Original Roleplaying Concepts
Finis (The End of All Things) 1887
Temptation of St. Anthony, 1898-1918
Hekate (Hecate), 1901
Dragon
Prey, before 1900
The Birth of Eros, 1890 
In the same lands that gave us Grýla, The Christmas Witch we also get the Yule Cat, also known as Jólakötturinn or Jólaköttur in Iceland.
Since the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition in 2000, Goodman Games has published over one hundred adventure modules for its Dungeon Crawl Classics line and since 2012, these have been for its own Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Derived from the d20 System, the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game sits somewhere between Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in terms of its complexity. The most radical step in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game is the starting point. Players begin by playing not one, but several Zero Level characters, each a serf or peasant looking beyond a life tied to the fields and the seasons or the forge and the hammer to prove themselves and perhaps progress enough to become a skilled adventurer and eventually make a name for themselves. In other words, to advance from Zero Level to First Level. Unfortunately, delving into tombs and the lairs of both men and beasts is a risky venture and death is all but a certainty for the lone delver… In numbers, there is the chance that one or more will survive long enough to go onto greater things! This is what the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game terms a ‘Character Creation Funnel’.
The year 2019 seems quite the year for the Cyberpunk genre, as we reach the year in which the genre classic film, Blade Runner, is actually set, and the classics of the genre in roleplaying see the release of either a new Starter Set and edition, for example, Shadowrun, Sixth Edition or Start Set with a new edition to come, for example, Cyberpunk Red. It is joined by Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG, a roleplaying game notable for being from a British publisher, Dragon Turtle Games, Ltd. and for its mechanics being derived from those used for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. From the outset then, the designers of Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG were faced with the challenge of adapting a set of rules strongly identified with Dungeons & Dragons and the fantasy genre to model entirely different genre. The good news is that they have succeeded and appropriately enough in 2019, have done so with a Cyberpunk roleplaying game heavily influenced by Blade Runner.
A special sort of Zatannurday here today.
Published by the Melsonian Arts Council, Troika! is a Science Fantasy roleplaying game of baroque weirdness that lies beyond eldritch portals that open into non-euclidean labyrinths which lie on the edge of creation under skies filled with innumerable crystal spheres and the golden-sailed barges that travel between them. It combines a simple set of mechanics with a world that is not so much described as implied in its thirty-six refulgent and empyrean character options. This is a world and roleplaying game inspired by Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series and M. John Harrison’ Viriconium series, with just a little feel of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. Further, and although the mechanics of Troika! are not compatible with the majority of roleplaying games and scenarios for the Old School Renaissance, in tone and feel, it is not dissimilar to scenarios like Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld from the Hydra Collective LLC, Crypts of Indormancy and The Monolith from beyond Space and Time, and roleplaying games such as Monte Cook Games’ Numenera, Pelgrane Press’ The Dying Earth, and Lost Pages’ Into the Odd.
Taverns are a cliché in fantasy roleplaying because that is always where adventures begin, as in, “You all meet in an inn.” They are places where the adventurers can buy a drink, pick up a few rumours, perhaps get hired for a job, and then go on their merry way to delve into some dungeon or some other adventuring site. Then when the adventure is over, they are places for such adventurers to retire to and spend their loot on wine, women, and song. The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is designed to make such establishments more interesting than that and to give multiple examples of such places where food and drink, company and entertainment can all be found and enjoyed. Some seventy or so taverns detailed, spread across four types of terrain—cities and towns, on the road, villages, and wilderness—all designed for use with the fantasy roleplaying game of your choice, for the content of The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is entirely systemless. Further, the supplement published by Wisdom Save Media is very simply presented in a black and buff booklet in order to make it friendly on the pocket.Exhibit / December 12, 2019
Object Name: Domebook 2
Maker and Year: Pacific Domes, 1971 (Lloyd Kahn, editor)
Object Type: Building publication
Image Source: Archive.org
Description (Michael Grasso):
“The thing about zomes is,” Riggs with a desperate grin, “is they can act as doorways to other dimensions. The F-105s, the coyotes, the scorpions and snakes, the desert heat, none of that bothers me. I can leave whenever I want.” He motioned with his head. “All I have to do is step through that door over there, and I’m safe.”
“Can I look?” said Doc.
“Better not. It’s not for everybody, and if it’s not for you, it can be dangerous.”
—Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
In the spring of 1971, it seemed everyone on the fringes of mainstream society in North America was trying to build geodesic domes: soaring gridwork domes made of plastic and steel, of wood, of concrete. Inspired by technocratic engineer-turned-counterculture guru and geodesic dome evangelist R. Buckminster Fuller, hundreds of back-to-the-land hippies sought to use his elementary architectural example of solid geometry as the basis for their homes and gathering places. One of the many venues that helped dome aficionados figure out how to build their own domed spaces was a guidebook assembled by a group of students and facilitators at a freeform California high school. Inspired by their own experimentation with building geodesic structures, and directly assisted by the runaway success of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, these dome-builders and educators released a pair of “Domebooks” in 1970 and 1971 for sale to the general public. While Domebook One was more of a straight-ahead how-to construction guide, Domebook 2 acted as a clearinghouse for correspondence from a panoply of counterculture builders, along with material specifics on dome-building, ruminations on the geometry behind geodesics, a lengthy interview with Fuller, and a plethora of intriguing diversions illuminating the state of the counterculture in the early 1970s.
Buckminster Fuller’s conception (and subsequent U.S. patenting) of the geodesic dome does owe quite a bit to German engineers and architects of the interwar period, but during Fuller’s tenure immediately following World War II at the renowned experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North California, he struck upon the idea of building domed structures around regularly repeating three-dimensional geodesic frameworks. They would be strong and cheap, ideal for quickly assembling structures with a minimum of materials. Postwar developments in lightweight construction materials, such as aluminum and petrochemically-derived plastics, would provide the ideal building blocks for geodesic structures, just as they were already being used everywhere from suburban homes to designer furnishings. The U.S. government, specifically the defense establishment, immediately saw the value of these domes for structures that needed to withstand difficult climactic conditions, including radomes on the U.S. Air Force’s Distant Early Warning Line built in the Canadian arctic. Fuller’s patented domes were therefore fully integrated into the U.S. military-industrial complex prior to their adoption by the counterculture. Fuller’s emergence as an unlikely countercultural guru culminated with the release of his seminal 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, but his eccentric futurist visions had intrigued independent thinkers throughout the 1960s. Fuller’s own life was full of such contradictions: a man born into old Yankee WASP privilege, his own lifelong nonconformist ethos and mystical epiphany in 1927 were always at the heart of his humanitarian inventiveness and intellectual creativity.
The Domebooks themselves emerge, just as the geodesic dome did at Black Mountain did a quarter-century earlier, from the lengthy tradition of American experimental schooling arguably begun with the work of John Dewey in the late 19th century. Domebook 2 tells the tale of Pacific High School, a “free school” founded in 1961 in Palo Alto and designed to center the students’ experiences over formal instruction, hierarchies, or explicit supervision from adults. Field work was common at Pacific, as well as trips abroad. By 1965, the school had received 40 acres in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which the students first commuted to and eventually decided to live on, sharing responsibilities for food, shelter, and maintenance. Inspired by the domes that were popping up in locations like Big Sur (the location of countercultural retreat Esalen) thanks to dome-builders like Lloyd Kahn, the students tried their hands at dome construction. Like many of the student-directed experiences at Pacific High School, the domes met with frequent failures, but by the time of the first Domebook‘s release, more than a half-dozen domes made from different kinds of building materials with differing levels of success were standing on the grounds of the school.
Domebook 2 differs from the marginally more staid Domebook One in its patchwork ‘zine-like appearance; while both Domebooks used Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog publishing facilities (and Domebook One definitely apes the Catalog in its sleeker modernist visual design in spots), Domebook 2 has a much more homemade feel to it, with whimsical cartoons, sometimes-baffling asides, imaginatively-designed photograph inserts, and hand-drawn subject headers all over the document. The purely mathematical and practical portions of Domebook 2—illustrations of geodesic shapes, listings of angle calculations for various dome structures, and the like—possess that very peculiar aesthetic combination of hard technocratic science and near-mystic wonder that some have called “hippie modernism.” In explaining the five Platonic solids, Domebook 2 offers images of microscopic plankton that adhere to the geometry of said solids, showing that Fuller’s designs adhere to the ancient esoteric maxim of “as above, so below.” Domebook 2 is definitely meant to inculcate a geodesic “state of mind” in the reader; before building a dome, Domebook 2 advises every prospective dome-builder to get their hands on modeling materials and physically build a model of their desired dome: “Don’t try to build a dome without first making and studying models.” One can easily imagine even a dilettante with no interest in building their own domed home simply buying the Domebook to stare at the endlessly repeating geometries within; Domebook 2 even outright states that making a geodesic sphere model will allow you to “trip out on the different patterns.”
That variety of building materials evident in the Pacific High School projects was multiplied greatly in the photos and written contributions by the far-flung correspondents to Domebook 2. Each of these small groups of dome-builders—some of them families, others communes, some eccentric wealthy individuals, professional conferences, and even a few universities—had their own unique challenges in building and maintaining geodesic dome structures. The Pacific High School “campus” located in the woodlands of Northern California was situated in a temperate, if wet, climate. But within the pages of Domebook 2, builders from all across North America, from the frozen plains of Alberta to the deserts of New Mexico to the high mountains of Colorado to the snowy backwoods of Vermont, explain their own unique local challenges to dome-building, from temperature variations to precipitation to the incursions of porcupines. Correspondents to Domebook 2 accentuate the wisdom to be found in native populations and traditions—“for practical as well as spiritual reasons,” as one correspondent from New Hampshire says in a letter—such as using hand-split cedar shake shingling in the Pacific Northwest. Disagreements among the contributors on whether to use organic renewable building materials like wood or non-renewables like metal, concrete, or products of the “petroleum sucked from the earth” like plastic and foam insulation occasionally get heated; recommendations for how many Douglas fir seedling plantings would pay Mother Earth back for one’s dome are included in one sidebar. Tales of recycling and outright scavenging materials abound in the letters: “Use as little ‘money’ as possible. Recycle waste as much as possible. Manufacture our own parts as much as possible. Keep it clean as much as possible.” A Digger-like group that recycles urban waste for building and living materials goes further, cannibalizing old condemned structures; as they say, “The only growing resource is trash.”
Which brings us to the social and political aspects of the various dome projects seen in Domebook 2. The majority of these experimental builders, like Pacific High, reject many of the traditions of conventional mid-century American society. Dropping out and living by their self-professed ethos, many of the builders not only calculate the costs to Earth for their building materials but try to ditch the “square” mentality entirely in the process of building: “The most important thing we learned building this dome is that women baking bread while ‘dudes’ build domes is sexist bullshit,” says one of the Red Rockers commune in Colorado. “We dig science and futuristic stuff,” say the Red Rockers about their 60-foot wide central dome. “We wanted our home to have a structural bias against individualism and for communism; we like doing big things together.” But the pages of Domebook 2 are full of references to authority figures among the “straight” world who seek to take away the autonomy of dome-builders, usually through the use of building inspectors. The Pacific team itself tells of difficulties with the local authorities as they attempt to be open with the building inspectors and thus manage to remain “half-way within the law”: “Through maneuvers over the months, some good human beings in Santa Cruz county department, we somehow become semi-legal.” Several of the commune groups also cite intense police interest in their communities and, given that many of these letters were written in the previous year (1970), the spectre of the state-sanctioned violence at Kent State hovers over the many submissions to Domebook editors. One particularly hair-raising account depicts county inspectors in Topanga, California siccing police helicopters on a dome-building community; comparisons to the war in Southeast Asia are naturally made. And occasionally, the geodesic dome’s established place in the military-industrial complex peeks through the overall handcrafted and hippie vibe of Domebook 2; many of the tables, calculations, and illustrations that help a dome-builder figure out the geometry of a geodesic dome are present in Domebook 2 thanks to the computer-aided calculations of a NASA researcher named Joseph Clinton.
Probably the most poignant thing about Domebook 2 is what’s made clear by so many of the stories from the field: that ultimately the domes aren’t really keeping their inhabitants all that warm and dry. “Probably the main reason there are not more dome homes,” says the “Sealing” section of Domebook 2, “is the problem of leakage.” The Domebook writers even admit that their next book will cease focusing on domes and their cousins, zomes, and instead fall under the more general banner of “Shelter.” The lack of a Domebook 3 would end up removing a major venue for dome-builders and inhabitants to socially network about repairing and maintaining their structures. But among all the letters and photos, and throughout all the narrative streams, what shines through is that the domes themselves are helping people imagine a different future, one that looks and feels radically different from the North American suburbia that most of these young builders grew up in, a world of people taking charge of their own housing and electing to form their own communities. Whatever mundane problems that rain and snow and cops and building inspectors might present to the dome-builders, that vision of “other dimensions” on the other side of the zome doorway, of a new path forward that “trips out on the different patterns,” of a possibility for living outside what seemed like an omnipresent and oppressive system, remains.
Artwork found at Christie's. 
Exhibit / December 11, 2019
Object Name: What To Do In An Emergency
Maker and Year: Reader’s Digest, 1986
Object Type: Book
Description: (Richard McKenna)
The world is a dangerous place, and nowhere is this more true—subjectively speaking—than in its safest, most fortunate corners. I’ve spoken before about how the postwar UK seemed sometimes to be living in a traumatized fugue state of danger and threat. Here, then, is the bible of that particular belief system: the Reader’s Digest‘s 1986 What to Do in an Emergency, a 400-page compendium of Anglo fears, running from the most mundane (“gravy stains, removal of…. p.180”) to the surprisingly obscure (“caves, lost in… p.310”), which allowed every Briton to writhe in pleasure at the thought of the many nightmarish injuries, deaths, and degradations that might await them should they step from the path of righteous behavior.
In 1986, Britain was still eleven years away from two events—the election victory of Tony Blair’s New Labour and the death of Lady Diana—which would spark a mutation in, or perhaps simply bring into sharp focus, its psychology, triggering the evaporation of the last remaining remnants of the country’s previous approach to existence. Contrary to any naive assumptions about British “good manners,” it ought to be stated for the record that much of what made postwar Britain function was facilitated not by any innate civility but by a series of behaviors that had been drilled into us since childhood, with origins in the regimented lives ingrained in our parents and grandparents back when we were a total war economy Airstrip One-ing our way through World War II. That and the real risk of physical violence for infractions such as jumping queues and insulting other drivers ensured a Pavlovian comportment that turned boarding a bus or joining a dual-carriageway into almost devotional rituals. Given what has taken the place of this conditioned, vaguely collectivist pseudo-altruism as it has decayed under the pressure of individualist right-wing ideology, I think we can perhaps be forgiven a brief twitch of nostalgia for said collectivist pseudo-altruism, for all its faults.
Reader’s Digest was an American general interest magazine containing condensed articles and devised by Dewitt Wallace while recovering from injuries obtained during the First World War. Despite its progressive attitude towards sex, the Digest was also fond of promoting reactionary values and anti-Communism, often printing smear stories leaked to it by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. The company was also famed for its series of “condensed novels”—each plastic-tooled volume of which contained abridged versions of four popular bestsellers of the moment (Wallace was fond of saying that his epitaph should read ”The final condensation”). The books Reader’s Digest published in the UK were available either from the “Reader’s Digest centres” dotted around the nation’s cities (where customers could “examine and buy” them) or directly through the post by mail order, and the company had a particular hold over people without easy access to bookshops and those who were perhaps not comfortable entering them—because they could be intimidating places—and felt they needed a guide. This guidance was trafficked through the pages of the magazine, amidst its strange mixture of real-life “I fell into a cement mixer” horror, advice on removing stains, and excruciating joke columns like “Laughter, the Best Medicine.”
As well as producing guides like the Reader’s Digest Family Medical Adviser and The Reader’s Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual—a two-volume tome so enormous that it came in its own ICBM launch-codes-eque slipcase—part of the remit of Reader’s Digest‘s publishing arm was to address the output of whichever gland of the zeitgeist happened to be secreting in that particular moment, hence books like 1976’s dip into the paranormal Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. What, then, does it tell us that alongside more sedate products like Success with House Plants and Creative Cooking and Entertaining, the Reader’s Digest publication roster for 1986 also included What to Do in an Emergency? Remaining safe and avoiding harm for ourselves and our loved ones is obviously a priority for most people, but What to Do in an Emergency also feels very much like it is tapping into something else—an almost perverse need to feel proximate to risk, to feel that our lives aren’t quite as safe and dull as they appear. It’s a truism oft repeated that one of the wellsprings of the aggressive energy of British punk was the flat-out boredom of British life, especially in the provinces. Perhaps What to Do in an Emergency was responding to that same need, which, across the Atlantic, was being answered by the delusions of a generation of survivalists. Of course, British survivalism was never going to take the same form as its pumped, bullish and locked-n-loaded US cousin, with its pecs oiled and its buttocks tightly clenched: our buttocks were tightly clenched alright, but for very different reasons. Plus, we didn’t have guns; we had umbrellas—well, if we were soft Southerners we did.
Perhaps it was also a reaction to the cognitive friction between the narrative then being pushed by the right-wing Thatcher government—that the world was a dangerous place and that the Tories were the party to make it safer—and the knowledge that thanks to Tory policies it actually was becoming a more dangerous place (albeit gradually, for most) and that people were going to have to start looking out for themselves as the strings of the welfare state’s safety nets were gradually snipped away. In some way, What to Do in an Emergency feels as though it was responding to these multiple stimuli—a need to feel that life wasn’t as dull as it seemed and at the same time a genuine fear that life risked becoming far less dull than it seemed.
In case potential buyers were unsure of the book’s contents, or emergency-tackling owners were worried about being able to identify their copy in haste as they attempted to save someone struck in the head by the yardarm of a yacht or scalded by a hot drink, What to Do in an Emergency featured a cover in innovative hi-visibility yellow with EMERGENCY emblazoned upon it in a clashing magenta, an ensemble clearly meant to evoke the livery of the British emergency services and confer upon it a pseudo-institutional aura of gravitas. To emphasize the tome’s vocation as a vital piece of lifesaving equipment, the book begins with a “rapid action guide” called “When Seconds Count” that covers primary existential threats to Brits—including, natch, chip pan fires, as well as children eating poisonous plants—before the book proper begins. The nine chapters that follow, from first aid and medical emergencies to drink and drugs, contain a number of illustrations so mind-bogglingly vast that only a corporate behemoth like Reader’s Digest could possible have afforded to fund. These are the book’s true heart and raison d’être.
Counterintuitively, the interior illustrations don’t take up the cover’s dramatic tones, adopting instead a washed-out, vaguely surreal photorealist style presumably intended to be reassuring and undramatic but in fact conferring to their subjects an eerily dreamlike quality. The scene for each chapter is set with a full-page image whose hazy tones, slightly more vivid than those used for the bulk of the illustrations, only lend their nominally innocuous subject matter an unsettlingly elegiac quality: a child on a bike, an old lady being given a cup of tea, a group of friends enjoying a picnic—tranquil scenes of everyday life whose very inclusion in the book imbues them with a sense of foreboding about what form the implicit emergency is going to take: will the poor old lady be scalded by tea, or is it the kind young man who is at risk? Are the carefree holidaymakers about to be attacked by wasps, or will they be struck by lightning? The pictures illustrating the chapters themselves share the mannered and vaguely camp style common to many Reader’s Digest self-help books—an uncanny fetishistic quality that makes them feel almost like some obsessive work of religious mania. In fact, the whole of What to Do in an Emergency feels like a dimly understood metaphor for something troubled and profound, and the stiffness of the posed images only adds to the disconcerting yet compelling atmosphere of gloom. In fact, What to Do in an Emergency almost seems like a vast, metastasized airplane safety card.
The book’s index—where “blood stains, removal of” sits next to “blocked lavatories” and “vomit stains, removal of” sits beside “volcanic eruptions”—reads like some crazed Oulipolian metafiction. In fact, you could probably make a case for What to Do in an Emergency being one of the more successful modernist horror novels of the 1980s. As well as covering standard British fears like blocked toilets, our ubiquitous chip pan fires, and the quicksand that, to judge by the amount of attention it got throughout the ’70s and ’80s, you would have been forgiven for imagining covered much of the mainland instead of a corner of a small beach in Grange over Sands, What to Do in an Emergency trots out a mindbending litany of horrors: “Menaced by a hitchhiker,” “A sleeping bag can become a dangerous trap,” “poisoned by a crop sprayer,” “Trapped in a bog,” “If you are falsely accused of shoplifting,” “TV fires,” and “If you are swept along by a crowd,” to name but a few. The emphasis is firmly focused on the less spectacular emergencies—surviving a plane crash is given less space than propping up a collapsed tent, for example—and each entry is written in the same voice: superficially calm and in control, but with a terse undertone that hints the writer is struggling to repress a panic attack. It’s not just the entries that are incredible, though—everything about What to Do in an Emergency is incredible, including the names of the illustrators, most of whom sound like people writing local scene reports for late-’80s Maximum Rock’n’Roll: Andrew Aloof, Dick Bonson, Charles Chambers, Ivan Lapper, A.W.K.A. Popkiewicz. The contributing writers are no less remarkable, any random selection of them—say, Dr. Birdwood, Frank Eaglestone, Anthony Greenbank, Basil Booth, and Pippa Isbel—sounding like characters from some half-remembered sitcom.
It would be churlish not to admit that what What to Do in an Emergency does, it does excellently, and its advice is always clear and to the point. The book’s genesis is obscure, but the illustrations and list of contributors indicate that it was commissioned by the British arm of Reader’s Digest and only later published in other countries: was it perhaps a fix-up compendium of material cobbled together from other Reader’s Digest self-help books? I can’t be arsed to find out, to be honest. But even if it is, it still feels in some way symbolic of its time and of what was to come. As I said at the beginning, the world can look like a dangerous place when you live in the safest parts of it. People there have farther to fall, as well perhaps as a suppressed semi-awareness that their peace of mind is simply an unearned accident of birth that was at least in part paid for by the sufferings and hard work of other less fortunate people around the world whose countries we’d invaded and whose economies we’d put to our own use.
For a long time, us Brits were fucking lucky, let’s face it: unemployment benefits, free healthcare, free dental care, free and affordable housing, free schools. The quality might occasionally have been as uneven as the teeth British dentistry provided to most of us middle-aged Brits, but at least you didn’t have to worry that there wouldn’t be a system there to provide help if you encountered an emergency. The seeds of the demise of our good fortune, though, were sown right there in the same furrow: given the decades of privilege and social security, many of us had forgotten that a world without such things was not just possible but the way most of the world lived. We thought being safe was the birthright of humanity—just something everyone got. Familiarity with the welfare state bred complacency and indifference, and when the spivs started trying to privatize it, we didn’t even realize it needed defending.
In times of uncertainty, safety and security start to prey on people’s minds. We’ve been watching it happen for years now in the UK as the political party most responsible for actually making Britain a more dangerous place—the Tories, natch, though Tony Blair’s New Labour did a lot of the groundwork and UKIP continues to stoke the fires—has used the anxieties its own policies continually frack up from beneath the psychic shale to fuel the engines of its own self promotion, promising they’ll be the ones to restore the beige stasis of what many consider to be English (as opposed to British) life. We’ll see over the next few years what new emergencies that typically English (as opposed to British) bit of shallowness leads us to.
Ok, now this is a fun one. At least it made me smile.
These are the voyages...Yeah. This sounds like fun.
