he has died they will attack any sentient creature that attempts to open a book in their presence.

A swarm led by an Attack Book has the following stats:
No. appearing =
HD: 1 per 500sp original value of the library

Attacks: Everyone in a 10' area
Special Defenses: Regenerates d6 HP/round - suffer double damage from fire
Treasure: d6 random level Wizard scrolls spontaneously generated by the process of textual corruption; small trinkets as per the original Wizards' library.

Spielerfahrung

I wrote an article with the lovely Pete Wolfendale that appeared in the pop philosophy volume Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy a couple of years back, and I've returned to thinking about it after seeing a few unrelated comments on Google Plus from RPG authors and commentators, speculating about DnD as an art form and its relation to other art forms. The article, "Why Dungeons and Dragons is Art", interprets DnD through a Kantian model of aesthetics (the title we actually wanted was "The Aesthetics of Roleplaying Games", but I don't argue with sub-editors). I don't think the theory that Pete came up with and I helped him to explicate is a full explanation of the aesthetics of roleplaying, I'm not enough of a philosopher to assert that it's the correct theory of art, and I don't think it's even necessary to hold a theory of art to believe that something has full status as artwork; but by entertaining it we can raise some new questions about the relationships between different parts of RPGs, and how they might (or might not contribute) to the experience on an aesthetic level.

I can't embed the original post as it's part of the OSR DnD community on Google plus, so here's the important part -

 "In essence the Kantian aesthetics (Pete, correct me if I'm wrong here) is that the aesthetic experience is a moment in which our mind encounters something made of intelligible parts but not fully intelligible (ie, an artwork), and enters a state of speculation during which it cannot alight on a judgment of the things it is speculating on. In this state it can perceive its own function (as a machine for constructing worlds out of of sensoria), and this self-perception is what we experience as the awe of art.

RPGs are a collective experience of world-constructing through consensus (between players and rules) and randomisation. The goal-oriented play of an RPG enables immersion in the constructed world, and enables the aesthetic experience of speculation without a judgeable object. The excitement of simultaneously being in your living room eating pizza and being in another world comes about, in part, through the aesthetic experience of your own ability to construct a functional world out of scant experience, that is both independent of you and also known to be an incomplete model; just as we experience reality itself."

I put some other terminology into the post as well which connected to a debate/disagreement that, from the comments that followed, I evidently didn't realise the full extent of. I'll get onto that later. 

An RPG is a nest of many different things. It has players and play experiences and sessions; it has rules documents and rulebooks and rule-following and referees (and rules arguments); it also has documents that guide play that aren't rules, such as setting documents, or adventure modules; it has unwritten rules, social rules, house rules; it has stories and art; it's also possible to turn play experiences into stories and art. So what part of that complex is the artwork? We found it easier to ask, "When do you experience the art?" and then reify that into an object; and we decided that the experience of play is the moment you feel the distinct aesthetic power of RPGs, which makes the play-experience the object that has aesthetic characteristics. It was the one part that we definitively knew was not present in any of the constitutive elements of an RPG. (We could Germanize it for added Philosophy - Spielerfahrung. Actually that's awesome. I'm going to use that.)

The essay attempts to find a theory for the artfulness of RPGs that does not collapse into another theory for another artform, and that is more than a sum-of-its-parts argument. It was an attempt to find what it is about the Spielerfahrung that can generate awe, distinct from the capacity of other artforms to create awe. A reductive explanation would be that all artworks enable our mind to look at some part of its own capacity to construct a world; when we play RPGs, we have root access, because we are literally engaged in an act of collective world construction. Yet RPGs are more powerful than even that suggests. The trick for a Kantian aesthetic experience is that normally, your mind is judging something or other. It is judging a table to be flat, or the wallpaper to be green. If you try to judge your capacity to build a world by looking at part of it, you instead judge that object - like fighting Medusa, you cannot look directly at your ability to create a world. It's only when you experience something seemingly but not finally explicable that exceeds your capacity to interpret and which you cannot definitively judge, that your judgment can circumvent the object you are speculating on and instead alights on your speculation itself. When you participate in the Spielerfahrung you are engaged in the act of constructing a world; yet you do not judge the Spielerfahrung because you are invested in the world you are creating. Or another way of putting it - being immersed in an RPG world stops your mind forming a judgment about the way that you create that immersion. Your mind is constructing worlds without end, it is not focused on a judgable object, and in this state it can judge its own world-building power (and find it good).

Now, to re-insert that point that I alluded to three paragraphs back. The terminology I used was "Narrativist vs. Simulationist." What I thought the terms meant was "games/rules that attempt to enable play that recreates narrative conventions", and "games/rules that attempt to enable play that mimics physical reality." Zak Smith in his insistent style pointed out that the terms have a rather broader and ill-defined use, not universally agreed upon or adopted. While narrativist vs simulationist is a false dichotomy between types of RPG, it is true that some games rules complement play that aims to reflect "what would really happen in X circumstance", while others "what would happen in an action movie/dramatic narrative/western". These aren't opposed tendencies, and they aren't the only scales on which the rules of RPGs affect play. But importing the theory from the DnD and Philosophy essay, I think they represent two very important ways in which RPGs create the aesthetic experience.

A world in the sense I have been using is a construct for making sense of experience, inferred from an outside reality but not equivalent to it. Our minds build worlds - but the physical world is not the only one. The physical world is a primary way in which we experience reality; it's a world of causality, physics, human-independent facts. The narrative world is a world of politics, idealism, fatalism, narrative conventions, and human-dependent sequences of events. The symbolic world is part of language, tarot reading, saga and myth. The dream world exists in the associative logic of schizophrenics and sleep deprivation, faces in car bumpers, overactive pattern-forming and unfounded conviction. I'm sure there are sub worlds (tragedy vs. comedy vs. police procedural within the narative world) and that there are worlds of experience missing from the short list. A world as construed here is just a framework for understanding what we perceive, and there should be as many as there are humans. When we participate in Spielerfahrung, we are able to experience our capacity to build many different types of world, and different RPGs will engage us in the creation of each type of world to a greater or lesser extent.

So, questions arising from this:

What RPGs are there that enable you to construct the weird outlier worlds? Any game can be jury-rigged to support any kind of world-making by inserting setting material, referee styles, house rules and so on, but are there any rules systems that particularly encourage dream logic?

Which conventions of play enable you to experience immersion? What makes you forget that you are engaged in building a world from a quintessence of dust?