Irkalla (Hex25 week one)

Oops! All big hexes. Hexmap and nice internal links via Alex Schroeder's Hex Describe.

Congratulations, you're dead - for better or worse, a situation that's a lot like being alive. You don't need to worry about aging, and you'll never be able to have more children, but you still need to eat, drink, sleep, piss, shit, and breathe; you can still burp, fuck, get high, or for that matter practice clean living. It's not clear whether everyone goes to this place or not - people seem to enter without regard to when they died "up there," so maybe they just haven't made it yet - but entrants seem to consist of the same mix of saints and sinners as everywhere else, and your station here, unless you do something about it, is a function of how lavish your funeral was.

0202: Glacial uplands and cryovolcanos form the source of the Styx.

0203: Mt Purgatory. According to the Montanist denomination (in contrast to their rivals in orthodoxy, the Harrowers, who advance a sola fide soteriology) Christ-Thoth will forgive all sins for which sincere and painful penance has been made. In this monastery-state the brothers and sisters help each other avoid further sin, and cleanse out existing sin via torturing each other. Strict monotheists, they reject worship of any entity other than Christ-Thoth and his vaguely distinguishable father, Anu-Yahweh; this places them on permanent war footing with idolatrous Ganzir and by extension in tentative alliance with the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tartarus

0302: From her palace at seven-gated Ganzir Ereshkigal is eternally proclaimed sovereign over the Underworld. Here the villas of her aristocracy - mostly those buried with retainers and other choice grave goods - look down on timeless latifundia whilst scheming to win her favor. History, in the form of the new states of Mt. Purgatory and SSR Tartarus, is an unwelcome bug that will be stamped out; time will return to its proper place as the dance of planets and retroactively-annual release and hunt of Tammuz.

0303: The fertile valley of Lower Stygia is the breadbasket of Ereshkigal's empire, albeit one ready to be contested by the revisionist states also bordering it. It is into this land that Tammuz is typically released after his sojourn in the overworld; while he is down under, the ghosts enjoy pleasant weather and ample harvests. The warrior queen Mu Xin holds a fortress here to secure the land for Ereshkigal, but mostly as a staging area for her own charioteers to win the glory of catching the Harvest King.

0402: The Cedarmarch was, supposedly, planted by the gods as a barrier between this place and their own idyllic domain; don't cut down the trees or furies will mark you out for divine vengance. Humbaba probably won't notice you enough to eat you, but he might digest you anyway after eating the guy that did.

0403: Vladimir Lenin (no, really) founded the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tartarus within a few decades of arriving; a few decades of civil war and radical high points later, it's been keen to recruit officials with a background in palace administration to administer its planned economy (copying existing up-there industrialization models when no metals stronger than bronze or burnable fuels much more efficient than charcoal is a challenge, but the metaphysics of this place also lend themselves to the long run.) War with Ganzir is on the backburner at the moment, but only a matter of time; relations with Mt Purgatory are consequently more friendly than not.

Oozes and Oubliettes Beta

Astrologers proclaim the Year of the Beta - truly, my time to shine. Oozes & Oubliettes, a very intentionally minimalist dragon game, would probably never get published otherwise, so here you go! It's probably broken, definitely incomplete, and only worth spending several hours of your free time with if you have very niche interests - but then all the same applies to myself.

Here you go, with commenter privileges.

the d60 on your wrist

If you need a random generator but can't roll dice or can't (or don't want to) access electronics, you already carry a d60 with you - or at least I do, with the seconds clock on my trusty $10 digital watch. This is especially great if you're solo roleplaying on a walk or at work, or perhaps if you're playing with others while walking or in the car or in just about any impromptu situation.

The easiest use for this is as a d6, a d10, or as a d6xd10 oracle, with 0 treated as the highest pip value. (As long as you aren't "rolling" too frequently, you can also make Ironsworn-style rolls with a glance, where the last minute of the seconds and minutes are the challenge dice and the tens digit of the seconds timer is the action die.) Knowing a few lists with an obvious/familiar order and 5, 6, 9, or 10 values (if one lower, let 0 = go with most appropriate) means you can be pretty flexible about this. Here are a few:

the universal d6 oracle that's been independently invented a zillion times, e.g.

1. no, and
2. no
3. no, but
4. yes, but
5. yes
6. yes, and

dnd stats (d6) or WoD stats + willpower (d10)

mtg colors

big five personality traits: d10, alternate high and low, OCEAN order

enneagram types: d10, 0 wildcard

dnd alignments: likewise

If you're familiar with the tarot, such that you just know off the dome what a seven or swords is or whatever (I don't), you can make :00-:19 the major arcana, drop the minor arcana nobility, and make the :2_s, :3_s, :4_s, :5_s the number cards of your suit of choice.

The Pathfinder Harrow Deck is basically already this, since the suites are just dnd stats and the "ranks" dnd alignment! (As before, turn the list of 9 into 10 via 0 digit as wildcard.) I'm tempted to familiarize myself with it because then I get an instant image or more complex tarot-y association that requires a little less brute force recall than actual Tarot, even if the original version is richer.

Oath boardgame suites (hearth, order, discord, nature, arcane, nomad) though I don't have a great intuitive sense of how to order them other than by memorizing in brute force

List your own!

gaming goals 2024

This is a year of cutting back - I anticipate further cuts to my time and there are other things I want to prioritize with the time left, so gaming gets triaged.

Keep playing weekly or biweekly. It's good! It's probably the only friends time I have. See if I can make it more in-person if possible. 

No more commercial products. I'm already sitting on a vast dragon's hoard, full of well-regarded stuff I haven't even gotten around to reading; so no paying for anything, and no piracy either. The exceptions:

1. paying for shipping or printing costs for things I've already Kickstarted,
2. getting a book if my group is playing a new game,
3. books with gaming utility that aren't gaming specific (like my beloved Greenwood Press Daily Life series,) and other gaming-useful materials like pencils, paper, etc (but not "gamer products" like a beautiful GM's Screen or whatever)

Allocate less thinking time to gaming. Not zero, but in terms of books, blogs, podcasts, and independent thinking time, I'm going to focus more on other things I'm concerned about. I'll still be blogging myself, but about economics and politics and the future here, but this gaming blog will probably lie dormant for a good while.

I don't regret my time spent in this scene at all; lovely people (by and large), and delicious ideas. No doubt I'll come back eventually!

 

a prompt calendar for Lore24

Spriggan's Den proposes #lore24; let's fuckin goooooo. I failed D23 pretty instantly, but I've always been a more general lorehead, so maybe I'll have more luck with this one.

Here's a calendar of prompts. Each month and week has a theme, and there a couple of cycles through other various prompts. It works best if you ignore most prompts and just go with whatever stupid idea pops into your head; it deliberately has too many. Replace mine with ones that work for you - modifying them on the "ref" tab will automatically update them on the "calendar" tab.

ur-systems

There are a lot of rules systems, debates over the extent to which system matters, and groupings of rules into groups. Based on advanced paleontology, historico-linguistic comparative analysis, and the latest genetic evidence, I have cloned the most basic systems to display them in this post, my personal Jurassic Park. 

Primordial Sim

Players describe what their characters do, and the GM decides what the likely outcomes will be. If it's not obvious whether it would succeed or fail, she flips a coin.

FKR isn't about the amount of rules, but one can read a lot of FKR-style play as essentially this, with optional bells and whistles. Indeed, I think the core claim of FKR is that all other rules in a game can be considered a sort of midrash which advises the execution of Primordial Sim. 

Hadean Narrativism

A storyteller tells a story.

You might say that this isn't a game; that's quite true, in fact ludochemists have reconstructed it from processes they believe to have begun during the Hadean Eon, before there were games proper, but as certain molecules were beginning to behave in a game-like way.

Archean Narrativism

Players describe what their characters do, and the GM decides what would make for the best story. If it's not obvious, she flips a coin.

During the Archean Eon, the primordial soup began to bubble, and Hadean Narrativism evolved into a game-form. It is most well-known for two descendants.

Primordial Narrativism

Players take turns telling a story.

Primordial Illusionism

Play Archean Narrativism, but say you're playing Primordial Sim.

Thus we have three basic primordial body plans - PS, PN, and PI - that describe the rules of all roleplaying games. 

IMO, species-level system differences do not matter that much, especially within PS/PI, but phylum-level differences do.

my downtime rules

(These are for 5e, but can be adapted to just about anything. The most important thing they're meant to do is to make downtime a meaningful scarce resource, and to give players a cast of NPCs for us all to play with. There's also an attempt to attack 5e's five-minute adventuring day and caster-martial disparities, especially around high levels and outside of the combat situations, where they are strongest.)

During a week of downtime you can take downtime actions. You can take actions equal to three plus the number of extra attacks/cunning actions you get. Unless otherwise noted you can't double up on the same kind of action in the same week. These include

• Work: work enough to pay for your lodging and basic needs.
• Rest: get the benefits of a long rest, aside from renewal of spells higher than 2nd level.
• Train: you must spend a number of weeks equal to your current level training to advance to a new level. Half rounded up must be consecutive. Can also be used to acquire language or tool proficiencies. If you have an appropriate mentor, may be used to unlock abilities a level early.
• Build friendship: spend time with an NPC to build up a positive relationship - drinking buddies, romance, business partners, you tell me. (Renew with the Maintain Relationships action, which must be maintained once each moon) You can invent an appropriate NPC or as if it would work with an existing one. Friendly NPCs can help you out, make social introductions, consulted for knowledge, might accompany you on adventures, and so on. They also might expect the same.
• Maintain friendships: spend time with, or write heartfelt letters to, up to (2 + Cha bonus) NPC friends once each moon to maintain friendly status. (You can do this more than once a moon to maintain such relationships with more people.)
• Bully: you can also maintain an intimidating relationship with up to (Cha or Str + Intimidation proficiency) NPCs who are weaker than you. They maintain fear of you and won’t do anything to inspire your ire unless they get assurances from a faction that could offer them protection. (You can both bully and maintain friendship with the same people if you particularly want to invest in their loyalty - this typically looks like putting a lot of work into getting them to accept their status as a valued minion.)
• Study: spend time with a complex book or artifact to understand it better, or research a topic at a library you have access to.
• Stalk: follow someone's movements, or case a building. Typically a Stealth roll to not get caught and Investigation roll to find the information you're looking for.
• Carouse: go down a stress level, and something unexpected happens (most often an unexpected new friend, new enemy, or debt.)
• Prayer: go down a stress level level. Strange dreams may intrude, offering information or other blessings in exchange for more stress or obligations. One week of this is required to renew (as per a RAW long rest) 3rd level divine spells, two consecutive weeks to renew 4th level divine spells, and so on. Might be combined with something else depending on circumstances.
• Arcane Research: One week of this is required to renew (as per a RAW long rest) 3rd level arcane spells, two consecutive weeks to renew 4th level arcane spells, and so on. If you have a new book or other source of arcane lore, get the benefits of the study action as well.
• Something else, you tell me.

If you have a warlock patron, they will typically require one downtime action per week doing their bidding - either "do this specific thing" or "do something that advances this plan" - for you to stay in their favor. If you are out of favor, warlock abilities that would require a short rest require a long rest, or at least a night's rest, instead.

As with anything else, tell me what concrete in-world actions your character takes to do these. In-world logic trumps game rules.

We can typically handle downtime over email. If you're incommunicado I'll assume work/rest/something else reasonable.

slush pile #1

One day these may blossom into beautiful Posts. Today they are just slush. 

revisionist terminology: anti-narratology

fictional → imaginary, makebelieve 

character → (imaginary) person

setting → (imaginary) world

(You’re an adult; assume “imaginary” is implied from here out.)

scene → moment, event, the time and place when…

plot, arc, theme → no

character development → ways this person has changed

 

Aaron Trammell's "The Privilege of Play"

Deeply frustrating book. Some really great archival research, and some really interesting arguments about how geography and professional networks intersect with race and the hobby. Whenever the archival stuff gets interesting or complicated, or whenever there's an opportunity to develop the arguments further, though, it tends to retreat into boilerplate not really moored to the evidence he's dealing with. It feels rushed, more than anything, as though the author spent a decade of diligent work in the archives mine and then was told by a publisher "okay, we can do this, but you have to get it out before people stop caring about Gamergate." (Too late, surely?) 

the Narnia campaign structure

The campaign as a series of mini-campaigns, with PCs isekai'd into the secondary world. Between each mini-campaign, advance the time PCs are in Earth by like five years, and in Narnia (or wherever) by 1d6 centuries exploding or whatever. 

Smaller cultures of play

Journaling games - got big, something something bluebooking

BroSR - these guys suck but their style is genuinely interesting.

Quests - such an interesting version of the form, one GM, many players with one PC, feels like a response to player flakiness

on the big cultures of play

Throwing my hat into this ring pretty late, and I'm still not sure where on the obvious-untenable spectrum this hypothesis is. But if you take a look at the evolution of play styles mentioned by John:

obv the lines of influence are way more rhizomatic than this

part of what you get, I think, is a progressive intensification of the elements of (tabletop) RPGs that aren't as well served by other media - at a time, of course, when those other media have become a bigger and bigger components of people's lives. 

Classic play presents itself as a series of escalating, fair challenges; fairness, in turn, allows success to be legible. Classic play is built with assumptions for tournament play and open tables, and, above all else, is a game. Trad play, by contrast, can be read as a form of play built for the established "table," a small group of people who will experience the same events - event which, if properly finessed, might add up to a story. 

So we have stories and games - two familiar aesthetic forms occupying the same strange new medium, TTRPGs. This dichotomy, present in many ways before the medium itself, is still with us today. But they've both evolved in ways to take advantage of the differences between this medium and others. There are a lot of games to be legibly good at or stories that are well-paced out there.

 Exalted delta combat charms

[Weapon]-Wife Wisdom
Δ: train with an acknowledged master of a weapon or armor (or absence of armor) that you have not fought with before, or win three fights in a row with it, using no other weapons to attack or defend for a month.
Whenever you fight with this weapon, +1 Prowess. Whenever you fight opponents who are exclusively using weapons and armor for which you have a variation of this Charm, an additional +1 Prowess. The bonuses of this can be applied twice, once for weaponry and once for armor.

Call the Blade
Δ: grant a name to a weapon or suit of armor for which you have [Weapon]-Wife Wisdom. Treat it with respect.
With a moment's concentration, you can banish this weapon to Elsewhere (if you are holding it), or retrieve it from there.

[Weapon]-Daughter Bequeathal
Δ: train someone, who acknowledges you explicitly as their instructor, in a weapon for which you have [Weapon]-Wife Wisdom. After they survive an attack alone defending themselves with the weapon, receive their sincere thanks and blessing.
Double the effects of [Weapon]-Wife Wisdom. When you train someone in that weapon, they gain the benefits of [Weapon]-Wife Wisdom themselves.

Wild-Eyed Berserker Onslaught
Δ: take a Morale of 12 in a combat.
+1 Prowess. If you take a morale of 10+, +2 Prowess. If you ever take a morale of 4 or less, lose the benefits of this Charm, although you can gain it back by taking a Morale of 12 again.

Heavenly Guardian Defense
Δ: be mentored in combat by a Celestial Lion; or, face attack from a Wyld Hunt, 2nd circle demon, or similarly threatening opponent without retreating an inch or suffering a scratch.
The first time each day you would die in combat, remain unscathed instead.

Defense of Celestial Bliss
Δ: having mastered Heavenly Guardian Defense, forswear its use for your most formidable opponent yet.
Upgrade Heavenly Guardian Defense to twice a day.

Ready in Eight Directions Stance
Δ: wander alone and blindfolded for at least a week, surviving at least one ambush; if you are already blind and have a way around that, stop your ears instead.
As long as your attention is primarily oriented towards the possibility of being ambushed, you cannot be.

Circle of Fury Meditation
Δ: having mastered Wild-Eyed Berserker Onslaught and Ready in Eight Directions Stance, draw a circle in the ground with your weapon, declaring (then, and again to anyone who appears) that you will kill anyone who crosses or disturbs it until the next dawn or dusk (whichever comes later); carry through this promise to the doom of at least one person.
Draw a circle in the ground with your weapon, swearing the oath that won you this Charm and enter into single-pointed meditation on the infliction of death. The first being to consciously cross or disturb your circle shall die by your hand, whether they be the Maiden of Battles or your own child.

 

links 2023-10-13

I have little to add to these debates but there's some interesting insights in the back n forth on the latter!

Google kills Jamboard. I had considered using Jamboard as a lightweight VTT with integration with my Drive stuff, but held off because of the likelihood of something like this. There are other options but they get by by SaaS rather than stealing your data, which in theory is slightly less bad but in practice I figure Google/the NSA already have anything they want on me already.

Lanterns of the dead were towers "originally constructed to warn passers-by of the danger of infection" at sanataria, "as well as to illuminate cemeteries where it was feared that repenting souls, ghosts, and criminals could hide"

B/X hexcrawl tool, lots of work put into this one

Alex Schroeder (who wrote another wonderfully elaborate-in-content-simple-in-execution hexcrawl generator) is setting up an automated rss feed for the OSR discord server 

Rob Conley finishes his fantasy sandbox guide and, as a capstone flourish, has a Kickstarter up. A tremendous achievement.

Blog post (from a longer back n forth) related to how prose fiction has tended to draw more and more influence from film, to the detriment of the uniqueness of the former. Not all endorsed, even just the aesthetic parts, but the suggestion that prose is oriented “to the memory rather than the senses” has given me a lot to chew on w/r/t medium 

(Related: novelization style.)

Harris also writes about the distinctions between story-first and worldbuilding-first art, which I think is actually an excellent summary of the differences between the two, written by someone with tastes opposite my own. The way that worldbuilding invites collaboration is why worldbuilding is an especially apt form for the roleplaying game.

While we're talking film and medium, Neil Brand on scoring silent films.

I have nothing to add on present IRL events besides what John Ganz says here.

GOo5e 🦢 (goblin ordinances of fifth edition)

This takes 5e and replaces all the chargen and magic rules with GLOG. All remaining gaps and inconsistencies are left as an exercise to the GM. WHY you would do this is also an exercise for the GM.

Instead of your character class, take the UR-CLASS. This is just a nearly blank slate to which you can add GLOG class templates.

HD: d6 if you got an MD this level, d10 otherwise 

Save proficiencies: one of Dex/Con//Wis, plus one of the useless ones

Skill proficiencies: choose three

Gear proficiencies: anything in your starting loadout

If a template would give you +1 to something you get advantage instead

For level one, choose a class and get its A template. At level 3 and 7, get an additional class chosen by the GM to reflect how you’ve grown. At levels 5 and 9, choose an additional class to reflect how you’ve grown. When you level, roll randomly to determine which of your classes advance. If you got a class for the first time you can choose for that to be the one, and if you found a relevant new powerful mentor or the like you can choose the relevant of that. If you selected a Δ class mark off blank “B, “C,” “D” progressions when you roll it, then then it’s “completed” for these purposes (but you can continue to achieve Δs)

antiblorb (blorb + anticanon)

Not like antivenom or antifascism, which are not venom or fascism, but like antimatter or antipaladins, which are wonky types of paladins or matter.

The blorb levels of truth are:

1. explicit GM notes, and if none exist,
   
2. procedures like random tables for generating truths flagged by the GM in advance, and if none exist,
   
3. GM fiat

Antiblorb is quite similar, actually, following the hierarchy:

1. explicit GM notes and overwise established truths, and if none exist
2. if the facts would be known to PCs, established player headcanon, and if that does not exist or is inapplicable,
   
3. if the facts would already by known to PCs, player fiat, and if that is not applicable,
4. procedures like random tables for generating truths flagged by the GM in advance, and if none exist,
5. GM fiat

Note that antiblorb is similar to blorb when PCs are literally or metaphorically "in the dungeon" investigating something outside of their zone of familiarity, allowing for the strength of blorb (genuine exploration and mystery.) When they're "in the tavern," literally or metaphorically, it's similar to and exploits the power of anticanon (making worldbuilding into a team sport.)

1HD = 2 + 1d4

Marcia writes with airtight logic that 1 HD = 4 hp. But hit dice are meant to be rolled!

From my perspective, the ideal is to split out unbloodied and bloodied tracks. The unbloodied track is a known quantity; it represents the minimum level of how much a thing of that order can take. The bloodied track is a mid-combat surprise: you've tested this guy's mettle, and here's how tough he really is.

 This has a couple of benefits from my perspective:

It's an anti-railroading device, much like reaction and morale rolls. If you're mechanically transparent and let the players roll for opponents' bloodied hp, you've removed any worry that players will think you're fudging for dramatic convenience; if for the sake of logistical convenience you want to say "yeah I think you've pretty decisively won this fight we can montage you winning the rest rather than play it out" you can do so from a position of credibility. 

It's a cinch to calculate, either starting with monster HD or monster HP. Starting with HD in an old-school system, you can have unbloodied equal to 2xHD, and then bloodied equal to 1d4xHD (I recommend a single d4, the result of which is multiplied by HD.) If you have a suggested HP, then you can go with bloodied as equal to half default HP and bloodied equal to d(default HP) - round to nearest at-hand polyhedron (good use for Zocchi dice) or take 1d10 and multiply by closest multiple of 10. (So 35 hp becomes 17 ub, d30x3 bl.)

It's a bit gamey but diegetically plausible, as sometimes you don't know how tough someone is until they're battle-tested. 

It avoids the traditional scaling issue of traditional rolled HD, in that as you roll more and more dice as HD goes up, swinginess goes down and there's a lot of calculation to do.

It builds in pacing and surprise into combat, as suddenly things may turn out to be much tougher or easier than expected. Strategies may have to be adjusted.

bad metagaming is always the GM's fault

Harsh words but I'll stand by them. 

Metagaming is when the player knowledge affects character behavior over and above what character knowledge would afford. Bad metagaming is when we don't want this, which depends on lots of things: most obviously how trad vs. storygamey we want to be, and even in very trad games there will be metagamey elements that arise, most often for the sake of smoothing things out and getting to the interesting bits:

• leaning in to cooperation with other player characters, even when the characters would have more reason to conflict
• speeding up/slowing down action because you know the IRL clock on the game session is going to end
• choosing to steal the jewels at night rather than by winning over the prince at the ball because you (the player) like heists more than social adventures

or whatever. [1]

The classical instance of bad metagaming is something like: the party are attacked by trolls, but the players have cleverly read the Monster Manual and know that trolls can't regenerate from fire, and so break out flame even though their characters are benighted innocents who are unaware of such things. [2] Players, don't beat yourself up over this; GMs, this scenario is your fault and you should have got gud. This is on you because:

1. Players don't have control over whether their own knowledge propagates into character action.
2. You DO have control over the fictional situation, and hence whether player knowledge corresponds to it. 

Within a trad or simulationist context metagaming tends to be bad because it takes people out of actor stance, but when players are "playing dumb," the damage is already done. You are the one who decided that trolls die from fire and acid damage, not the Monster Manual. The Monster Manual just suggested it to you, just like it suggested it to your players. 

Does fire and acid damage route around troll regeneration? Do trolls regenerate at all? Make those decisions in the context of the fact that the players have been suggested that this is so. The easiest assumption to make, the one that requires the least work from you and players, is that meme D&D (or whatever folk knowledge associated with the kinds of books players know you're borrowing from) is within the folk knowledge of the setting. Communicate that this is the case and that this folk knowledge is in many cases correct and in some cases incorrect. Then you can decide whether trolls regenerate and what they don't regenerate against, and when PCs encounter trolls (or creatures described similarly to them) they can start with flame as a starting hypothesis and proceed empirically from there, experiencing neither dissonance nor betrayal regardless of the result.

[1] I think most of these kinds of good trad metagaming are best thought of as costs rather than good in themselves, insofar as they take you out of an intended actor stance and into author stance, as opposed to the kind of metagaming one can do from author stance, like deciding that your character who has decided to seduce the prince also finds him absolutely revolting because you (the player) think that would be dramatic and funny.

[2] Maybe this scenario is good at your table; substitute another scenario, then.

review: Barbie (2023)

You’ve probably heard that Gerwig’s Barbie is pretty good. It is! It’s a collection of well-executed gags in service to a thoughtful meditation on feminism and the role of the Barbie doll in American culture the metaphysics of TTRPGs. Spoilers ahead but honestly this isn’t the sort of film where spoilers don’t spoil.

Barbie is a player character Barbie girl who lives in a published campaign setting Barbie world, which is a sort of sterile Platonic realm teleologically oriented towards killing monsters and leveling up being professionally accomplished while hanging out on the beach. But alas! Barbie starts experiencing inbleed malfunction from the IRL human playing with her the IRL human playing with her. She goes on a Hero's Journey (tedious in any story that isn't a meditation on stock stories, which this is) to encounter an almost Plotinian series of her creators: the game designer inventor of Barbie, Ruth Handler; a loveably evil and stupid toy manufacturer; a particular human who plays with a particular Barbie, Gloria. Everybody finds that the effects of their intended interventions between the real world and Barbieland are not what they intended: Ruth's carefully crafted fantasy universe enables objectification rather than empowerment in the real world; Ken "ruins" the carefully crafted world by importing IRL cultural ideas; Mattel literally cannot put Barbie "back in the box;” Gloria, a middle-aged mom plays with Barbie “wrong” by projecting middle-aged thoughts about mortality and depression onto her.

Obviously, Gerwig isn’t here to talk about TTRPGs, but she is interested in formal questions about play with toys more generally, whose Henadic procession of creators mirrors somewhat her own medium of film: writer, director but also production studio, actor. These questions occupy a relatively small portion of discourse about the film, because understandably people want to discuss gender more than they want to discuss art formalism, but while there is some examination of Barbie’s effect on the real world, very little changes there; all of the action in the film is about how the real world intrudes on Barbie and Barbieworld, ultimately to her/their enrichment and depth. (One of the best little scenes involves Barbie sitting mindfully on a park bench, overwhelmed by sonder - a kind of reality-deepening play any of us can engage in at any time.) All of the chaos and unintended bleed is good and doesn’t necessarily change the world, but does let us make toys into a vehicle for greater feeling when we’re willing to be both cringe and perverse and inject our feelings into them.

This I think this can be read as a salvo in the recent discourse around the locus of control between design and play; worries about designer “mind control” are always going to be overblown because play is always enriched by these perverse moves. 

Socially Appropriate Noesis

Your SAN score hovers between 100 and 0. Being exposed to traumatic experiences and supernatural weird shit can bring it down. Watch out! If it goes low enough, you'll have a lot of difficulty getting through the day.

The typical SAN score is somewhere between 75 and 95. People who put special effort into ignoring unpleasant facts, or who don’t really try to build a world model so much as memorize “what the right thing to do” is in a wide variety of situations, or who have a high level of epistemic learned helplessness may have SAN scores in the high 90s. People who are both curious enough to be weird and privileged enough to have a safety net, like tenured professors or eccentric billionaires, may be high-functioning despite SAN between 50 and 80, but this is difficult for most people.

SAN is a presence, not the absence of something. Low SAN can mark someone off, while high SAN is unremarkable, so it seems like the absence of something called “insanity.” Nope! SAN is a specific set of beliefs and instincts that are built up with great effort and maintained with what is considerable inconvenience, because having them is so useful. (Having low SAN doesn’t automatically result in something that shows up in the DSM, except in the sense that literally everything corresponds to something  in the DSM, but the DSM is part of a universal cultural project of trying to keep people at high SAN and policing those who do not.)

The specific beliefs that are part of high SAN vary from culture to culture, but in general they include things like:

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

and so on. Continuing with the relationship between SAN and our society’s concept of a mental disorder, if you believe in the rituals of mental health enough to go through them as an enthusiastic-ish participant, you probably already have a decent SAN and the rituals will work for placebonic reasons. (The rituals may also work for reasons adverted on the tin, like changing your brain chemistry or exposing you to evidence that high-SAN beliefs are true.)

SAN is reduced by exposure to evidence that its percepts are false. SAN loss is thus an expression of rationality, not irrationality. If you meet an honest-to-goodness ghost that is evidence, among other things, that

• you can’t trust your senses
• science doesn’t work
• elite common sense is wrong
• etc

At low SAN, you can’t rule out many possibilities, and you especially can’t rule out many bad possibilities. This is mostly bad. If your SAN is really high you may come off as shallow, naive, and robotic, and maybe you’d benefit from an Ayahuasca trip, but if you’re a paranormal investigator in a modern horror setting or whatever, you want all the SAN you can hold onto.

SAN loss should largely be a choice, albeit often the best of several bad choices. Exposure to horrid mysteries should largely grant the option to simply suppress the information, forgoing the option to acknowledge or reason from or use it in any way. This healthy suppression is what most people do most of the time (the average person IS exposed to all sorts of stuff that would drive them mad reasonably often, if they thought obsessively about it, which they quite reasonably don’t.) But if you’re a humble flapper investigating Yog-Sothoth or whatever, maybe you need to acknowledge some of that. Pick your demons wisely.

revisionist terminology: first/second/third-party material

First-party material is anything oneself comes up with. (Like first person.)

Second-party material is anything someone else at the gaming table comes up with. (It's first-party to them, of course.)

Third-party material is anything someone not at the table comes up with: random blogs, publicly traded Seattle corporations, an angel gives you golden tablets inscribed with elfgame combat rules, whatever.

This is probably like DVORAK in that it's not worth the switching costs. But it's how I think of it in my head, and certainly the right mindset for DIY elfgames.

blood, time, hunger, clean hands, and fast friends (on setting stakes)

(See also: mechanics for resource management, ICI doctrine, impact, attack the character sheet.)

Some crude steotypes you hear sometimes:

1. "OSR play is all bean-counting rations and torches and encumbrance"
2. "PbtA games are great if everyone is bringing the energy to make it sing, but if just one person is out of gas it falls flat"
3. "Modern D&D is just rolling dice until one is high enough that the DM shows you the next scene"
   

Some stereotypes are the opposite of true, but these all hint at something useful. And I think this has to do with the variety of consequences that the different styles work to make relevant. Failing forward and success at a cost are at the core of PbtA, and they lead to the "partial success" range being very fun if the player facing them has the creative energy to make them relevant. No resources is worth tracking in modern D&D other than spell slots and hit points, and you probably won't run out of hit points either.

For old-school play in the sense I care about, you don’t need death around every corner, or bean-counting encumbrance and gold, or strictly-kept time records (although I like some of those too.) But things like these allow the referee to attach costs to actions in a way that presents players with meaningful tradeoffs. Schematically, the conversational loop that undergirds play operates something like:

1. The referee describes a situation.
2. The player consider a response.
3. The referee communicates whether there is significant danger in this response, and if there is not, how long it would take and what other resources it might consume. ("Yeah, it looks like it would take about a dungeon round to hack your way through this wooden door") If there is no danger and no relevant time or resources to consume, they simply do the action.
   
4. If there is significant danger, then the referee either communicates that danger ("so you'll all be scaling this cliff in the storm, I'll have you roll a check at DC 20 each; for each failure you'll have to drop a backpack, and if everybody fails you fall to your doooooms") or notes where mysterious danger at least might be relevant ("okay, so to be clear, you're reading aloud from the tome, even though you don't know what it means, right?")
5. Players decide to go through with the action or consider another.
6. If they go through, referee describes consequences and hence the new situation.

Something (for instance, time) can't be a cost if it doesn't matter. The same applies to every other type of consequence:

• injury and risk of death
• encumbrance
• money
  
• rations 
• stress and mental health
  
• relationship with your patron deity
• relationship with various factions
• "are we the baddies?"
  

These don't necessarily need to be tracked quantitatively, and indeed many suffer from this. If PCs' moral status is supposed to matter, I don't think it requires a Humanity track like in Vampire and may often suffer for it (though I think in that particular game it works for it, in that it simply forces you to make a note of it when you hurt people, and the threshold for making that note of it gets more extreme as you descend further into being a monster.) But it does require that characters care about being good, and that they're thrown into situations that demand either compromise or lateral thinking. "Task: punch one million Nazis" might be an interesting challenge in any number of ways, but it's not morally interesting. 

People sometimes associate aspects of WotC-era D&D they don't like with streaming, but while to be fair tracking gold and encumbrance makes for extremely bad radio, I can think of at least one game that makes for great radio because of how obvious the risks and tradeoffs are when players face a decision: Delta Green. In DG agents have to worry about

• time (bad shit is going to keep happening or get worse without your solving it, otherwise you wouldn't have been called in)
• injury and death
• mental stress, especially how exposure to certain kinds of otherwise useful information
• the affect of all this on their relationships
• whether any particular pretty fucked-up action is morally justified by the harms they're trying to prevent

is Delta Green old-school? Whatever, it's dramatic because of (when played right) tough decision density.

Advice I'd consider generalizable: 

1. have a couple of different things you can reliably count on as a relevant cost, and keep track of it at the level of granularity and using the tools that make sense
   
2. vary up a bit what costs are relevant for any given session; give play variety by putting players in situations where time is suddenly rich where they're used to it being tight, or where rations suddenly matter even if they weren't worth tracking before
3. get your players primed to point out costs; this can align with their moment-to-moment interests if they know that you'll sometimes let them succeed at something they otherwise failed at if they propose a cost that makes sense.
   

 

a one-pager for NPCs

There are many one-page thingies to print off for generating NPCs; this one (pdf) is mine. Most of the content pilfered and lightly edited from there. 

The d66 charts are grouped by theme, so you can roll 1d6 if you're looking for something that fits a broad stereotype, or traits that have that kind of consanance with each other, and the traditional d66 if you don't. The "probable progressions" represent some possibilities for how a problem might develop in the absence of PC intervention. "Manners and motions" is taken from Laban efforts. The Durer is nominally a gender table, but the real purpose is just an image to make it clear which page this is as I flip through my GM's notebook.

Editable version here, if you wish to tailor to your own uses.

the Ersatz King

Another quotepost. 

By 1863 bce, King Sumu-El of Larsa had been dead for three years. Larsa was rising in power and importance under his successor. King Sumu-la-El of Babylon was in his seventeenth year and busily expanding the borders of his own kingdom. Meanwhile, previously dominant Isin faced one defeat after another. And then something remarkable happened there. Or rather, it may have happened. We only know about this episode from a much later chronicle, but the names are right, so perhaps it really took place.

It seems that an eclipse of the moon occurred, terrifying everyone who witnessed it. The Mesopotamians had no way to know that the eclipse happened because the Earth passed between the moon and the sun and cast its shadow across the moon. To Mesopotamian eyes, the bright, reassuring face of the moon gradually seemed to be swallowed up by darkness and was replaced by a round red shadow in the sky. Diviners believed that it signaled the death of the king.

Erra-imitti acted in his own self-interest, and he may have been the first king to come up with a solution to the threat of his imminent death. At any rate, he’s the first one that we know of to do this (there were others who followed his lead in later centuries). According to the later chronicle, “Erra-imitti, the king, installed Enlil-bani, the gardener, as a substitute king on his throne. He placed the royal diadem on his head.”⁵² The plan was that this gardener, Enlil-bani, would serve as king in place of Erra-imitti—living in the court, being served by attendants—and that the gods could go right ahead and carry out their threat to kill the king, but they would choose the gardener-king instead of the real king, Erra-imitti. Just in case the gods failed to follow their cue, the real king would have the substitute king killed, after which Erra-imitti would retake the throne, the prophecy having been properly fulfilled. This, at least, is what happened in later centuries when a substitute king was installed in order to fulfill, and outwit, a prophecy of death to the king.

But the gods seem to have been wiser than Erra-imitti anticipated. Instead, “Erra-imitti [died] in his palace when he sipped a hot broth. Enlil-bani, who occupied the throne, did not give it up (and) so was sovereign.”⁵³ Fact or fable? It seems like a fairy tale, and yet it may well have happened. There is no record from the time of this remarkable occurrence, only ones that were written much later. But then, not many royal records survive from this period; it might simply be lost. Enlil-bani is unlikely to have bragged in a royal inscription about this odd way of coming to power. Being a gardener was not a normal preparation for the throne, after all.

So perhaps the real king did die, as the gods had foretold with the lunar eclipse. One can imagine Erra-imitti sipping his hot broth and then suddenly falling to the ground. Did he choke to death, or have a heart attack, or was he perhaps even poisoned? At this point the gardener, Enlil-bani, who had been placed on the throne simply as a convenience in order to spare the king, could have justifiably argued that the gods had wanted him to rule. What were the chances? There he was, ready to give up his life for the gods and the kingdom, and suddenly it was clear that he was the gods’ choice, after all. They had seen through Erra-imitti’s ruse and killed him anyway.

In the end, Enlil-bani (1860–1837 bce) left far more evidence of his reign than did the ill-fated Erra-imitti. He commissioned an inscription to be impressed onto the bricks of a building that he constructed in Isin. It began, “Enlil-bani, shepherd who makes everything abundant for Nippur, farmer (who grows) tall grain for Ur,”⁵⁴ which sounds like a slight nod to his humble agricultural beginnings. But he also claimed religious powers. He “purifies the mes (cosmic truths) of (the city of) Eridu,” and was the “favorite en-priest of Uruk.” At this point he came to his titles: “king of Isin, king of the land of Sumer and Akkad,” the latter being the title given to the kings who claimed to control all of Mesopotamia. He was their rightful successor. Note that, unlike most kings, he didn’t name his father. Why would he? His father had not been royal. Instead he emphasized that he was the “spouse chosen by the heart of the goddess Inana.” And, like Erra-imitti and the other kings of Isin before him, Enlil-bani added the divine symbol in front of his name. Notwithstanding his humble start in life, he asserted that he was himself a god, an appropriate husband for the goddess Inana.

No commentary because this - from Amanda Podany's lovely Weavers, Scribes, and Kings - stands as gamefuel on its own.

the damnation song (OSR-style challenge)

There is a certain ritual which a particular religious order insists must be performed continuously, generation upon generation unto infinity. For it to be interrupted for even a second would be a kind of disaster, albeit one which insists must be corrected as quickly as possible, not the kind that ends the world.

For present purposes, the details of the ritual itself aren't important, although for gameability it might do well for the ritual's continually evolving needs to require either something horrible or difficult to acquire. Inquiring PCs might first note that the religious order is cagey about what goes on and why, and further furtive inquiries show devil masks and other stereotypical Evil Cult Aesthetics.

The ritual is connected to a hell realm. What it does it keep the hell realm lulled into stasis. When the ritual - which is a sort of mock continuation of the realm - pauses, the tortures of the hell resume. When the ritual resumes, time in the hell realm pauses. There are at least several thousand beings ready to get tortured in there.

You get sent to the hell realm when you die, if and only if you know about it and the purpose of the ritual, and you pass on that knowledge to anybody else.

some (imperfect) resources for smell description

Smells! They play a distinctly tertiary role compared to sight and sound, so central to the mechanically reproducible media of our age. When you bring smell into your description at the table, you really bring an oomph that stirs players out of their cinematic slumber. But precisely because it's less available, it's also harder to get the tools to describe it. Even if I've never seen a dragon, I've seen a million videos of tigers and falcons, but I have a terrible sense of smell and it's been years since I owned a reptile, so that aspect might be a bit harder to do off the cuff.

What I really want is a, like, smell encyclopedia - a big scratch n sniff book where if you want to know what, say, camphor or dillweed smell like, you can just look it up and inhale. I can't find such a thing (if anyone knows, you have my eternal thanks.) But the closest I can find is the Odeuropa smell explorer. 

It's just on the edge of useability - you'll find stuff that should be gameable, like an alchemist's lab, and there will be firsthand accounts - but it's hard to navigate and the accounts are often not as useful as they could be - describing things simply as good, bad, suprising, or the like isn't uncommon, or everything will be in Italian, or whatever, and yeah automatic translation is a thing but that's another set of clicks... why am I sharing this bad resource with you? Because it's so close to being so good; my way of interfacing with it must just be off a bit. One of you, I am sure, it will click just right for.

This article claims to have found ten basic smells (analogous to the sweet-savory-salty-sour-bitter division), I don't know the math to critique their math and I'm guessing their report data is biased towards a WEIRD sample that is used to e.g. lemony scents being used in cleaning products. But it's the same biased sample that I and the people I'm likely to game with are drawn from, so it's potentially useful for gameable description - this list will probably end up on my GM's screen at some point:

1. floral, perfumey
2. woody, musty
3. fruity (but not in a citrusy way)
4. rotten
5. chemical, alcoholic
6. minty
7. sweet
8. nutty, smoky, popcorn
9. chemical, onion, gas, decay
10. citrusy

I'm never going to remember a list of ten things, so here's them in even more arbitrary categories:

• fragrant
  

1. floral, perfumey (factor I)
2. fruity (factor III)
3. minty (factor VI)
4. citrusy (factor X)
    

• tasty

1. woody, musty (factor II)
2. sweet (factor VII)
3. fireplace (factor VIII)
    

• gross

1. rotten (factor IV)
2. ethery (factor V)
3. gas leak (factor IX)
   

 

Magritte, self-portrait

the Dead Christ Proclaims that there Is No God

Not directly RPG related, but here's a great little bit that I discovered from this interview about the history of nihilism. The wrapping device is "dear reader, I apologize for writing something so blasphemous... whew well thank heavens that isn't true at all." I guess that's the sort of groveling you have to do back then if you write something with as metal a title as the Dead Christ Proclaims that There Is No God:

The rattle of the wheels of the clock running down as it was striking eleven, had awakened me. I looked for the sun in the dark and void night sky, for I supposed that some eclipse was hiding it with the moon. And all the graves were open, and the iron doors of the charnel-house kept opening and shutting, moved by invisible hands. Athwart the walls shadows went flitting; but no bodies cast those shadows and there were others, too, moving about out in the open air. Within the open coffins there were none now asleep, except the children. Nothing was in the sky but sultry fog, heavy and grey, ranging there in great clammy folds; and some gigantic shadow closed and closed this fog as in a net, and drew it ever nearer, closer, and hotter. Up overhead I heard the thunder of distant avalanches, and beneath my feet the first footfalls of a boundless earthquake. The church was heaved and shaken to and fro by two terrific discords striving in it, beating in stormy effort to attain harmonious resolution. Now and then a greyish glimmer passed with rapid gleam flittering athwart the windows; but, whenever this glimmer came, the lead and iron of the frames always melted and ran rolling down. The fog’s net, and the quaking of the earth, drove me into the temple, past gleaming, glittering basilisks, brooding in poison-nests beside the door. I passed among shadows, strange and unknown to me; but they all bore the impress of the centuries. These shadows stood all grouped about the altar, and their breasts quivered and throbbed—their breasts but not their hearts. There was but one of the dead still lying on his pillow, and he was one who had but just been buried in the church; he lay at peace, his breast without a throb, a happy dream upon his smiling face. But now, as I came in (I, one of the living), his sleep broke, he awoke, and smiled no more; with painful effort he raised his heavy eyelids—and there was no eye beneath—and in his beating breast there was no heart, but a deep wound instead. He raised his hands, folded as it for prayer; but then his arms shot out and came apart from his poor trunk, the folded hands came off and fell away. Upon the dome above there was inscribed the dial of eternity—but figures there were none, and the dial itself was its own gnomon; a great black finger was pointing at it, and the dead strove hard to read the time upon it.

And at this point a lofty, noble form, bearing the impress of eternal sorrow, came sinking down towards our group, and rested on the altar; whereupon all the dead cried out, “Christ! Is there no God?”

He answered, “There is none.”

At this the dead quivered and trembled; but now it was not their breasts alone that throbbed; the quivering ran all through the shadows, so that one by one the shudder shook them into nothingness. And Christ spake on, saying, “I have traversed the worlds, I have risen to the suns, with the milky ways I have passed athwart the great waste spaces of the sky; there is no God. And I descended to where the very shadow cast by Being dies out and ends, and I gazed out into the gulf beyond, and cried, ‘Father, where art Thou?’ But answer came there none, save the eternal storm which rages on, controlled by none; and towards the west, above the chasm, a gleaming rainbow hung, but there was no sun to give it birth, and so it sank and fell by drops into the gulf. And when I looked up to the boundless universe for the Divine eye, behold, it glared at me from out a socket, empty and bottomless. Over the face of chaos brooded Eternity, chewing it for ever, again and yet again. Shriek on, then, discords, shatter the shadows with your shrieking din, for He is not!”

The pale and colourless shades flickered away to nothingness, as frosty fog dissolves before warm breath, and all grew void. Ah! then the dead children, who had been asleep out in the graves, awoke, and came into the temple, and fell down before the noble form (a sight to rend one’s heart), and cried, “Jesus, have we no Father?” He made answer, with streaming tears, “We are orphans all, both I and ye. We have no Father.”

Then the discords clashed and clanged more harshly yet; the shivering walls of the temple parted asunder, and the temple and the children sank—the earth and sun sank with them—and the boundless fabric of the universe sank down before us, while high on the summit of immeasurable nature Jesus stood and gazed upon the sinking universe, besprent with thousand suns, and like a mine dug in the face of black eternal night; the suns being miners’ lamps, and the milky way the veins of silvery ore.

And as he gazed upon the grinding mass of worlds, the wild torch dance of starry will-o’-the-wisps, and all the coral banks of throbbing hearts—and saw how world by world shook forth its glimmering souls on to the Ocean of Death—then He, sublime, loftiest of finite beings, raised his eyes towards the nothingness and boundless void, saying, “Oh dead, dumb, nothingness! necessity endless and chill! Oh! mad unreasoning Chance—when will ye dash this fabric into atoms, and me too? Chance, knowest thou—thou knowest not—when thou dost march, hurricane-winged, amid the whirling snow of stars, extinguishing sun after sun upon thy onward way, and when the sparkling dew of constellations ceases to gleam, as thou dost pass them by? How every soul in this great corpse-trench of an universe is utterly alone? I am alone—none by me—O Father, Father! where is that boundless breast of thine, that I may rest upon it? Alas! if every soul be its own father and creator, why shall it not be its own destroying angel too? Is this a man still near me? Wretched being! That petty life of thine is but the sigh of nature, or the echo of that sigh. Your wavering cloudy forms are but reflections of rays cast by a concave mirror upon the clouds of dust which shroud your world—dust which is dead men’s ashes. Look ye down into the chasm athwart the face of which the ash-clouds float and fly. A mist of worlds rises up from the Ocean of Death; the future is a gathering cloud, the present a falling vapour. Dost thou see and know thy earth?”

Here Christ looked downward, and his eyes grew full of tears, and he spake on, and said, “Alas! I, too, was once of that poor earth; then I was happy, then I still possessed my infinite Father, and I could look up from the hills with joy to the boundless heaven, and I could cry even in the bitterness of death, ‘My Father, take thy Son from out this bleeding earthly shell, and lift Him to thy heart.’ Alas! too happy dwellers upon earth, ye still believe in Him. Your sun, it may be, is setting at this hour, and amid flowers and brilliance, and with tears ye sink upon your knees, and, lifting up your hands in rapturous joy, ye cry each one aloud up to the open heavens, ‘Oh Father, infinite, eternal, hear! Thou knowest me in all my littleness, even as Thou knowest all things, and Thou seest my wounds and sorrows, and Thou wilt receive me after death and soothe and heal them all.’ Alas! unhappy souls! For after death these wounds will not be healed. But when the sad and weary lays down his worn and wounded frame upon the earth to sleep towards a fairer brighter morn all truth, goodness and joy,—behold! he awakes amid a howling chaos, in a night endless and everlasting; and no morning dawns, there is no healing hand, no everlasting Father. Oh, mortal, who standest near, if still thou breathest the breath of life, worship and pray to Him, or else thou losest Him for evermore.”

And I fell down and peered into the shining mass of worlds, and beheld the coils of the great serpent of eternity all twined about those worlds; these mighty coils began to writhe and rise, and then again they tightened and contracted, folding round the universe twice as closely as before; they wound about all nature in thousandfolds, and crashed the worlds together, and crushed down the boundless temple to a little churchyard chapel. And all grew narrow, and dark, and terrible. And then a great immeasurable bell began to swing in act to toll the last hour of Time, and shatter the fabric of the universe to countless atoms,

So, tl;dr, Christ comes back to Earth, says God is dead, everyone loses their fucking minds, Christ looks out on the cosmos knowing it will die in nothing, the end (or at least the end of the interesting parts).

One, boring genealogical questions: was Richter an influence on Lovecraft? Was he the first to play with some of these tropes?

Two: this is just so great! It's a set of motifs you normally just don't see together that work so well with their incongruity: it's judgment day, the final trumpet is sung, the dead crowd into church with their spectral bodies overlapping and their rotting faces sliding off of their skulls, and Christ comes down from Heaven to state the fundamental truth of the universe, which is that nothing matters and we should all die in horror. 

Three: I think that there's something actually kind of accurate about this incongruity. Two pretty typical models you might have are Jesus vs Satan, or 1 vs. -1, or perfect good vs. perfect evil, on one hand, and on the other 0, Cthulhu, nihilism.

0 vs. 1 is more accurate, more true to real struggle. Per Kant, morality arises from the structure of rationality and agency, but per modern science rationality and agency are the result of atoms smashing into each other from a universe blindly following completely arbitrary and amoral laws. My intuition from hearing a lot people talk about their moral experiences is that basically all of us, regardless of our metaphysics, feel this pull between very high moral aspirations and that everything is completely meaningless and pointless. Active malevolence is by contrast pretty rare and mostly a projection. I wouldn't agree with Augustine that all disvalue is the absence of something good - pointless involuntary pain, the most obvious case of disvalue, isn't the absence of something else - but the Devil, I think, is less real than Yog-Sothoth is.