Backgrounds for Early Modern Cairn, Part 2

More backgrounds for a Cairn campaign set, like Beyond the Pale, in something very much like early modern Europe. We are now two-thirds of the way to the full set of 20, and I promise the next and last bunch won't take another half a year! As before, the object here is fun and a bit of verisimilitude, not any kind of balance. Some of these are definitely more powerful than others, but maybe the weaker ones will be more entertaining, who knows. None of these characters is going to last more than a few sessions before they get possessed by a dybbuk or drowned by a bukavac anyway.

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Background 3:

Chiliast

You belong to a millenarian sect like the Khlysty, Skoptsy, Dukhobors, Molokans, Kartanoists, Frankists, or Sabbateans—or maybe some group even more obscure than those. You have, or at least your leader has, inside knowledge of God's plans for this misbegotten universe, and an inside track on getting into Heaven, surviving the apocalypse, or whatever it is you people believe in. Or believed in, at any rate—you seem to have strayed from your flock.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Sackcloth Robes
• Gourd

d6: What are you doing on the road?

1. Hunting for an apostate. You don't seem to be trying very hard.
2. Seeking a holy relic to bring back to the leader of your sect. Maybe you already found it. Maybe you should keep it for yourself?
3. Given a task so vague and obscure by the leader of your sect that you wonder whether they just wanted to get you out of their hair.
4. Looking to slay a demon, or chastise an unbeliever, or accomplish some other heroic deed of that nature.
5. Sneaked away to visit family, friends, or a lover outside the sect. It's probably past time you returned. Or is it?
6. Absent without leave. Having second thoughts about the whole “end of the world” thing.

d6: What eccentric beliefs does your sect hold to?

1. Iconoclasm. Take a Mallet (d6) and be sure to smash any ungodly icons you see.
2. Polygamy. Take a Wedding Ring (petty). Take several!
3. Strict celibacy. Take a Leather Scourge (d6) with which to mortify your sinful flesh.
4. Vegetarianism. Take a Wheel of Unusually Tasty Cheese.
5. Feminism. Take a Pamphlet on the Rights of Woman (petty).
6. Abolition of private property. Take only your unshakeable Confidence in the Perfectibility of the World (intangible).

Background 5:

Dragoman

You are, or were, a translator, interpreter, and mediator. You have a gift for tongues; you speak the languages of the great empires (German, Russian, Turkish, Persian) at least passably, and are perfectly fluent in French and two others, in addition to your unfortunately totally irrelevant native dialect.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Book of Court Etiquette
• Quill & Ink
• Sheaf of Paper

d6: Why aren't you in the employ of a baron or a government minister or some other bigwig?

1. Your employer died of dysentery while on a tour of the provinces.
2. You were outmaneuvered by rivals at court and sacked unceremoniously.
3. You were chronically insubordinate and were sacked unceremoniously.
4. You took a leave of absence to come study an obscure local dialect.
5. You undertook a wildly inappropriate tryst and are waiting for the outrage to die down.
6. You learned of opportunities more lucrative than any minor court could offer.

d6: What exotic gift did you receive in the course of your service?

1. A Pouch of Spices (petty) from the Indies, which enlivens your food.
2. A Silk Scarf (petty) from Cathay, which keeps your neck warm and looks rather dashing.
3. A Hamsa Pendant (petty) from the Holy Land, which wards off the evil eye.
4. An Anatolian Meerschaum Pipe (petty), with which one might smoke tobacco or the like. (You have no tobacco.)
5. Leather Moccasins (petty) from the Americas, in which you can walk quietly and comfortably.
6. An elaborately carved Walrus Ivory Comb (petty) from the Arctic, the better to comb your hair.

 

Background 7:

Estafette

You are a courier, probably in some official capacity (a military messenger or a postal relay courier), although you may be a freelance rider. You've come out here to the hinterlands to deliver or receive letters; maybe your work is done already, or maybe you're dawdling. Perhaps something out of your control has gotten in the way—the post you're meant to pick up hasn't been penned yet, or a bridge is out, or there's bandit activity in the region. Why not look for a little extra work on the side?

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Overcoat Pistol (d8)
• Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds)
• Theodolite
• Letter-Case

d6: What was your proudest professional accomplishment?

1. Braved the worst storm of the winter to bring a plea for aid from an avalanche-devastated village.
2. Dashed through enemy lines to deliver orders to the general commanding a besieged city's defense.
3. Bluffed your way past mercenaries sent to intercept you and seize the maps you carried.
4. Galloped all the way from Sambor to Mährisch-Ostrau in just two days. You changed horses a dozen times!
5. Chosen to deliver engagement announcements on the occasion of the imperial heir's betrothal.
6. Rode all night through mud and thunder to warn the crown of the revolutionary army's approach. Or was it to warn the revolutionaries the imperial army was on the march?

d6: What breed of horse do you ride?

1. A dainty Arab, swift as lightning.
2. A doughty Turkoman, famed for its endurance.
3. A lively Holsteiner, strong and agile.
4. A beautiful Mérens from the faraway Pyrenees, bred for mountain service.
5. A hardy Vyatka, fast and sure-footed in wintry conditions.
6. A refined Trakehner, with a hearty constitution and a cool head.

 Note: All firearms require a full round to reload, unless noted otherwise.

 

Background 10:

Hayduk

You are the moon to the armatole's sun, or the sun to their moon—a member, or ex-member, of an armed band who operate just outside the reach of the tsar's, kaiser's, or sultan's law. You may be called batiar, klepht, or opryshok. You may be hailed as a hero or rebel; you may be derided as a bandit, brigand, or outlaw. It's all a matter of perspective.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Flintlock Musket (d12, bulky)
• Cartridge Box with 20 Rounds
• Stylish Cape

d6: Which of your very heroic and not at all exaggerated deeds is most celebrated in song?

1. Robbed a tax collector in broad daylight. Returned the money to the local peasants. Well, most of the money.
2. Challenged the captain of the guard to a drinking contest. Put him under the table.
3. Evaded an effort at capture by plastering on a fake mustache and offering to join the hunt for yourself.
4. Eluded a month-long campaign to root you out from the hills, using your knowledge of the terrain to humiliate your pursuers.
5. Caught in bed with the local lord's heir. Made a spectacular leap from the balcony to effect your escape.
6. Used to be an armatole; betrayed the empire rather than massacre innocent villagers.

d6: What treasured loot do you still carry with you?

1. A gorgeous Illuminated Manuscript. You can't make heads or tails of the peculiar writing inside, but it sure looks nice.
2. Romantic Letters (petty) from your highborn lover. They keep you warm on lonely nights, and also make valuable blackmail material.
3. A random Spellbook, liberated from the clutches of a wicked sorcerer. Or a book collector, maybe—a wicked book collector!
4. A Bejeweled Pendant (petty) that you're certain protects you from harm. Sure, it didn't protect the previous owner very well, but he was using it wrong.
5. The Fingerbone of a Saint (petty) encased in an elaborate little reliquary. Only apostates (or infidels) venerate this particular saint, so you don't feel guilty about toting it around as a good luck charm.
6. A Flask of Perfume just waiting for the right occasion. Which will hopefully be immediately preceded by an opportunity to take a bath.

 

Background 11:

Lectour

You may have been born into a society in which few can read at all, in which case your literacy alone is a blessing, or one where lettered people are more common, but either way, you were blessed with unusual fluency, and a pleasant voice besides. You might be a meddah, performing morality plays for coffeehouse audiences; a maggid, lecturing on the Torah; a storyteller hired by business owners to entertain their employees while they work; or an itinerant poet reciting your own work and others' for a little coin.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Leather Haversack (stuffed with books)

d6: What great personage once heard you speak?

1. The Man of Destiny! Yes, the Emperor Napoleon himself. Or was it Napoleon III? Or Louis? One of those Bonapartes, certainly.
2. The Kaiser! Well, it was before his coronation. He was a young cavalry officer at the time, quite incognito.
3. The Tsarina! She was in disguise, naturally, but you recognized her—she looked right at you and winked!
4. The Sovereign of the Sublime House of Osman, the Sultan of Sultans! Well, his carriage rolled by while you were speaking, anyway.
5. Lord Byron, the infamous poet! He was rather rude, truth be told.
6. One of those notorious socialist rabble-rousers…Blanqui, was it? Or maybe it was Blanc. Or Buonarroti. Something with a B, surely. Or maybe Lassalle…

d6: What props or accoutrements do you carry with you?

1. Puppets to act out parts of your storytelling.
2. A foldable Painted Backdrop (bulky) to transport your audience into another world.
3. A Small Drum to add a little rhythm to the proceedings.
4. A handsome pleated Hand Fan (petty) with which to cool yourself. Some of these places get quite hot!
5. Spectacles (petty), the better to see what you're reading.
6. A Tin of Ground Coffee—this newfangled brew gives you tremendous energy.

Background 16:

Shaman

You are a conduit between the mundane human world and the realm of spirits. If you live among Christians, Jews, or Muslims, you might incorporate their faith into your practices, or pass yourself off as a humble healer, a znakhar, one of the “clever folk.” In pagan lands, you might be recognized for your power and called noaidi, gonagas, volve, vluxvu, or bakshi. As long as you treat the spirits with respect, the rest is your own business.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses) 
• Ritual Knife (d6)
• Staff (d8, bulky)
• Drum

d6: What magical practice do you most confidently command?

1. The healing arts. As Cure Wounds in the Warden's Guide.
2. Shapeshifting. As Beast Form in the Warden's Guide (but specifically into your totem animal; see next table).
3. Laying curses upon your foes. As Befuddle in the Warden's Guide.
4. Seeing the true nature of things. As Detect Magic in the Warden's Guide.
5. Enchanting the weak-minded. As Vision in the Warden's Guide.
6. Protecting yourself and your people from harm. As Ward in the Warden's Guide.

d6: What animal spirit shares the strongest connection with you?

1. The Bear.
2. The Eagle.
3. The Raven.
4. The Snake.
5. The Swan.
6. The Wolf.

Background 17:

Surveyor

You're an educated person, wise in all manner of natural philosophy, from geometry and trigonometry to physics and engineering. You were surely sent here by an employer or patron—a nobleman, a private company, the crown itself. Perhaps you have encountered intractable obstacles in your work, or perhaps your work went smoothly, but you see other opportunities.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Overcoat Pistol (d8)
• Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds).
• Theodolite

d6: What youthful foolishness did you indulge in during your university days?

1. Dueling. Take a Rapier (d8) and some impressive facial scars.
2. Seduction. Take a Vial of Mercury (petty) and a nasty rash.
3. Freemasonry. Take a whole repertoire of Secret Handshakes (intangible). Who knows what doors they might unlock?
4. Radicalism. Take an Urgent Missive (petty) intended for a local republican thinker.
5. Literature. Take three Dog-Eared Volumes of Poetry. Memorize a few of your favorites.
6. Occultism. Take a random Spellbook and some arcane tattoos, and keep them well hidden.

d6: What business opportunities does your highly trained mind detect in this godforsaken hinterland?

1. Timber. It doesn't take a genius to see it, but your genius might smooth out the logistics.
2. Mining. There's iron here. There's salt. Maybe there's gold!
3. Furs. Ships go all the way to Hudson's Bay in Canada for beaver pelts, and here there are beavers in droves, so much closer to home.
4. Cattle. Once some enterprising lumbermen knock all the trees down, this could be prime grazeland.
5. Textiles. Some of these rivers could support enormous mills.
6. Railroads. Whatever goods other businesses wring from this landscape, they'll need a way to move them back to civilization.

Warped Beyond Intuition

Like myriad unfortunates before me, I find myself compelled to jam the square peg of Mothership's loosely sketched economy into the round hole of a persistent campaign played by bean-counting nerds. And there's one particular thing that, like many before me, I got stubbornly snagged on: Warp cores are really, really expensive. So expensive that the vast majority of work in published materials, often including a job that comprises an entire module, won't even cover a one-way trip from the next system over. (I've touched on this before!)

Now, if you go to Reddit or Discord to search for other people's thoughts about this, you're likely to encounter the observation that, in A Pound of Flesh, there's a Warp Core Vault on Prospero's Dream where it's possible to score cores for a mere 50kcr a pop (APOF p. 43). Most people seem to dismiss this as an unreconciled holdover from 0e; warp cores used to be cheaper, and now they're prohibitively expensive to make interstellar travel an enormous undertaking and emphasize how small and economically powerless the PCs are in the big scheme of things.

But what if neither the 50kcr price on the Dream nor the 1mcr cost in the base 1e rules is “wrong,” and they don't need to be reconciled? I've been warming to the idea that they simply represent extreme possibilities: If you're at a major, densely populated economic hub (e.g., the Dream) that either produces warp cores or is a major transshipment point where a lot of commercial ship traffic (some with warp cores as cargo) passes through; there's a substantial gray or black market at that location; and you have strong connections to whatever group controls access to the cores (perhaps they owe you favors, even), you can score warp cores for as little as 50kcr a pop—maybe even less.

On the other hand, if you're at the only inhabited station in some bumfuck system at the ass end of the Rim, where the few hundreds, or few dozen, permanent residents keep a few warp cores on hand to sell to ships passing through, but have no local access to more, and you're a stranger whom none of the locals know from Adam, you pay full freight. Maybe more, if you seem desperate, or if they're down to the very last of their inventory (or both).

We could cook up a table for prices, something like (and probably derived from) the trade tables in the Stars Without Number supplement Suns of Gold—roll 2d10, “subtract X for each of the following conditions” and “add Y for each of the following conditions,” get a percentile modifier to apply to a base price somewhere in the vicinity of 200kcr or 250kcr—and if I ever published a campaign setting or something that really needed to formalize this, I probably would. For the campaign I'm now running, though, I feel pretty comfortable just spitballing.

* * * 

What does need to be defined more carefully, of course, is what happens when players do the obvious, smart thing and jump at the first chance to hoard warp cores. The low-end price is still far too spendy for starting characters, and even many sessions down the road, modestly successful owner–operators are never more than a few months away from crushing debt and will probably think twice before dumping six-figure sums into speculative stockpiles…but after thinking twice, they'll probably do it. Hell, they'll probably want to look for profit-turning opportunities the next time they meet another crew at some backwater station where cores cost a fortune. So I want some kind of soft cap on how many cores they can just shove into the reactor component.

The description of warp cores in the 1e rules leaves a lot to the imagination, but it does emphasize that cores are dangerously radioactive, and of course we know that hyperspace travel is weird and scary. Warp cores should have a touch of the weird and scary about them too—maybe they come from hyperspace, somehow. Maybe they contain malign hyperspace energies. Maybe they're made of condensed hyperspace ghosts! Who knows. In any event, if you put too many of them in the same place, bad things happen.

When you jump, roll d10 + the number of extra cores the ship is carrying:

1–10: The jump proceeds as normal (or at least as normal as a hyperspace jump ever is).

11: The ship sustains minor damage. Roll once on the Maintenance Issues table (SBT p. 39); reroll Major Repairs.

12: Upon awakening from cryo, the crew are afflicted with persistent disturbing hallucinations (sanity save every day for 1d5 days).

13: The jump consumes one of the stored cores.

14: The ship sustains major damage. Roll twice on the Maintenance Issues table. If your first roll results in Major Repairs, do not make a second roll.

15: The jump consumes two of the stored cores.

16+: Warp core containment failure. As radiation leak from Maintenance Issues table, and the damaged core must be ejected unused. 

This probably needs some tweaking and playtesting—the step up from faintly dangerous nuisance results on 10 and 11 to economically disastrous ones on 12+ is pretty steep, and the ~50% risk of needing Major Repairs on a 13 is a pretty harsh disincentive to ever carry more than four cores at a time—but it'll do for a start. (How do freighters move large quantities of warp cores for wholesale purposes? Special containment fields, of course. Very expensive, very bulky, can only be fitted on enormous supertanker-like ships far beyond the PCs' means.)

Proof of Life

 

I've been doing some backpacking too. Here's Mt. Baker!

 

Back in March, the Reddit account I was using to share these blog posts got banished to the shadow realm after I posted something about the No ICE in Minnesota bundle on itch. Nobody at Reddit ever responded to my appeals or explained exactly why I'd been shadowbanned. But all my posts (and all my many comments, the dumb and the brilliant alike) have been forevermore invisible and unsearchable.

And, annoyingly, I got super discouraged by this! Even at my most active, the posts here that I didn't share anywhere else got maybe 70 or 80 views; the ones that got a good response on Reddit got hundreds, sometimes thousands. When I started the blog, I was sick of social media, sick of the grind of holding people's attention and the Skinner-box fugue state of scrolling. I'm gonna blog, I said! I'm just gonna put my thoughts out into the world a couple times a month and hope that people find them, and I'll be content with that. But, oops, I was not content with that. I went to Reddit to get people's eyes on my posts, and it totally worked and was very satisfying, and then a big dumb bully of a corporation took it away from me and I got all bummed out about it and spent months sulking and not posting. How embarrassing!

Anyway, I live. I breathe. I'm still doing lots of fun game stuff (and reading, and writing, and watching lots of Tony Leung movies, and cooking my way through all of Hetty Lui McKinnon's recipes, and so on and so forth). I've been running a Black Sword Hack game, sporadically, for my old Stars Without Number group (you truly don't appreciate the pandemic-spawned miracle of a game that meets nearly every week for almost five years until it's gone) and Tales of Argosa and Mothership in person with some local friends. I've even been playing D&D 5e again! (But not GMing, thank God.) Gonna post some Mothership stuff, and some Cairn stuff, and probably some Black Sword Hack stuff, and some book reviews, and undoubtedly some political screeds, and I will be happy to have 70 to 80 people stumble across them and read them, goddamnit. (But maybe I'll be more active on Bluesky too. Who knows.)

Bookpost #5

Yes, it's (past) that time again. And again, we're just going to skip over the stuff I don't have anything positive to say about. Being catty and trashing other people's work may be fun, but it's not nice. Life is short. We're all trying our best.

* * * 

Tokyo Ueno Station (Miri Yu)

Beautiful and oddly lively, for all that it's a profoundly sad novel about a dead homeless guy and the crushing weight of class and caste in Japanese society. I find it really interesting how much contemporary(-ish) Japanese art, like the films of Juzo Itami and Satoshi Kon, prominently features, or even (as in this novel and Kon's Tokyo Godfathers) focuses directly on the homeless, a population that, by official measures, scarcely exists in the country.

HHhH (Laurent Binet)

A fascinating blend of gripping true story and dizzying metafiction account of trying to write a gripping true story. Not as confident as Binet's Civilizations, which I read first, and less enjoyable overall, but the lack of confidence is part of the point, and how much are you supposed to enjoy learning about the rise of the Nazis and how they strangled the life out of Europe, even if a few of them do get theirs in the end?

Severance (Ling Ma)

For all that this was prescient about what a disastrous pandemic originating from China would look like (Ma predicted the ubiquity of KN95 masks and remote work, among other things, well before COVID arrived), I think it's been unfairly pigeonholed as “a pandemic novel,” when it's really much more about The Way We Life Now. The real pandemic was capitalism! (But seriously, a beautiful, provocative, hilariously funny novel, one of the best I've read in recent years.)

Short Letter, Long Farewell (Peter Handke)

A weird, endlessly digressive little novel that I didn't tremendously enjoy as I was reading it, but that has stuck with me more than I expected it to. Handke had a way of conjuring up powerfully vivid little scenes and communicating the disjointed, discursive thinking of his oddball narrator (which is to say, probably, himself) such that you can really get into the head of a guy you have very little reason to relate to.

Plague Ship, Ordeal in Otherwhere, and Garan the Eternal (Andre Norton)

Found these last summer in the same used-books section where I snapped up Moorcock's Runestaff books—same yellow and yellowing little old 1970s paperbacks (somebody in Hot Springs, Montana, was plugged into exactly the same influences as Gygax and company). I'd never read any Norton, one of the most prolific SFF authors of the 20th century and, right alongside Moorcock, one of the chief influences on D&D (and thus on pretty much all genre media of the past 50 years). I grabbed one from the '50s, one from the '60s, and one that was started in the '40s and finished in the '70s, and they're all delightfully representative of their time periods, going from the hypermasculine star-trader heroics of Plague Ship (which is basically just a short Traveller campaign) to the psychedelic quasi-feminist zaniness of Ordeal in Otherwhere and then Garan lurching from baroque Sky Captain silliness in his postwar debut to apocalyptic drear (and also trippy past-lives Eternal Champion stuff) in the Nixon-era conclusion. Definitely going to be on the lookout for more Norton in my used-books beachcombing.

Creative Surgery (Clelia Farris)

I was put onto Farris by Lavie Tidhar, who included her story “The Substance of Ideas” in Best of World SF: Volume 2. For better and worse, I think he chose well — that story, which is included in this collection, remains my favorite. They're mostly great, though (I also liked “Gabola” and “Secret Enemy” quite a bit), and every single one has something arrestingly memorable going on.

Fire to Fire (Mark Doty)

Another book, albeit an almost entirely different one, where my point of entry (in this case, “Messiah: Christmas Portions”) remains my favorite of the author's work, but I'm not the least bit disappointed. Many beautiful poems here; Doty is an observer of the minutiae of life, particularly urban life, with few equals. Love “Chanteuse,” and not just because it's about, and so vividly evokes, Boston.

Broken Stars (ed. Ken Liu)

Another one that I found my way to via Tidhar's Best of World SF series, and as much as anything I've tracked down following the spoor of one of those stories, this reinforces my belief that all the best, most interesting stuff happening in SFF is happening outside the United States, if not outside the Anglosphere entirely (although, in fairness, a couple of these were originally written in English). “Moonlight,” “The Snow of Jinyang,” and “The First Emperor's Games” are all fun little confections, playing with genre tropes or mashing up short fiction with other media (“Moonlight” is by Cixin Liu; I was not a fan of The Three-Body Problem, but I think his style is very well suited to this sort of wry short fiction). The best of the book, and one of the most affecting, thought-provoking stories I've read in a long time, is “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appeal,” which like many (most?) of the works in this collection concerns travel through time and our perception thereof.

Delicious in Dungeon, Vols. 1–4 (Ryoko Kui)

Super fun stuff, can't wait to read more. Incredibly good about taking a lot of what's weird and irrational about D&D and digging into it, spinning out rationales for it and deriving all kinds of fun little plots from it. The whole dungeon ecosystem is a great idea, but all the individual parts of it are particularly wonderful fuel for game writing.

The Living Mountain (Nan Shepherd)

Strange and beautiful. Some of the best work I've ever read not so much about nature but about being in nature, being embodied in the natural environment—the sensory experience, and not just the sights and sounds (although she has keen and unusual observations about how the mountain atmosphere plays tricks on the eyes) but the touch and taste of it too, the sensations of walking barefoot, napping under the sky, drinking spring water straight from the creek. Also a good reminder that you might write something truly great and not be able to find a publisher for it, not be able to find an audience for it, and that doesn't diminish its greatness. Shepherd had the pleasure of seeing it published (and become beloved and influential) late in life, after it'd sat in a desk drawer for 30 years. Not all artists are so lucky!

The Vanished Birds (Simon Jimenez)

Didn't love the story or setting, but still found a lot to like. Strong, well drawn characters, some arresting imagery, good writing throughout. The first shift of perspective is extremely powerful, a wonderfully lived-in illustration of the effects of time dilation, of what it's like to live, travel, and love in an interstellar society. The second shift in perspective, and the subsequent elaboration of one character's backstory, is much weaker, and the novel never finds it way back to the heights of the first two chapters.

Radical Warrior: August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General (David Dixon)

It's not perfect (like almost everything published these days, it could've really used more and better editing) but I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth when the universe hands me a full-length biography of my favorite, and heretofore criminally obscure, Civil War general. The full story of Willich's life is even more delightful than what I knew from Wikipedia and anecdotal scraps from other histories. A truly modern man, two centuries ahead of his life, and deeply flawed in ways that only make him more relatable to me. It is crazy what posters dudes like Willich, Marx, and Engels were. People joke about like, “Oh, imagine if they'd had Twitter!” but no, I don't think that would've actually changed much. They were tweeting at each other in the broadsheets and in handbills, and exactly the same dumbass ways leftist bros snipe at each other online today, right down to accusing each other of being both gay and cucked. It's magnificent. And also, for all that he was a temperamental egotist with a death wish, for as much as he enjoyed the sound of his own voice and was a political naïf, Willich was truly heroic. Not just a brilliant, and appallingly physically courageous, military officer, but a courageous thinker, a courageous ally to oppressed and marginalized people (particularly Black Americans), and somebody who sought—for all that he enjoyed fame, acclaim, and the perks of leadership—not to command but to empower others, to give them the tools to defend and perfect a people's republic.

The Smell of Burnt Toast

 

As you will know if you've been following this blog religiously, I tend to take a jaundiced view of videogames these days. Not all of my friends are so jaded, though, and thanks to their influence, I occasionally get roped into some zeitgeisty new hotness. A little ARC Raiders here, a little Clair Obscur there. I'm glad to have had a chance to try them out, and at least equally glad not to have wasted too much time, or my own money, on them. But every now and then, something really seizes my attention. Like today. Today, I got to play Crimson Desert.

I keep seeing people describe this game's story as “bland,” “boring,” or “forgettable.” I do not know what kind of brainrot these people have been exposing themselves to that Crimson Desert strikes them as being on the bad side of normality. It is terrible, to be clear, but “forgettable” is the last thing I'd call it. Others have called it “convoluted,” “incoherent,” or “nonsensical,” which are all closer to the mark, but I think those adjectives, sapped by overuse of some of their power, also fail to do it justice. Crimson Desert might have the worst story I have ever seen in a game, and it also might have the worst storytelling I've ever seen in a game. It is fucked up in ways that have permanently rewired my brain.

* * * 

The game is actually in pretty good shape, technically, for a new release. No game-breaking bugs, nothing that impedes progress, hardly any minor visual glitches, even. It's a rat's nest of insanely bad design choices in every possible area, from the user interface to the control scheme to the inventory system, but it all seems to be working as designed. Not bad for a big-budget game at launch.

And the life-changing badness of the story sneaks up on you. It all starts the way I've seen people write about it, with some generic but incongruous elements slapped together in a way that's a bit discordant but mostly just tiresome. First there's an attack by (one presumes) the main bad guy on the good guys' camp, and our protagonist gets repeatedly stabbed, his throat is slit, and he's thrown in a river. Seems like he ought to be dead! But instead (or maybe as a consequence?) he goes to techno-heaven and learns the first of many abilities that have been shamelessly cribbed from other, better games. There are no NPCs in techno-heaven. There are no explanations. Is it real? Is it a dream? Does it matter? Eventually, our hero returns from whence he went and washes ashore, uninjured.

His name is Cliff, by the way. They spell it “Kliff,” but…come on. It's Cliff. He has a friend named Duane. This is in a world with orcs (with names like Oongka) and ogres and wizards. There's some guy called Jian (Chinese?). The realm we're all in is called Pywel (Welsh?). Zero effort whatsoever to make things coherent or give any of the proper nouns legible relationships to one another. It's great. The whole thing seems haphazard, slapped together, just an excuse for a beautiful open world to roam around in. Fine.

But there is a main quest, and if you follow that main quest, the sense that things have merely been kludged together lazily begins to give way to something more uncanny. More unsettling. A couple hours in, you realize that you're playing out a waking fever dream, and that your actual flesh-and-blood brain is overheating. The following is an actual sequence of steps in the game's main quest.

* * * 

You jump off some sky islands, which are 1) one of the very most shameless of Crimson Desert's many, many deeply shameless borrowings from the last couple of Zelda games and 2) called “the Abyss” for no reason I can even begin to imagine. You land back near the starting town where much of the quest line has taken place thus far. You are prompted to go to a watchtower nearby. Nobody actually gives you the quest; no NPC has even mentioned the watchtower. You just know: It's time to go there. The holy spirit, or the insistence of the 10-year-old Zelda-loving DM running this most unholy railroad of a D&D campaign, compels you.

As you approach the tower, you hear NPCs yelling about bandits. Seems some bandits have captured the watchtower! You'd better fight them. You do, which is pretty fun, to be honest—trampling them with your horse, hacking at them with a one-handed axe—and the instant the last one falls, the screen fades to black. You've been teleported off your horse to the base of the tower; all the dead bandits have vanished (their gear has helpfully been whisked away to a chest in your quarters, from which you can extract loot, but which you cannot actually manually add anything to; you can only store things in your personal inventory). Up come several of the game's never-ending blizzard of tutorial screens explaining one minigame or arcane sub-mechanic (claiming territory! fishing! investing in the stock market! arbitrage!) after another. You close them out. Your quest now is “Go to the top of the tower.” Do you smell burning? Is something burning?

To get inside, there's a sort of puzzle where the solution is basically, “Hey, you played Zelda, right? You know how this works.” (If you hadn't played Zelda, you'd probably have no fucking clue what's going on. You have played Zelda, for better or worse.) You go inside. There are some extremely half-assed traps, easy to bypass, trivial to evade even if you do trigger them. Did a human being design this? Like, in the game, are we meant to believe that an NPC put these traps here, on purpose? What kind of a watchtower is this anyway, with only one door and no windows? Is any of this real? Is it meant to be? Did a human being design this? Like, was this made by AI, in the real world? Is any of this real?

You hike to the top. There are three traps, and maybe five stories to the tower. Or maybe fifty. It all looks the same, and it's taken you so long. You're feeling a little dizzy. There's nothing at the top except loot. Better get to looting! Halfway through picking up coins and books and random flatware—everything is labeled ??? until you pick it up, and I do mean everything, from grasshoppers to cheese—you accidentally pick up a weird helmet. Your quest now is “Put on the weird helmet.”

You put on the weird helmet. There's a hologram of a wizard who made this helmet to record memories or something. He says something about you being the chosen one, maybe? Or maybe that was somebody else. Who can remember? It's all hallucinatory, and it's hard to hear him over the ringing in your ears. Your quest now is “Talk to the child.” What? Who? Where? Why? (At least you know when. Right now!)

You go back down the stairs and out the tower's front door. There's a kid on the wall. Ah, you do recognize her. For a moment, things snap back into place. The ringing recedes. Back in town, you helped her rescue her cat from a rooftop. Also, she's probably not actually a kid, because that earlier part of the quest line involved an old beggar who turned out to be off-brand Merlin and a noblewoman who turned out to be…a talking bird? Like, a seagull, but magical? Gandalf, but a lady, and a seagull? Don't think too hard about it; you'll only hurt yourself. Follow the cat, the kid says. That's your quest now.

You follow the cat. It takes like an hour. The cat goes halfway up a mountain, and it's not that fast, and it gets stuck in a stream and on a rock along the way. Time unspools. Your eyes lose focus. You shake yourself. How long were you out like that?

Oops, the cat's moving again. Up on the mountain is a magical ruin that's the 185th thing you've seen in the past two hours (four hours? six?) that was shamelessly lifted from Tears of the Kingdom. You watch a hologram do magic to a holographic door, which teaches you a magic spell that lets you do magic to a real door. You go inside the magical ruin. You learn another magic spell by watching a hologram. A different one? The same one? It's all running together, but it doesn't matter. None of this is real, you promise yourself.

You are presented with a puzzle that, perversely, is solved with neither of these new magic spells but one you learned three magic spells ago, back in the Sky Islands, excuse me, the Abyss. Your quest is, once again, “Talk to the child.” What the fuck? How'd the child get here? What happened to the cat? Was there ever a cat? Was the cat the child all along?

You go outside. Oh. It's not that child from before. It's a new magical child. The kid blathers at you about destiny or the balance or something. Your ears are ringing again. Blood trickles from your nose. Wipe it away. A wave of dizziness buffets you. Fight it down. You can't really understand what the kid is going on about. You can't concentrate. But you can stay on your feet. Your head swims. Stay on your feet. Your quest—that's simple enough. That you can understand. “Go back to town.” You can do it.

You go back to town. Some guy wants to fight you. Sure, you say. You say yes to everything. There literally aren't any dialogue options in this game. You simply do whatever the 10-year-old DM railroading you through life and death and unlife thinks would be cool next. Every step of every quest is just “Make the next thing happen,” or “Go to where the next thing is going to happen to you.” You have no choice. You kick the guy's ass. Oops, he has a second health bar. You kick the guy's ass. He compliments you a bunch. You respond with great humility. You are always extremely humble. You have no choice. Your quest now is “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”

That's actually from the game. I mean, all of this has really been from the game, but I've been paraphrasing the quest text, mostly. This one is verbatim. That's what this next step of the main quest is: “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”

You experience a massive cerebral hemorrhage.