A Review of Forgotten Realms; Underdark

 By Bruce R.Cordell, Gewndolyn F.M. Kestrel and Jeff Quick. Art direction by Robert Raper. Graphic Design by Robert Raper and Robert Campbell, Cartography by Robert Lazzaretti. First printing 2003.

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This book has some notable slop and a semi-regular patterning of some supremely boring ideas, which gradually frets like cloud to reveal increasingly good work in exploration, before dawning blackly into seventy pages (nearly half the book) of geographic information about the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms and in particular, of the period right in the middle of R.A. Salvatore’s ‘War of the Spider Queen’ novel series.

honestly, these covers are almost selling me

Prestige Classes, ‘Regions, Feats

These things are like dirty nasty crack to me, or cheap sweets I can’t help eating more of. With my heart and my soul they disgust me, yet like a low enslaved desire, some abandoned part of me yearns for them; what exactly would it be like to be a ‘Cavelord’ (a kind of Underdark ranger), and exactly how does that differ from a ‘Prime Underdark Guide’ (someone who helps others range under the dark). Perhaps these crystalline imagined alter-selves occupy something like the fragmentary dreams of other ordinary lives which sleet through our minds in quiet moments of the vaguest ennui; “What would my life be like if had Prestige Classed up to ‘Arachnomancer’? Sure there’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t be able to do, but think of the spiders. At least then I would know who I was = an Arachnomancer.” O to be the guy who has a ‘thing’, and for everyone to know it.

A standout for its pleasurable ridiculousness is the ‘Illithid Body Tamer’ - for those who, not only want to play a brain-eating psychic octopus from a hyper-villainous made-for-crime cephalopod race, but want to play the buff , hand to hand focused version of that race.

These strong squid come with a range of whirling tentacle attacks; (Tentacle of Fate, Reaching Tentacle, Whirlwind Tentacle and Tentacle of Destiny) spiked tentacle attachments and a promise not to use their innate, deadly, and very easy murderous psychic powers. A promise which they will break if they feel like it;

“An illithid body tame is not slavishly devoted to its code. If using plane shift or mind blast is clearly in its best interest, then it does so, preferring to lose access to the benefits of abstinence than lose its life.”

This surely takes the already hypertrophied art of Prestige Classing close to the limits of its own absurdity. But perhaps its that very insane hyper-specifity that helps to cast the strange spell such thing have over a living game. The others in this book are more boring and lack the ‘tang’ of 3.5 hyper-absurdity. (The vision of a 3.5 influenced game where only the most deranged Prestige Classes are allowed; Cancer Mage, Candle Caster, Halfling Outrider and Fochlucan Lyrist anyone?)

Though some still mourn the loss; “Multiclassing, at its best, is a biography expressed through mechanics.”

Nothing in the ‘Races’ section is as good as these images of them;

which are amongst the best art in the book.

You are not (at least here), actually allowed to be a ‘Derro’, which is disappointing for the book that introduced the Mind-Flayer Body-Tamer. Perhaps even amidst these often somewhat-villainous races, they were simply too Chaotic Evil.

‘Feats’ are as you would imagine them, apart from a few sparks of fun; ‘Elfhunter’ only available to Drow? Very sad. ‘Graft Illithid Flesh’ lets you play Squid Frankenstein, which has at least one very boutique use we will discover later on.

Magic and Spells

Spends an alarming amount of time describing the for-this-book ‘Node Magic’, a system of magic and advantage built around dicking around with ‘Earth Nodes’. This is the kind of deeply embedded rules system that, once you know someone is planning on interacting with it, you have to integrate it into your whole campaign, placing various NODES of varying level here and there; and what NODES you place where will have a big effect on play.

If anyone has ever used this, leave a comment or a link. Its hard for me to believe anyone could be as into something called ‘Node Magic’ as is required to actually simulate and use it for a campaign.

I did find a handful of spells I enjoyed, all of which do what they say on the tin; Amorphous Form, Contagious Fog, Drown, Rushing Waters, Viscid Glob and my favourite; Stone Sphere, which creates a five-foot diameter sphere of polished stone which moves under your control at a speed of 30ft. The Stone has Armour Class 5 and 500 hit points. One round per level and its a Level 5 spell. After casting, directing its movement requires a move action, so you can still presumably cast more bullshit so long as you stay in place, rolling your bid deadly marble about. A wonderful alternative to ‘Fireball’.

Equipment and Magic Items

Things improve a little more with ‘Equipment and Magic Items’, almost all of these are very or slightly impractical outside of a handful of uses, but isn’t that the pleasure of a tool? And of having this particular tool? Perhaps this granular imagining is the true spirit of 3.5.

It also has a pleasing image.

Various odd or conditionally useful weapons, some bizzarro additions to armour. ‘Blackwater’ which cripples water breathing creatures in a certain volume of water, (there have been occasions where I wished I had some), the Caveharp, (less interesting than it sounds), the blessedly-specific ‘Darkvision Invisible Paint’, wonderful SHRIEK PASTE, a ‘Spelunkers Kit’ which should be standard issue for all characters anyway.

Then a range of poisons and chemicals, including ‘Virile Madness’, which is PCP, and another curious obsession of this book; templates. Here templates for magical weapons made of this thing and that, including ‘Morphing’ weapons, which I feel like would be much more insanely useful irl than in game, where the physical/kinetic problems such things are made to solve are rarely imagined with the depth, fluency and regularity to make their use worthwhile.

Armours of ‘halfweight’, ‘Drowcraft’, ‘Illithidwrought’ and ‘Xorn’. Cortical mucusy armour that blanks your mind to foes, psychic armour and Drow Death Armour that makes you invisible, gives you ‘disguise’ and ‘spider climb’, for if you want to fantasise about being the coolest most cracked ultra-high-fantasy protagonist EVAR - these are dreams and aspirations I think, more than tools, and its curious how much ultra-mega-high-fantasy begins to intersect with post-singularity science-fiction tropes. We will see this later in city design.

Rings, of which the most fun is ‘Antivenom’ (60,000gp), and just below it ‘Antivenom, Frugal’ (10,000gp), just for the image of a world that contrast creates. RODS always feel under-noetic, and Staffs (no room underground surely?). A Figurine of Wonderous Power that transforms into a giant spider you can ride around on, and I have always wanted to own one of these in D&D, the less romantic and perhaps more old-school ‘Figurines of Illusory Escort’ which cast an illusion of guards around you when you sleep. Some very boring Neutral-Themed items. Last; a magic tome so powerful its like carrying around a semi-divine limited-use A.I. (you must speak to it in a specific dead language or it eats your soul and makes you one of its pages), and the Illithid Grafts, finally, but they are mainly just sticking tentacles on things, apart from ‘Humanoid Skin’ which involves sealing up something (or someone, presumably horrific), inside;

“If the humanoid skin hides monstrous features below its surface (such as extra arms, tentacles or antennae), using those features requires thrusting them through the skins surface as a standard action. This act showers all nearby cretures with blood and deals 1d4 damage to the graft recipient.”

Monsters are not a high point, there are rules for crossing things with Illithid (add tentacles), crossing them with spiders (add legs), crossing them with Chameleons, filling them with ‘Faerzress’, rules to mineralise anything; none make anything more interesting, producing largely globs. Multiple creatures that ‘swim through earth’ for various reasons and in various ways. A minotaur with demon blood? The ‘Lith’ has a good silhouette;

The ‘Maur’ as a hunched underground giant has a pleasing mechanic in which, if it can find room, it laboriously and horrifically stands full upright, “an agonizing, joint-popping experience for the Maur, though it relishes the change” and takes on a little of the noble potency of its forebears. The ‘Ineffable Horror’ which I can only assume got its name as an Underdark joke, since it is the most ‘effable’ thing ever.

The only really very-good monster is still only half-good and that is the ‘Annihilator’, a kind of Abberant solo Rust Monster with extra tentacles which can disintegrate anything. “The annihilator seems to derive sustenance and pleasure from destroying things, especially living things.” It has no ecology, background, sanity or reason for being, and likely would not benefit from them, it just likes Annihilating things and that is all it wants to do. A twist in the tapestry of the world and a gleaming contextless ambulatory disaster. Not bad.

just once in my life I want to say ‘call forth.. the ANNIHILATOR’

Exploring the Underdark

Things take an uptick here and its surprising, or unsurprising, how parallel to my own thought much of this is. We begin with a tour of underground features; Abysses, Caves, Dungeons, Gorges, Lakes, Rifts, Rivers, Seas, Shafts, Tunnels, Vaults and Volcanoes, which in this last section, does nothing to elucidate the Magma/Lava differentiation; what is lava encountered underground, but magma? What is Magma encountered in an open cave, but lava? Precisely when does water count as having left the tap?

From there into rocks and rock formations, including the classic trifecta of Sedimentary, Igneous and Metamorphic, to which we add MAGIMORPHIC rock formations - much could be done with the consequences of alternative geology and tectonics in a fantasy world, one far older than ours, and thus with a different arrangement of stone, or with magical warfare etc happening on the regular, with semi-regular portals to the Plane of this and that, D&D type Gods popping down to fundamentally alter reality for a certain place or time, and of the more Abrahamic, Tolkien-level God fundamentally changing the substance, history and nature of reality if, for instance, you sail too far West. (Discovering America is a sin.)

Then the Environment, climate, ecologies, plants and fungi, animal life. In almost every version of the Underdark the environment is still seperate from the solar cycle, as with ours, but is much higher in energy than our own cave systems. The answer is magic. The conception of the Underdark being ‘magically compressed’ appears in many tomes. This book imagines trees which feed on magic the way others do on sunlight. I can’t help but imagine what the leaf and branch shapes would be? Would the leaves have subtle dimensionally warped Escher shapes? The branches bend in directions you can’t go?

My own conception for this hyper-compression is that of the unification, compression and composting of multiple causal paths, the deeper in you go.

So for instance, if you go a mile down, civilisation is about 5,000 years old and modern humanity has only expanded since the last glacial maximum roughly 10,000 years ago.

But if you go two or three miles down, then there may have been 10,000 years of civilisation, perhaps even mutually-contradicting civilisational paths, either combined from alternate worlds or perhaps those paths wiped from ontology by divine hands, cannot be wiped down here, so if the world is ‘re-set’, this deepest layer of it cannot be re-set, and retains all the old programming and tombs and remnants of old dreams and old ideas, things which could never have happened, but did, but which are only remembered here.

Then if you go down four to six miles, you walk amongst the compressed relics of 20,000 years of civilisation, or 5,000 years X four, each semi-sperate yet interacting, interlaced and overlapping. This combined weight of time, experience and record, more than the surface could bear, is what creates the overwhelming magical compression of the Underworld. There is more down here than could be here, and more and more the deeper you go. Till if you go deep enough, perhaps the depths of all possible worlds combine into one vast realm of night.

That, at least, is my conception. We get ‘Underdark Hazards’, a limited but ok climbing and spelunking section, a bit on getting lost and then a long section on Encounter tables. I will be advising people make their own for Veins of the Earth

Finally for this ‘exploration’ section, we get into the once-again parallel conceptions of a somewhat ‘mythic’ underworld and the differences between this and the real-life underworld that inspired it.

A pseudo-natural aspect of the Forgotten Realms Underdark is that it is not contiguous, that is; it comes in patches and bounds, like islands, and its hard, sometimes impossible, to get from zone to zone. There are big areas of interconnection, but these are seperate to each other. Interesting and curious.

A classic situation for the ‘semi-mythic underworld’ is that its deeper than it should be, and the magma, water, caves and tectonics are much more spread out and interwoven than they ever should be. You can imagine our world like a densely layered cake, or lasagne, with interesting, but limited, layers of interaction. You have limestone caves, which were usually below, or on, the water table, but are now above it, then you have the water table, and its hard to explore beneath that underground, and then you have massively increasing pressure and heat, and then molten rock. Head to tail there is not that much actual depth to work with.

In the Forgotten Realms, and in VotE, there is way more depth and things are more spread out and intermingled, even at the cost of perhaps making less sense. Can you have a huge cavern beneath an ocean, with another (navigable) ocean in it? In our world, no, but in Fantasy, yes. Can you have navigable caves above, around, even below a magma flow? Not really, but in Fantasy, yes.

Geography - Faerun’s Underdark

A really nice piece of cartography and a slightly-frustratingly organised alphabetical section finish off the book, and much of it is this section. We are moving slightly more into a ‘Hasbro’s Invisible Cities’ vibe here; a list you can read like fiction, purely for the enjoyment of it. And its here that the propensity of the Forbidden Realms to build upon some very normative base concepts, but to keep building on them, to keep iterating and developing, and to bury the results of those developments deep in hidden corners of its world, helps it reach ramparts of innovative high fantasy you probably weren’t expecting going on. A lot of this is normative, some more interesting than you thought, and bits of it are very good.

Araaumycos - an entire kingdom-sized section of the Underdark is one fungal organism. It seems to be maybe possibly sentient, some of the time, and broadly neutral, or at least not expansionist. “On rare occasions enormous patches of Araumycos die, revealing ancient civilisations ripe for plunder beneath.” Even better, there is another, smaller, but aberrant and expansionist Fungal kingdom/entity/person.

Blingdenstone - A collapsed Deep Gnome city, but one of the ‘factions’ currently occupying it is ‘Ogremoch’s Bane’ a sentient cloud of magic dust. Its motivations are unclear but “In the back of the city, dozens of planar creatures of earth stand inert as the cloud swirls around them, whispering promises of victory and glory in Terran. Earth Elementals, mephits, Xorns, thoqquas, end even stranger creatures wait, still as statues.”

Cairnheim, Demense of the Dodkong - a lava tube village of giants ruled by a crafty 1,500 year old Stone Giant Liche with a magical crown, ruthless, but being very old, he still clings to an ancient Giant custom of hospitality, (limited, three days of safety). Of course you need historical knowledge to even guess this custom still exists and he’s not going to tell you.

Chaulssin; a ruined city, half within the plane of shadow, on a precipice above an abyss, now occupied by a House of Assassins. An Illithid city ruled by a council of Vampire Illithids who took over when their Elder Brain died - but they are all going slightly crazy from absorbing the thoughts and memories of so many other Illithids. Also home to the twisted Illithid philosopher Nurr’Korzahg who, after a moment of clarity, has started developing the notion that consistently trying to subvert and dominate all other forms of life might actually be not a great long-term strategy (several cultures and locations in this Map are made up of Illithid-hating ex-slaves, and they have at least two ‘Slave Races’ (Gythanki and Duergar) who ended up escaping and turning into absolute 100% Illithid HATERS, could our own policy of literally making enemies be at fault here?)

Deep Imaskar is a really neat addition to the legendarium; an ancient city of Wizards which hid beneath the earth after a major slave revolt. Now a self-sustaining pocket-kingdom with buildings growing from its gravatically-warped walls.

Imaskar is so secret that the glowing ‘sky’ of its cavern is a gigantic seal made specifically to keep it hidden, a seal so complex that studying and repairing it is equivalent to stargazing, a seal that affects reality so much that, wherever anyone is outside Imaskar, if they imagine Imaskar itself, the seal subtly and invisibly tugs at their thoughts, suggesting to them that the city is long-gone, if it was ever real, nothing but a rumour or fantasy. Imaskar is so secret that if people are chosen to leave, to complete some mission or for other reasons, they have the very memory of Imaskar erased from their minds, and are dropped in some random place far from the city; a true Wolfian hero, (or an RPG hero), who literally does not know where they are from, has a general sense that they have a mission, and at some point, will face a deeply buried command to return... somewhere, somehow. An interesting literary experiment.

Drik Hargunen; a city overwritten on every surface with the testament of a Duergar god, with complex runes of warding and subtle interlaced command phrases for the cities self-defence system interwoven in the ever-flowing words. To live here you must know how to read, know what to read and know deeply what not to read, which is why the Duergar allow no sighted slaves into the city-proper, instead they bring in blind Grimlocks, their hands tied to the handles of carts, so they can’t touch anything they shouldn’t.

Dupapen; a village of Aboleth slaves who, in the mental absence of their masters, have set up a thriving commercial concern. Some time ago the Aboleths ate a bunch of Gityanki and absorbed their minds and memories of intra-planar life. These memories are so vivid and intense that the Aboleths have been sitting around, blissed out and vibing for a decade. They tried breeding new Aboleths to manage the slaves but since each new Aboleth is born with the perfect memories of its parent, they had the same problem.

A near-extraplanar city made up of portals and spherical spaces in solid stone. If you can’t naturally swim through stone, don’t bother turning up.

Llurth Drier; Drow but poor and covered in mud.

Looblishar; a Kua Toa settlement overtaken by devotees of the Goddess of Darkness. Utterly lightless, only those with perfect Darkvision need even try to enter, though small this is the Axial point for a range of portals which reach to oceanic and above ground exit points all over the world. Creepy cultists of the Dark Goddess use Looblishar to move things and people and to engage their no-doubt whacky schemes. The kind of place you drop a patriot missile on as soon as you find out where it is.

Ooltul; a Beholder city forced into a surprising level of cosmopolitan toleration by an infestation of planar parasites who control the head Beholders; “Considering that Ooltrul is a city of evil geniuses dominated by monstrously unhuman aberrations, it is reasonably welcoming of outsiders.”

Oryndoll; an Illithid city dominated by a cult who’s modus-operandi is not only to acquire knowledge, but to specifically acquire knowledge that can then be removed from all other records or minds world-wide, so that this thing once known, now only they may know.

Reeshov; a Grimlock fortress town of former Illithid slaves who surround their settlement with complex traps, free slaves but trust no-one (the Illithids consistently probe their defences with mind-altered thralls and they know this).

Rringlor Noroth; “a city in only the most liberal sense of the word”, a city of Cloakers built into a gigantic bridge, part sculpted from shadow, crossing an immeasurable abyss. “The cloakers of Rringlor Nortoth spend much of their time continuously moaning and flying in great swooping orbits around a bridge of shadowstone”

I love these guys, they manage to be effortlessly more alien than either Kua Toa (cringe and flanderised) or Mind Flayers

“The entrance is a series of cracks and flat passages no more than 4 inches wide within the Shadowspan. Cloakers peel away from the circling mass at random intervals and wedge their bodies into the cracks to crawl into the city.”

“Sometimes, cloakers just lie on the ceiling and stare at the floor for hours;” - same.

One human sage ‘inhabits’ this ‘city’; “Saibh is not insane, but he is immersed so deeply into the cloaker mindset that he cannot easily return and carry on coherent conversations in Common...”

Undrek’Thoz; a Drow mega-city, a bunch of very different Drow cities connected by hidden portals and unified by a general government, though outsiders won’t necessarily know about the portals. The gates between different sections of the mega-city are set to allow no metal to pass through, (to limit the craze for assassinations), this has lead to a sophisticated arms-race in pets and poisons. Economically, the city is unified by vellum scrip. In a high fantasy setting, things like this portal-linked mega-city would be way more common; such settings, if allowed to run, would inevitably develop into something a little like high-energy science fiction.

Final Analysis; Adventure Locations, Infinity Engine, Nostalgic Emotions

A last section on ‘Dungeons’ lets the book down again; single entry, mono-path micro-maps with complex ‘trick’ enemies and substantial treasure. Nothing really like ‘dungeons’ and the section is not large, but it does have an entry for ‘Citadel of the Fiendish Slayer’ which is a great title if nothing else.

Of the differences I have with ‘Underdark’ at least some can be put down to preference in design. I am not of the Kind whom suffers for the Prestige Class, or who enjoys the ‘build’, let alone picking an absurdly specific Prestige Class and playing specifically towards that for god knows how many sessions. A ‘biography expressed through mechanics’ has no interest for me, I am not amongst the elect, yet, I cannot despise them. We are cousins if not kin and I have enough of the hyper-specificity autism tingle to refuse a wholesale rejection. Neither will I live in, or near their, ghetto of stats.

Of the monster section; it is simply bad. Of Underdark exploration and transit; parallel, and respectable.

The best part of the book is where it enters into the beautiful twilight dream of the Forgotten Realms, a place so normative in fantasy that it gets interesting again, there are lots of odd ideas buried here and there in this ‘eventide of gems’ (which I can never believe to be ‘lightless’, the conception of a true devouring dark and of adventuring for weeks within a fragile bubble of light is something this Underdark book, and perhaps every book of this type, fails at), and I see this dream, strangely, through the medium of the Infinity Engine and isometric RPGs like Baldurs Gate and Planescape: Torment.

Perhaps this is because such games were my only actual active interaction with 3.5 and its culture. Perhaps the physical design language of this engine seeped through into the worldbuilding for the entire setting. Wouldn’t be the first time there was conceptual counterflow. Deep Imaskar in particular seems set up for an ‘amnesiac protagonist’ RPG. The careful and quite charming visual design, including pseudo-crumpled ‘parchment’ edges, a boutique, or at least, rare, internal title font, and a handful of other things, speak of the fading edge of correct and comfortable warm and basking 1990’s page design. Summer.

Perhaps it is the sad, strange, isolated summer vibe I get from all these things and which seems to unify them. Of dreams engaged in darkened rooms while concrete bakes outside. Of a slight interior sadness and loneliness mixed with the deep possession of a fantastic land.

‘Stone Sphere’ is great.

(There is a side bar of ‘graffiti left around a portal’ so cringe it nearly made me want to kill myself.)

Take This You Fiends

This is the story of an encounter with Tunnels and Trolls by a guy who did not know that much about Tunnels and Trolls and still doesn’t, so if you are a T&T maven and don’t want to hear some half-interested newb bang on, then stop reading now. (Also; they are bringing out a new version of this soon, and by god my post has nothing to do with it! I literally stapled together the rules that I used from ancient box-sets and a PDF, and I ignored most of them.)

7.5

Somehow, I have the boxed set for the 7.5 edition of Tunnels & Trolls on my shelf. I must have bought back around 2009-2011 when I was getting interested in RPG’s . Yet more curious; I have a vague sense impression that I actually read these rules. I remembered nothing of them, but if sitting un-played on a shelf for fifteen years makes an RPG guilty then I don’t want to be innocent.

More recently I was listening to Chris McDowalls ‘Rule of Three’ podcast, where he interviews game makers about three favourite works, and he brought up the story of encountering someone at an Old-School meetup who had only ever played Tunnels and Trolls, and in fact, had only ever been in one campaign of Tunnels and Trolls, and had been gaming for years, this one game, this one world.

Clearly there is something going on with Tunnels and Trolls, I thought, and, foolishly, brought this up in a conversation with the Artist; “maybe that’s the secret, maybe we all should have been playing Tunnels and Trolls all along.”

“Oh, you should run it for us.”

Thus came the curse. My smallest statements are literally engraved on Votans Spear, and I am a pussy, a clock was ticking; could I read and absorb the Tunnels and Trolls ruleset AND develop a dungeon for Tunnels and Trolls in time, and well enough to run an actually functional game? (Watch my reality TV series to find out.)

(tldr; I can. Comments from two of the players, the ‘Rogue’ and the ‘Leprechaun’ are scattered through this post.)

Long hours of digging through this ruleset, producing documents to make sense of it, and writing dungeon ideas on the back of till receipts at work, which provoked some consternation when colleagues looked down to discover that I had been scribbling about Moon Mice and “THERE IS A COUNTDOWN”.

Character Generation

T&T Char Gen begins in a space broadly adjacent to Dungeons and Dragons, with Seven stats (in 7.5 at least) rolled 3d6 and in my case, down the line. Add Gold, a ‘Height and Weight table and so-on. When complete you get essentially three Core classes; Warrior, Wizards and Rogues. (There are more but I won’t get into those). So far so D&D.

What’s different?

TARO

“Remember, triples add and roll-over. This rule always applies in Tunnels and Trolls.” – Ken St Andre

It doesn’t always apply; one of a number of ways the 7.5 ruleset seems to be written by someone with an irregular supply of amphetamines. However, this fascinating and distorting rule probably should apply more fully across the ruleset.

If you roll a triple in Character Generation, you add everything together and roll again, adding the resulting value. If the second roll is also triples, you add and roll again. If the third roll is triples, you add, and roll again.

This means that while the general range of stats for an opening character is likely similar to D&D, it’s possible that one or more players may have one or more stats that are insanely ridiculously high, creating an utterly distorting effect on the game.

And in fact this did happen in the game we played, with one Rogue rolling an insanely massively high CHA score and very mid scores for everything else, resulting in one of the party being or a youngish Matthew McConaughey, roaming around the dungeon just charming the shit out of everyone.

This is important because, like a lot of things essential to T&T, it strongly effects the tone of the world in which you play, the nature of the challenges you face and a range of other things. The wilder the dice curve, the whackier the reality.

The Leprechaun – “T&T produces lawless, erratic game outcomes, but *appears to be* rigorously designed. There are a lot of rules but they don’t really work. The depthless complexity acts as a wax seal that legitimizes the game outcomes. In combat, you do a bunch of calculation and roll a big pile of dice, which is a ritual act that irreversibly moves the game timeframe forward one increment.”

Liz Darnforth

Kindred

Kindred is ‘Race’ in old D&D terms, and while it looks like earlier editions had a relatively narrow range of ‘normal’ Kindred you could be, the 7.5 edition has gone utterly loopy and included stat tables for a gigantic (literally, you can be a Giant), range of possible races, from Skeleton to Vampire to Dragon.

Almost all of these Kindred are measurably better than standard humans. Even Skeletons are a bit better. There are no gates or limits on what Kindred you can be. This means, if you are playing 7.5 as written, you can be literally almost anything and that almost all of these are better than standard human stats.

If you include one or two of these ‘hackable’ or ‘optimisable’ elements in a game ostensibly dedicated to a balanced experience then they are flaws, but if you flood the game with them, then you fundamentally alter the expectations for what kind of game it’s going to be. This is one of a wide range of ways in which Tunnels & Trolls is protected from the negative effects of being Tunnels and Trolls by the fact of it being Tunnels and Trolls, the games own anarchic spirit keeps it… stable?; if you are the kind of person who wants to min-max and powergame, (which you could theoretically do easily in T&T), why on earth would you be playing this loosy-goosey game?

I set bounds that no-one could play a Kindred too large to actually fit in the dungeon. We ended up with one very charismatic human rogue, one Leprechaun (size and weight reduction tables are included) and one Star-Obsessed and (below average for his people) strong dwarf with a BIG AXE.

Talents

Every PC gets one ‘talent’; a particular thing that they do, and this could also conceivably be power-gamed but generally is not. They roll a d6 for their talent value and add this to the stat being used when rolling for this particular thing.

Level

Your Level in T&T provides a number of benefits, and is based explicitly upon your highest essential stat. This means you can start play at Level Zero, Level One, Two, or even possibly Three, and that as your stats fluctuate through play, you can possibly change Level, back and forth, within the range of even one adventure. (NONE of the specifically-designed character sheets I saw online were built with the essential changeability of the PC stats in mind. You are better of just using notepaper.)

Loony Tunes Adventure Gang

It’s clear that through the 7.5 editions it took to reach me, T&T had been through a lot of rules changes and additions. As I will describe later, I think many of these are errors, or at least, non-optimal.

Two things I agree with fundamentally are TARO and the more-recent extended-Kindred chart. I actively want a Loony Tunes Adventure Party with a bunch of whacked-out and distorted stats and a range of weird presences in the game. (How would a Leprechaun react to hanging out with a Vampire?). I think it’s generally fine if someone with crap stats inflates themselves with a Kindred, so long as they actually play that role (remembering they are still a below-average member of their own Kindred). I didn’t set it as a hard rule but I would probably state next time that anyone who gets a TARO roll and a massive single stat, should stay human, but everyone else can pick a Kindred.

In its simplicity, adaptability, broadness of concept, lightness and gonzo-feel, T&T feels well-adapted to the ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ style of play. It also seems to suit well a ‘play whatever/whoever you want’ ethos. So long as you stick with it, and take it seriously (coherent and sustained), though not seriously (with tragic gravity). [The two forms of seriousness will prove a vitally important distinction going forward.]

(I also made the PC’s buy clothes out of their initial gold store, which kept them all relatively poor. Though gold doesn’t matter that much in T&T. (Also, TARO applies to your Gold Roll in Char Gen too, so one PC may just have ‘being loaded’ as their core trait.))

The Rogue - “I liked having to buy my own clothes using the gold generated by character creation, it was like starting out in Oregon Trail or something. I appreciate that the clothes list was long and carefully priced out and if I was in charge I would add even more carefully described clothing choices which could be used to define the character you are playing. What if you sunk it all into one really great jacket, no mechanical effects. Could you describe a jacket in such a way that it is really tempting even if you are gonna have to put that arbalest back on the shelf?”

Liz Darnforth

The Combat Sequence

Farewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors, Hail! The Tunnels and Trolls combat sequence makes no sense. Attempts to fix have made it worse.

Conceptually it is brilliant. Once it was simple, intuitive, somewhat baggy and clean to play. I think years of people asking questions (filthy nerds) has ruined it. I tried to boil it back to what I thought was the core; a battle is on, both sides roll all their dice; whoever gets the biggest number wins.

Adventurers and Monsters calculate these differently; Adventurers have Combat Adds derived from their physical stats, and whatever weapon they are using. Monsters have a Monster Rating, which breaks down to their dice rolled (The Monster Rating divided by 10), and their own Combat Adds (Half their Monster Rating). Confusingly, some posh and special Monsters can also have stats like Adventurers, but let’s not even get into that.

Everyone has a big pile of dice. Everyone rolls. Bigger is better.

Over time additions have been made, (as a result of questions). Some wise, most I think not.

One positive addition is ‘spite dice’; every roll of 6 on either side, always counts as damage. I think this was made to amend the horribly brutal attritional effect of these massive dice pools contending over multiple rounds, and it works ok.

Other additions are complex arrangements of specific damage set aside and re-integrated during the round to account for people sniping ranged targets or similar, and specific arrangements of spellcasting where damage from certain spells is accounted like a weapon and the effects of others are placed before-this-and-that etc.

I Ignored Almost All of This

I ran combat description-first, rules-light, quick and high consequence. It ended up not unlike a storygame or a Dowlain modern ruleset.

Surprise Rounds are a slightly weird thing in T&T, (if rounds are truly meant to be around 2 minutes long), and thankfully I was able to ignore them. Likewise I ignored sniping in or out of combat.

How I conceptualised it was like this;

First; describe fully where everyone is and what is going on as combat breaks out, be above all vivid, quick and physically exact. Go round the table asking, quickly, what each character wants to do, or “what do you want to achieve in the next two minutes”. PCs can combine actions, do tricks stunts, etc or anything they like, but they can’t take too long thinking about it Tunnels and Trolls does not respond well to planning.

Second; everyone rolls their dice and we add them all up.

Third; whichever side won inflicts damage, and I describe the events of these two minutes turn out largely as they intended. However, the T&T ruleset does say that the losing side of this can decide who on their own side takes what damage. This infers, and I applied it as such, that the losing side gets some vote in how exactly things turned out in these two minutes. They don’t achieve their aims but they do get to choose events relating to damage to their own side (though not whether they take damage at all).

Last; I tried to go for big, consequential swings in the description of events that would rapidly lead one side or the other to be disadvantaged, to flee, surrender, negotiate, be trapped etc, I did not want this shit going on too long.

Liz Darnforth

Why Ignore the Details?

The game does not seem to want to be played that way.

I think the inclusion of Ranged and Magic attacks being, at some points, their own special thing, is ultimately fucking stupid, as you are rolling to make these special pre-attacks (each of which requires their own segment of the round to work in) and then counting them towards the total value of the HPT? And then at the end, you focus special damage on the specific targets of the magic or Ranged attack? At this stage why are you not just going person-by-person?

Even the rules seem confused about this as the details seem to change from edition to edition.

It looks like the simple, basic concept of the opposed, simultaneous, dice rolls, has been subjected to so many tactical questions and faffing about that over time, it has developed so many exceptions, set-asides, layered sequences and so on that it has, in effect, become exactly as, or even more complex than an equivalent D&D combat turn.

But D&D has the saving grace of being sequential-by-person, so at least while you are faffing with big numbers you are doing them one after another. T&T has the elegant conception of simultaneous action, but that then divided, excepted, specified and detailed so much that now the DM deals with an equivalent cognitive weight to D&D and the initially non-intuitive simultaneous action of T&T at the same time. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.

I forwarded description, and tried to keep it forward. Everything that happens can only be allowed to make sense in terms of what has already been visually and spatially described in natural language. The results of dice rolls feed into this and are fed back out as more description. The vivid description of events fills the need for specificity that the rules either ignore or don’t do well. Most of all its meant to happen light and fast.

The Rogue - “I remember way back starting a D&D game with some friends who had never played before, and at first when we got into fights they would say all these wild ideas of what they were gonna do (’I’m gonna put my bow over his head and grab the string and shoot the arrow in his neck that way”) and then get discouraged as the rules generally would at best penalize for you for trying something different than: hit with sword, watch hp go down. Doing the combat as narrative first, even if that did not have very much to to do with the dice rolls, and then narrative again after all the rolls (deciding how the damage gets doled out) was kinda nice. I am surprised at feeling this way as I do not usually like story game rules.

Everyone goes at once feels more nervewracking & unpredictable as a player: instead of things slowing way down you are all making immediate guesses about what would be best to do, which feels more real than if you have to wait your turn & can adjust your actions based on what happened to the person who went first. On the other hand, every time we got into combat seemed to end after a single dice roll: either we got crushed & ran away or the opposite happened- which on the one hand is hugely superior to sitting around waiting for your turn to hit guy with sword, but sometimes made things seem anticlimactic: players all do one thing each, roll dice, cool that’s it evil is defeated. I guess one has to lean heavily on narrating what’s happened (either on the DM or player side) to make things properly impactful? It’s possible this was just on account of lucky rolls & combats could have taken longer? It seemed like our characters were appropriately balanced to the dungeon though (the leprechaun died)”

Rob Carver

The Leprechaun – “T&T combat as written is almost pathologically bad. We generally want things to be useable and simple; if a ruleset has complexity, each complication should justify itself in producing a better play experience. Instead, the rules work together to produce an appalling result. Rolling a large pool of dice that’s the same every “round” makes it likely that there’s a consistent result, so that combat is guaranteed to feel samey and yield similar outcomes from round to round. But there’s also a disastrous feedback effect: damage reduces your Strength, which gives you lower combat adds and less weapon access, so you roll fewer dice, so you lose faster and faster, and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out how much worse you’re going to do each round.”

Running the Dungeon

it all began to go wrong when they re-named Ralph

Play Time

I came up with a relatively simple 12-room dungeon with a lot if diegetic ‘safety rails’ and potential in-world guidance. The Rogue told me that a normal group will only handle about four rooms an hour, if that, so I planned for two possible sessions of up to four hours each. In fact they cleared the thing in just over two hours. Apparently I run games ‘quickly’(?)

The Rogue - “Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it.”

Rob Carver

“Take That You Fiend!”

People seemed to like the principal of ‘Saying the Spell Names Out Loud’. I felt like it kept the tone right.

The Leprechaun – “I agree that saying the spell names as though you’re casting them yourself is a splendid idea. You can’t cast a spell without literally saying the magic words.”

Post-Adventure System Issues

I only had to make a single, one-shot adventure so I was saved any of the scaling complexities of ‘how much gold is there’ or ‘what do you do with the gold’? Or any worries about ‘what happens after this adventure? T&T (at least in 7.5) bases advancement on ‘Adventure Points’ which you hand out regularly, mid-adventure, and which can be used, mid-adventure, to improve PC’s stats, which effects what level they are. Gold or treasure is mainly used for buying spells or equipment.

The Leprechaun – “The one idea I was interested in was gaining lots of XP and spending it incrementally whenever you wanted. It really changes the texture of the game to be getting these drips of XP and feel like you could realistically, in one session, change something meaningful about your character. This is also a place where narrative and ruleset dovetail nicely: players can spend their XP to level up a given stat *right before they need it*, which feels like the character rising to meet a challenge.”

Rapid Monster Improvisation

T&T’s Monster Rating is a raw, single number from which are derived both the number of d6’s rolled and the ‘adds’. The ‘adds’ are reduced as the Monster suffers damage while the dice are not. This is perhaps even simpler than the Hit Dice concept and makes inventing, moving and shifting around monsters for change and improvisation relatively easy. It does result in some big dumb dice pools though.

Big Dumb Dice Pools

Everything is based on the d6 and everything is Dice Pools, rolled in big piles, simultaneously. The PC’s add up theirs and the DM adds up the monsters. It’s a lot of adding up. I am not sure how this will actually work once you get into the Monsters with really big numbers or the really big amounts of monsters. I think I recall in some Ken St’Andre ruleset, seeing his rules of thumb for managing huge dice pool numbers, which was essentially multiplying smaller pools, which is fine, but also; it’s your ruleset dude.

The Leprechaun – “3d6 * 6 is a *dramatically* different roll from 18d6 and would totally change the texture of the game. I kept finding things like this in the T&T ruleset. Most early TTRPGs seem “game design naive”, even most modern TTRPGs do. This can make them characterful, or introduce some loveable features by accident, but can also lead to miserable gameplay patterns.”

Liz Darnforth

Growing and Shrinking

Probably inspired by the ‘small’ and ‘large’ tables for character generation in 7.5, I included a shrinking rules in the dungeon. While I may have intended to use some complex coherent system based on alterations to the core stats, in fact I just eyeballed it, using patched together rule-ideas that were systemically inelegant but procedurally quick and functional; I made it up. T&T’s super-simple core stats make it easy to adapt things relatively quickly.

‘Lightness’ and Speed

They re-named the Dragon Continent :-(

It seems to me that the speed of T&T combat, combined with the relative lightness and light comedy of its setting, are key to how this is supposed to work.

The description of events plays a huge shaping part in deciding what seems reasonable to happen in a fight, i.e; is it reasonable that one guy might hide out in a corner and try to snipe with arrows? Is everyone going to end up in a big melee or are they spread out or separated? Is the environment going to do something odd?

The enormous potentiality of this simultaneous-resolution roll is only moderated by a mutual, vivid, lively and quick description of events.

Put simply, this shit falls apart rapidly if you are autistic or power-gamy about it, and gamers do tend to be autistic about everything. There should never be arguments over numbers or spazzy autistic D&D arguments over precisely what the rules should allow – if it seems like it makes sense then it can be done, or tried with a Saving Roll, or if not just a flat ‘no’. If this decision or roll didn’t go well, there will be another along soon! Very soon! And another and another and another.

Conversely, if you are lively engaged, largely trusting, and more committed to acting out an adventure than managing risk though careful play, then you may get a great boon; of a rapid, complex unfolding and multifarious range of combat events which might never happen in another game.

There must be a rapid, and easy exchange of description and descriptive power between the Players and DM, especially in combat. It’s like dancing. It only works if you go in moving and go forward. If you hold back and try to plan and limit risk, or hyper-plan, you fail.

The Leprechaun – “Despite working on TTRPG systems myself, I think the ruleset barely factors into how good a given game session is. I had a wonderful experience playing Mausritter a few years ago and that game is rancid. My actual play experience with T&T was excellent, because you’re a great DM, and [The Rogue], [The Dwarf], and I are good players. I still think I would have preferred a system where every single outcome was decided by coin flip. But then my choice to be a leprechaun wouldn’t have been legitimized by doing a bunch of arithmetic with tables!”

The slight silliness of the setting, along with the ridiculous range of possible ‘Kindreds’ (I can play a Leprechaun with a Bardiche), and the slightly light tone, all help to control and manage the kinds of personality drawn to the game and the way that they play. (A meta-game effect like a Gonzo X-Card).

I feel like getting rid of this (slight) silliness and trying to make the setting and the game answer more ‘normie’ Fantasy questions actually ruins it. The absence of tangles and argument is just an effect I can describe of a cause it’s hard to define; it is the spirit of the game. It’s why the Dragon continent is shaped like a Dragon and (should still be) called ‘Ralph’. If you don’t like the idea of running, or playing on, a ‘Dragon Continent’ shaped like a Dragon, and called ‘Ralph’, or of a Skeleton teaming up with a Dwarf, a Vampire and an Elf, then the game has done its job.

The Rogue - “Maybe it is not so important that a game system have any particular level of seriousness as that it have like, any discernable character at all? While there’s a utility in basic fantasy tropes ( everyone knows what a dwarf is like so it is easy in your personal character to subvert or exemplify it) most world building in game systems ends up just being like the collecting of influences listed on such as a Kickstarter page as a reassurance that you won’t find anything too surprising or new here.

Anything in the games rules/setting that is discernably created by a real idiosyncratic human ( whether that is being unfashionably comic or having edges that are not sanded off entirely) is a chance to have an actual experience of art that’s your own interaction with another real person not with a corporation or like sales goals and it’s worth forgiving a lot of shakiness of rules and so on to get that.”

This is also built into the nutty world-creation of ‘Tunnels and Trolls; Trollworld is literally built on wizards. Or at least, huge numbers of whacky wizards have inhabited it over time, burrowed into its crust and disappeared under the earth, building their own strange ‘magical realms’, which form the nuclei of, one would assume, huge tunnel complexes. In in-world history is literally ‘a wizard did it’. Gonzo dungeon design is the actual geology of Trollworld. Gonzo, or a Toybox, or very ‘Dungeony’ gamified non-naturalistic dungeons work well with this ruleset and play experience. It’s not a ‘flat’ game, either in its aesthetic, or the probability curves that underlie it. I am not sure if its modern re-creators have grasped this.

A Review of 'Soliloquies in England' by George Santayana

 “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Remember that Plato quote? Well it WASN’T Plato, it was George Santayana! In one of the better parts of one of his better essays; ‘Tipperary’, in which he observes a group of British soldiers singing in a coffee shop after the Armistice is signed and they realise they don’t have to die.

A grim riposte but, in responding directly to his living circumstances, these singing soldiers manage to focus his mind, at least for a while and thus produce an unusually coherent, analytic and downbeat sequence of thoughts.

(All quotes severely broken up. GS does not use paragraphs much.)

From ‘Tipperary’

“They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.

If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and out politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady! If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect our passions, if we knew the world.

As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark, each generation breaks its egg shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or becomes wise too late and too no purpose.”

GS goes on to (correctly, but surprisingly ruthlessly) say that there is no reprieve in this armistice. The other nations may be at peace, but the Germans definitely are not. Nothing is over.

“Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good which the world brings is so fugitive and bought at so great a price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility, life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings.

The things we know and love on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the end only, but continually, as the phrase passes into its meaning; and since they are part of us, and we of them, we should accompany them with good grace: it would be desolation to survive.”

This might be true but such words count for more with me if the speaker themselves is visibly willing to claim ‘man’s charter of nobility’ (i.e. get shot). Coming from a man behind an orchard wall, it strikes a little different.

I have no exact recollection of why I first got my hands on this book. I think it may have been Georges Essay ‘Queen Mab’, about fiction and the British character, (I was working on Queen Mab’s Palace’ about this time). But my interest was redoubled, initially, by the largely warm viewpoint of this exquisitely civilised man going though a spate of pre-War Anglophilia.

From ‘Grisielle’

“England is pre-eminently a land of atmospheres. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavements become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be loved without being possessed.”

...

“In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these tender skies. here the conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is luminous and all is grey.”

…

Its always slightly pleasant to see one’s home through the eyes of an admiring foreigner, though in this case, sad, because Santayana is describing the last flower of pre-war Europe and England, a culture which, culturally, and largely environmentally, is now overwritten and essentially gone. (Though the sky does still act like that.)

From ‘The British Character’

“What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence; seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman’s heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom designing or mean.

There are nations where people are always innocently explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage, that seems to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman’s way: it is easier for him to face or break opposition than to circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention, we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.

Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social abortions - they affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when last in prison?

Where else would a young woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband, but no children, or children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.”

…

As with almost everything Geroge says, he layers positive and negative, the one implying the other, or counter-informing the other, layer upon layer, till one receives, never a judgment, (George would make a terrible Judge, his cases would never end and no final opinion would be reached), but more a rich, deep, painting of whatever he apprehends, in this case a culture, mixed with and informed by its environment, and its good-bad qualities mixed among its bad-good errors.

This is also the opinion of a very much a slightly anglicised, but still very Spanish Latin Man, (from a culture that knows how to feel and how to live) dealing with a horde of strange Anglos (who live and feel mysteriously, if at all, but sometimes know how to do.)

From ‘Death-Bed Manners’

“That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. “Oh yes our two sons went down in the Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that we don’t mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn’t have liked it at all being crippled you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms! It is such a blessing!”

..

The precise, living, vivid yet ironic voice of the past springing briefly from this quote, highlights what, (for me, if definitely not for him), if part of the tragedy of George Santayana; that he spent a huge amount of time thinking deeply, but mysteriously, and elliptically, though beautifully, about those wise and high generalities in which the limits of philosophy and cognition are defined.

Head in the clouds, where nothing is accomplished. With a mind as precise, sensitive, knowledgeable and tolerant as his, and a pen as brilliant and expressive, the world lost an incredible reporter and probably a great novelist (he wrote one but I fear it is a novel of ‘ideas’), while GS dedicated himself to the sky-castles.

Eventually, George seems to have had enough of England. Perhaps, in part of the long cyclic back and forth of admiration and alienation which any traveller feels when dealing with a foreign culture for a sustained period, he, after dealing with what I call ‘England England’ (home counties, oxford, misty fields, hidden wealth), he gets a view of what I would consider (to me), the ‘real’ England (mad councils, housing estates, public transport, mediocrity and depression). Here he writes an essay about how terrible the Hegelians are and how wrong, bad and inappropriate it is that England is filled with them, (who should not be there). I am not really fully familiar with what exactly an Hegalian is, but based on Georges writing I am willing to accept that they are very bad.

From ‘The real England’

“In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and over balanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, not bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, not sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything.

In the real England there is a strong, if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose.”

They have not changed, but this leads us into GS’s alienation from whatever modernity is becoming in England during and after the war, and while his ‘final opinions’ on anything are as misty and negotiable as always, he does have a lot of interesting things to say…

From ‘Liberalism and Culture’

“... Fortunately, liberal ages have been secondary ages, inheriting the monuments, the feelings and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people remember their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and other form of life.

Liberalism does not go very deep, it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind to which Matthew Arnold called culture.”

....

“Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.”

Reading this from the far end, in a sense, from the other end, of a great age of Liberalism, where the Liberalism still exists, but the culture has run out, feels a little spooky.

From ‘The Irony of Liberalism’

“... the transcendental principal of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no-one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same destination.

The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.”

....

“It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, “it is their nature to.” Dogs, according to the transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature and behave better.

A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal.

I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free an autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life in which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.”

When GS is not talking about England, Politics or, really.. who can say truly what precisely a lot of his essays are essentially about? He does not think in categories. But at least some of them are lean more into what we would call cognition, thought, the experience of the world and what it is to be, think, sense and exist.

From ‘Cross-Lights’

“... Things, when seen, seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and spread their roots in the darkness, which em-bosoms and creates the light, though the light does not comprehend it.

If sensuous evidence flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not see, and they would live in a fool’s paradise of lucidity.

Fortunately, for their wisdom, if not their comfort, they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush governs their fortunes.

The proud, who shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them; but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.”

In his views on the embedding of the mind in reality, and what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ knowledge and ignorance, the known and unknown truly mean, GS is brilliant, Heraclitean, perhaps wrong, but holy shit can he write. Even if his arguments are wrong, his prose is correct.

From ‘Psyche’

“Long before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing?

Far from it. intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions, yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever.

And the reason for this; that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child - who could have been his father? - is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can’t help feeding and loving him. He sees, which to her is a mystery, because, although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything.”

From ‘The Tragic Mask’

“Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.

Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation.

I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, of the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phrases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile.”

....

“Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams.”

..

“Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become “persons” or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.”

From ‘The Comic Mask’

“Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.”

....

“Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity, and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one.”

This ‘long way round to sincerity’ seems utterly appropriate to the current poisoned moment of relentless mutual surveillance and censorship combined with reactionary, resentful and permanently ironic ‘freedom’.

From ‘Carnival’

“This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as a fact.

Custom blinds persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious character of the actual, because custom assimilates their expectations to the march of existing things and deadens their power to imagine anything different.”

Santayana’s ‘job description’ is ‘philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist’ – I am not sure how he actually got paid. The man writes like an angel, thinks like a cloud and rambles like a lost dog. There are no short, accurate Santayana quotes, because every single idea is lengthily toyed with, and even if you excise that, each idea is lodged or woven in with, sometimes an elegant tapestry, sometimes a foul slum, of other ideas, many of which contradict or cast shade on anything stated or suggested by the one you are looking at now. No-one can criticise Santayana’s conclusions because we do not know what they are.

“I notice that the men of the world, when they dip into my books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent, and to the ladies everything is crystal-clear, yet the philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself what it is.

Because I describe madness sympathetically, because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the world from the transcendental point of vantage, while at the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own opinions.”

You are vacillating in your own opinions! You are not getting to the point! You should have gotten a proper job where people would have made you do things! Being bound to some actual functional purpose would have sorted you right out, instead we get this.