Saints and Shrines of the Diaspora

Nearly ubiquitous throughout human-settled space, often existing comfortably alongside more centralized, structured religions, is the veneration of figures who do not pretend to omniscience or omnipotence: tutelary deities, nature spirits, revered ancestors, culture heroes, and exemplars of righteousness. This last category (and sometimes the latter three together) are called saints.

Many of these venerated figures are hyper-local, and their cults are relatively recent developments; a shrine or spirit house in a village might honor the settlement's founder, one on a space station might honor a legendary hero who defended it against raiders, and one on a freighter might honor the progenitor of the captain's family. A few older saints (and ex-deities unglued from old faiths) came with humans from Old Earth and are widespread throughout the diaspora. They go by many names, but those below are the most common.

WHO IS HONORED AT THIS SHRINE? (d20 or d66)

1. Amaya. A niche in the shrine contains an exquisitely detailed figurine of a middle-aged woman. She wears sumptuous red (or occasionally blue) robes decorated with pearls and precious stones; sometimes, instead, the figurine is cast in solid gold. Amaya is a protector of travelers and patron of all who make their living in space, especially the crews of merchant ships. On less-developed worlds, she also appears as a patron of sailors and fishermen.
2. An. The shrine is neat and clean; off to one side, out of the way, is a small figurine or icon of the saint, who is depicted as a serene elderly woman, sitting or standing in a relaxed pose. Her hands rest at her abdomen, thumbs and index fingers touching to form a diamond; some supplicants tattoo an image of such hands, or a simple diamond shape, on their own abdomens. An is the special patron of bureaucrats, scholars, and teachers, but is entreated by all who seek serenity in a situation they cannot control.
3. Bosh. The shrine more likely contains her symbols—a seven-pointed crown, a fist clutching seven arrows, or a cloud unleashing seven lightning bolts—than an image of the saint herself. When she is depicted, she usually appears as a muscular young woman. The number seven is invariably incorporated into the design of the shrine (it might be supported by seven pillars, seven mirrors might be set in its walls, or seven lamps might hang from its roof) and pilgrims leave offerings in groups of seven. Bosh is especially venerated by athletes, miners, technicians, and all who do physical labor or work with explosives or electricity.
4. Doro. The shrine is small and tucked away in an overlooked corner, perhaps entirely hidden. The saint is depicted variously, as a mural or figurine, simple or detailed, often as a black or blue cat, often as a girl or young woman, and sometimes as a girl with cat-like features. Doro is a patron of sorcerers and magicians and a finder and keeper of secrets. Scholars pray to her for success in their research; spies and others who work in the shadows entreat her to keep their deeds obscure.
5. Eshba. The shrine is strikingly decorated in black and red, and patterned with sets of three dots, arranged either in a line or as an equilateral triangle. If there is an image of the saint, they appear as a blank mask or a simple, featureless figurine. Eshba is a messenger, an opener of doors, and a restorer of balance. They are prayed to for the receipt or delivery of good news, for the righting of small wrongs, and for new opportunities.
6. Genia. A life-size statue stands at the center of the shrine. She has dark brown, black, or occasionally very dark blue skin, and is usually depicted with four arms, but sometimes with two and sometimes with ten. She wears voluminous pink and blue robes and a silver crown. Genia is a protector of refugees, displaced people, and the oppressed and downtrodden in general.
7. Khadir. There is usually not a shrine as such, but offerings to the saint are brought to a spring or a tree. If there is a purpose-built shrine, it is always in the form of a fountain, a garden, or a small park. The saint is usually not depicted, but maybe be represented by a simple effigy of bound twigs or woven reeds. Khadir is venerated by a great variety of people and accorded a vast range of powers and portfolios: He is a keeper of secret or endangered knowledge; a protector of waters; and a patron of gardeners, farmers, interstellar navigators, psychics, and seers.
8. Leb. The shrine is in the form of a small shelter, with a few cots. The saint may be depicted, in a mural or relief carving, as a traveler or beggar in humble clothes, carrying a stick, staff, or club, often with a begging-bowl at his feet. Those visitors to the shrine who are able leave food, clothing, and sometimes money or other valuables for those less fortunate. Leb is a patron of the lost and desperate.
9. Maxim. The shrine's most prominent, and sometimes only, feature is a scarecrow-like effigy of the saint, depicted as an old, one-eyed old man in a wide-brimmed hat, sometimes wearing sunglasses. He sometimes wears a fashionable suit but just as often wears a simple, colorful poncho; his feet are always bare, and supplicants often bring shoes among their other offerings. He is entreated to intervene in all manner of relationships: for love, to repair existing romances, to smooth over rocky business partnerships, and for vengeance against personal enemies.
10. Nin. The shrine is small and cluttered, and features multiple mismatched murals, icons, or figurines of the saint, who is depicted as a child of indeterminate gender with a small body and an enormous head, usually wearing large, archaic spectacles. Supplicants pin, tape, or plaster handwritten papers to every surface in the shrine. Nin is the special patron of writers and programmers, but is entreated by all who must write prose or code, or whose life or livelihood depend on somebody else's writing or coding.
11. Om. The shrine prominently features a large statue or icon of the saint, who is depicted as a man with the head of another mammal—usually a water buffalo, but sometimes a donkey or, in remote places, some other, more exotic animal. He wears a long, bright yellow tunic with wide sleeves to accommodate his four arms, which hold dumplings, candy, fruit, and cooking utensils. Om is the special patron of artists and scientists, particularly chefs and chemists, but people of all backgrounds entreat him to bring them good luck.
12. Padma. The shrine is lavish, with many gold or gilded fixtures. A statue or icon shows the saint as a beautiful woman wearing a five-pointed crown and draped in jewelry, gold-embroidered finery, flowers, and mirrors. Padma is the special patron of entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and lovers, but is entreated by all for prosperity, abundance, and fertility.
13. Quan. The shrine is tidy and richly decorated; at its center stands a life-size statue of the saint, a red-faced warrior sometimes depicted with tusks or fangs. One of his arms is held upright and holds a weapon, usually a pistol or large knife; the other is empty and held at his side, palm down. Quan is venerated by police and criminals alike, and entreated by common people to protect them from violence and to keep the powerful honorable, or at least to divert the gaze of the powerful from the supplicant.
14. Riss. An abandoned or leftover space has been turned into a shrine, which is decorated in eclectic fashion. No two shrines to Riss are much alike except that most, somewhere, feature the saint's symbol: two arrows converging on a common point. The saint is variously referred to by female or nonbinary pronouns and is never represented visually. Riss is a patron of musicians, poets, actors, spies, forgers, and generally anyone who must lie or contort the truth.
15. Sombra. The shrine has a vaulted ceiling and prominently features a large statue, icon, or mural of the saint, who is usually portrayed as a skeleton wearing feminine clothing (often white but sometimes red or multicolored), but sometimes as a male or nonbinary figure and sometimes as an extremely gaunt, pale person rather than a skeleton. Sombra is a patron and protector of those who work at night or in the dark, especially in dangerous trades: sex workers, bouncers, bartenders, taxi drivers, salvors, and shipbreakers, among others.
16. Tara. The shrine is in a high place, or features a ladder or stair to a high niche that features a mural or icon of the saint, depicted as a muscular young woman, often winged and sometimes having the head of a bird—usually an eagle, a falcon, or some other fierce raptor. Bird, wing, and feather motifs feature throughout the shrine. Tara is a patron of nurses, social workers, advocates, public defenders, and all who seek strength and courage to defy injustice or oppression.
17. Tshi. The shrine, usually humble and rustic, prominently features a small icon depicting a mustachioed, long-haired man; the medium and colors vary, but the composition is curiously consistent from one shrine to the next. Around the icon stand potted ficus trees and (or in lieu of the trees, if the environment won't support living plants) murals of leaves and figs. Tshi is a patron of radicals, revolutionaries, those who work among the poor, healers, and all who resist tyranny and injustice.
18. Yurka. The shrine is unadorned, and prominently features a life-size statue or effigy of the saint, who is usually depicted as a man in armor or a spacesuit (often orange), but sometimes as a nonbinary person or genderless figure, like a humanoid robot or an empty spacesuit. The figure often holds a machete or leans on a standard topped with a flag significant to the locals. Yurka is a patron of soldiers and explorers, and entreated to deliver loved ones safely home from danger or to bring them success and glory.
19. Ziv. The shrine is festooned with ribbons, garlands, lamps, and mirrors. If depicted at all, the saint is probably depicted in several different places and in several different forms (as a small figurine, a larger statue, a mural, an icon). These images appear half-hidden behind some of the other features, with the saint often holding a mirror in front of their face or wearing a mirrored mask. Ziv is a patron of dancers, acrobats, smugglers, and all who wish to live fluidly and evade constraints.
20. A syncretic figure combining elements of two or more of the above (roll d20 twice; roll twice more for each subsequent 20, but reroll other repeats)
21. A recent ancestor of a prominent local family
22. A distant ancestor of a prominent local family
23. Multiple ancestors of a prominent local family
24. An distant relative of a party member or of somebody they know
25. An ancient culture hero venerated by a local group
26. The founder, or one of the founders, of this community
27. An early patron of the community (or the expedition that founded it)
28. A hero who rendered an immeasurable service to the community
29. A luminary who brought fame and respect to the community
30. An historical figure honored throughout this region
31. A benevolent local spirit who offers boons or protection
32. A wise or curious local spirit who shares lore or secrets
33. An indifferent local spirit who commands awe and respect
34. An erratic, sometimes dangerous local spirit who must be pacified
35. A mischievous local spirit who must be bribed to behave
36. A malevolent local spirit who must be appeased

 

WHAT DO PEOPLE OFFER THEM? (d20)

1. hell money
2. coins
   
3. incense
4. candles
5. milk or cheese
6. fruit or juice
7. alcohol
8. oil
9. flowers
10. herbs
11. cooked rice
12. pastries
13. candy
14. spices
15. crystals
16. stones
17. toys
18. poems
19. written secrets
    
20. something unique to this saint or ancestor

Taking Trek to the Table

William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk in "The Devil in the Dark"

 

A friend and I have been on not-quite-parallel journeys of Star Trek self-education during the pandemic. They're currently watching, and lobbying me to try, Discovery (of the post-Voyager series, I've only watched Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds), while I've been dragging myself through the final season of the original series and half-heartedly encouraging them to give TOS a try too. Sure, lots of it's awful, but there are classics in there too! I offered to draw up a list of some of my favorite episodes and some of the ones most referenced in subsequent series.

Looking at all the episodes at once, two things are obvious. First, way too many involve godlike aliens contriving wacky scenarios that the crew (or certain members of the crew) have to deal with. The 90s series had the good sense to mostly confine such antics to a single character (Q), which created some opportunities for character development and for the writers to play with expectations. In TOS, it's just one thing after another, always context-free, with little variation: the most obvious proto-Q is Trelane from “The Squire of Gothos,” but we've also got Apollo, the Metrons, the Organians, the Melkots, and a half-dozen more.

The second thing that jumped out at me, though, is that there a lot of TOS episodes that can be dropped into a TTRPG (say, Stars Without Number, which I happen to be running for the above friend and others) with very little modification. The 90s series rely much more heavily on character and plot, and although those episodes offer plenty of inspiration, they tend to rely heavily on the personalities of specific characters. In fact, the overdone equivalent, on TNG and Voyager, to a godlike being's wacky TOS antics, is “a familiar character is behaving in an unfamiliar way or has been replaced by an unfamiliar character.”

There are some great character-driven episodes in TOS, too, of course, including the archetypes of those “familiar characters act weird” plots ("Mirror Mirror,” “The Enemy Within,” “The Naked Time”) and some heavily plot-driven ones that might serve as inspiration for a game session but would take some work to reverse-engineer (“The City on the Edge of Forever,” “The Enterprise Incident,” “Balance of Terror,” “Amok Time”). But there are a lot of episodes, including some of the very best, that can pretty much go straight to the table if you're playing a SF game and your players have a spaceship.

Here are seven of my favorites, with rough outlines of how I'd play them:

• “Journey to Babel”: The party is hired to transport a bunch of diplomats (or a bunch of scholars, or a bunch of whatever sort of passengers) to a summit (or a conference, a business negotiation, wherever). One of the passengers is a spy, secretly in contact with a ship that's shadowing the party's vessel. The spy's mission is to sow distrust among the passengers—carry out a murder, or least an attempt, and frame another passenger (or maybe a player character!) for it—to disrupt the summit (or conference, or whatever). Is the mystery ship going to attack as a last resort, spirit the spy away when the mission is complete, carry out some kind of false-flag operation? Lots of good possibilities.
• “The Ultimate Computer”: The party is contracted to test a computer system that'll turn their ship into an autonomous weapon (or hired to crew a different ship that's being used as a testbed for such a system—as security, evaluators, or research adjuncts). The system's designer is on hand to supervise (and complicate the situation). The fatally flawed system goes haywire, the designer has an emotional breakdown, and the crew can't communicate with other ships, which theirs starts to attack (or, if we don't want to escalate immediately to lethal danger, maybe the ship plots a collision course, or starts heading for some dangerous or off-limits area). The players have limited time to choose an approach (reason with the machine, try to disable it, make contact with somebody outside and help them disable the ship) and attempt it.
• “Space Seed”: The party finds a derelict adrift in space (or responds to a distress call). There are a bunch of people on board in suspended animation who need to be awakened, or are being awakened without the party being able to safely stop the process (or maybe they're just on board, awake already). One of them (doesn't have to be an ancient superhuman war criminal, but something along those lines certainly spices things up) makes a nonviolent (or minimally violent) but forceful play for control of the party's ship. Maybe they take the ship; maybe they end up holding just part of it. Negotiate, retake the ship by force, try to divide the loyalties of the castaways? Once the players manage to reassert control over their ship, assuming they haven't killed everybody, they need to figure out what to do with the castaways.
• “Where No Man Has Gone Before”: Yeah, this is kind of a godlike being wacky antics episode, but it has two fun twists. First, the godlike being starts as one of the crew (ideally a beloved henchman, sidekick, or other friendly NPC, in TTRPG terms) but is exposed to some MacGuffin that gives them awesome new powers. Second, the new powers keep growing. The party needs to figure out how to resolve the situation before their erstwhile companion becomes so strong that the players won't be able to challenge them. Expose one or more of themselves to the MacGuffin to get similar powers to fight back? Find some way to reverse or disable the effects? Duke it out?
• “The Trouble with Tribbles”: While the party is docked at a space station for repairs (or held in port because of a quarantine, or stuck in place for just about any other reason), a merchant sells one of them (or an NPC crewmember, if necessary) some adorable little alien pets. And they start reproducing uncontrollably. And they start eating (or damaging, or destroying) some valuable commodity or otherwise making trouble on the ship or station. And the party is held responsible! You don't even need a Klingon in disguise or poisoned grain to create drama. Most of the obvious solutions involve wanton violence to helpless, cutesy-wutesy little critters. (Whether that's actually an obstacle depends on the character of the party, I guess.)
• “The Conscience of the King”: Under some other pretext, the party comes to a planet (or station, or asteroid base or whatever) to surreptitiously surveil an actor (or some other entertainer, or a person of pretty much any description) who is suspected (by an acquaintance of the party, or perhaps by the authorities) of being a mass murderer (or other heinous criminal) long thought to have been dead but seemingly alive, at large, and in disguise. Ideally, at least one member of the crew is familiar with the guy, or you've dropped his backstory into the game at some point, but works fine cold. To complicate matters, the few surviving witnesses to the man's past crimes keep dying mysteriously; the party must figure out whether the suspect himself is the one killing them. He's actually contrite, if basically unrepentant, and harmless—it's his daughter (or biggest fan, or secret admirer, or manager) doing the killing.
• “The Devil in the Dark”: Probably my favorite TOS episode of all. The party takes a contract, or responds to a distress call, and ends up at some remote industrial (or scientific, or run-of-the-mill colonial) outpost where a mysterious “monster” is wrecking equipment and dragging people away to their deaths. The monster is actually an intelligent, but entirely non-humanoid, alien, difficult but not impossible to communicate with. If they manage to figure out what's going on without immediately resorting to violence—turns out, oops, the colonists' major economic (or research) activity involves unwittingly killing the alien's offspring—they might have to switch sides (after a fashion) and negotiate with the angry, grieving colonists on the creature's behalf.

2023: Year of Culture

La Mer at the Boston Ballet

 

The Books I Most Enjoyed in 2023 (Only One of Which Was Actually Published That Year)

• A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1968 onward)

  I'm rereading my way through the big, beautiful 2018 omnibus edition. I originally read Tombs of Atuan first, when I was eleven, having found it on the little bookshelf in my sixth-grade classroom. It's not an exaggeration to say that it changed my life; it's been with me ever since, and it's still my favorite of these four. The others are richer than they were, though, coming back to them for the first time in a long time (I reread them a couple times as a teenager, and maybe in my early twenties, but it had been a good fifteen years at least). I appreciate the Taoist influence, especially in The Farthest Shore, a lot more than I did when I was younger.
  

• The Female Man (Joanna Russ, 1975)

  Anybody Samuel Delaney, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Gene Wolfe all counted in the inner circle of their most important and talented peers must be worth reading, even if she is mostly out of print now, right? No big twist here: Yes. She was brilliant. Bitter, hilarious, wildly creative. (And out of print no longer; the Library of America just published her collected works.)
  

• Teaching a Stone to Talk (Annie Dillard, 1982)

  Wonderful little essay collection. It was one of the first things I read in 2023, and “An Expedition to the Pole” and “Aces and Eights” in particular stuck with me all year.
  

• The Idiot (Elif Batuman, 2017)

  It's unsettling how effectively she conjures up the foggy, mercurial emotional and intellectual world of a teenager, the simultaneous fragility and stubbornness, the know-it-all idiocy.

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Olga Tokarczuk, translated 2018)

  Uproarious, defiant, righteous, truly unique. Janina is an all-time great unreliable narrator. Probably the best thing I read all year.
  

• The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti (Meryle Secrest, 2019)

  Did the CIA assassinate Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou to prevent Olivetti from leapfrogging IBM and becoming the world’s most important computer company, thwart the sale of advanced technology to China, and let General Electric buy the now-distressed company for a song? Yes. They totally did.
  

• The Employees (Olga Ravn, trans. 2020)

  Foreign, in multiple senses, science fiction that follows almost none of the familiar rules of the genre. Kind of an anti–Blade Runner, setting humans and replicants alongside each other and then estranging the former rather than humanizing the latter.
  

• Matrix (Lauren Groff, 2021)

  Not-quite-historical fiction that builds an awesomely fully realized little corner of medieval Europe. Transportive, right from the first sentence.
  

• Mona (Pola Oloixarac, trans. 2021)

  Seems a witty, funny, dirty, and rather gentle satire of academia and the literary world but for the occasional surreal vision or half-remembered hint of something much more disturbing. The weirdness accelerates so smoothly and swiftly that, even though you can sort of see it coming, the climax hits you like a truck.
  

• A Man of Two Faces (Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2023)

  Part memoir, part polemic, part history, part eulogy. Beautifully written.

The Book I Got Angriest About in 2023

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Gabrielle Zevin, 2022)

  I'm torn, because I don't have any serious ill will toward the author (a little scolding will, maybe) and I think it's very easy to be negative (and have fun being catty about it) and much harder to, you know, write a whole fucking novel and send it out into the world to be ripped apart by jerks like me. My general policy is (or at least I know it should be) “If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all.”
  
  However, I have a lot to say about this one, most of which is negative and some of which actually feels important. Maybe I'll do a big post on it later and then delete the whole thing if this blog ever attains any kind of significant readership? For now I will say that although this novel is not alone among contemporary media in portraying the 1990s as a lost golden age, and it's not even alone in scrubbing all the rough edges off that benighted decade, the way it belatedly introduces to its plot racism, misogyny, homophobia, and every other form of bigotry it has bizarrely elided for hundreds of pages is uniquely dishonest and disturbing.

 

My Personal 2024 Oscars

• Best Picture: Past Lives

• Best Actor: Natalie Portman in May December

• Best Animated Feature: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

• Most Tasteless (Complimentary): Bottoms

• Best Frankenstein Retelling: Birth/Rebirth

• Best Scream Meets Sci-Fi Comedy Classic Mashup: Totally Killer

• Special Achievement in Odious Protagonists: Killers of the Flower Moon

• Special Achievement in ACAB: Only the Good Survive

• Biggest Success in Spite of Itself: Oppenheimer

• Best Cannibal and Best Mukbang: Cannibal Mukbang
  

Notable Older Films I Watched for the First Time in 2023

• The Color of Pomegranates

  I'm going to film a fifteen-hour-long adaptation of The Book of the New Sun in exactly this style.
  

• Picnic at Hanging Rock

  Indelible. I want to turn this into a TTRPG setting, somehow.
  

• Midnight Cowboy

  Incredibly fresh and powerful, despite have been referenced, imitated, homaged, and memed a thousand times over.
  

• The Handmaiden

  It's Picnic at Hanging Rock, but Korean. I will not be taking questions at this time.
  

• Videodrome

  With each passing news cycle, the New Flesh looks more and more appealing.

 

My Favorite Dumb Little Letterboxd Reviews I Wrote in 2023

• Abstract Expressionism Comedy Hour

• Somebody Studied Too Much Critical Theory

• An Actual Attempt to Do Film Criticism

 

My Favorite Series of Reviews I Found on Letterboxd in 2023

• This absolute queen watched Carol twenty-two times in a three-year period.

 

Most Embarrassing “Why Haven't I Been Listening to This for Years?” Musical Discovery

• Du Blonde

 

Best Unexpected Record Release by a Long-Beloved Artist

• Formentera II (Metric)

 

Best Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Big New England Bias)

• Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? (MASS MoCA)

 

Best Not-Contemporary Art Exhibition (Feat. Even More Powerful New England Bias)

• Fashioned by Sargent (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

 

Ballet Bummer of the Year 2023

• La Mer (part of the "Our Journey" program at the Boston Ballet)

  Again, I don't want to be a jerk about it. Parts were cool, some great images (the siren rock, the light swinging through the depths), some lovely performances. My gripe is a very big, very broad one, and this dance performance just happened to exemplify it: The audience at the Boston Ballet, in the year of our Lord 2023, does not need to be convinced that global warming is happening, or that it's bad. Or that the oceans are in danger. Or that we need to change our relationship with Mother Earth. If there are people who still need to be convinced of these things, they're probably not going to the ballet, and they're probably not in Boston, and they're almost certainly not going to the ballet in Boston.
  
  What Boston Ballet-goers need is to be convinced that they are still culpable. That sorting their recycling and composting their food waste and driving their Prius and going to see eco-conscious Art doesn't absolve them of anything. That the same system that affords them wealth enough to go to the ballet and cultural instruction enough to appreciate it is the very thing killing the planet, poisoning the oceans, and blocking any effort to change our society or our values in a meaningful, enduring way. That change might discomfit them, but is nonetheless necessary. That they need to act, not just spectate and consume.

 

The Wild West Is Boring

As many folks have observed over the years (e.g., James Maliszewski back in 2008, Paul Hughes at greater length in 2016), Westerns were a huge influence on D&D (and Traveller), and you can see the imprint of the Western mythos on many subsequent TTRPGs. Game designers love their open ranges and noble savages, even in genres that wouldn't seem likely to accommodate them—think of Shadowrun's Great Ghost Dance and Cyberpunk's Nomads. Lots of non-Western RPG settings include quasi-Western gimmicks or locations (wandslingers in D&D's Eberron, the Savage Coast in…D&D's Mystara). There have been many attempts to create Western systems and settings over the years, too, some played straight, others with Lovecraftian or other horror and fantasy elements woven in.

Few of them really stuck, and none in a big way. Some of it's probably timing; the Western's star was on the wane all through the early decades of TTRPGs. Boot Hill, the direct follow-up to OD&D, came out in 1975, already past the peak of the Western zeitgeist (a lot of the long-running Western TV shows, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, ended in the early and mid '70s; the spaghetti Western craze was still going, but was starting to peter out). Still, Boot Hill's heyday coincided with How the West Was Won; the '80s had the novels of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy; the '90s had a small Western film revival (and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman); the 2000s had Deadwood; and the list goes on. The Western never went away. It just never caught on in RPGs.

Why not? You already know my thesis: The Wild West is boring (as an RPG setting).

* * *

When I say “the Wild West,” I mean the post facto American (but also German, Italian, Spanish…) vision of “the Old West,” the setting of nearly all of the movies, TV shows, comics, and books that Gygax and company grew up with, and the setting we all reflexively think of when we hear “Wild West.” Cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, six-shooters, chaps, big rowel spurs, ten-gallon hats, saloons, cattle drives—and, narrowly, the time period from the end of the American Civil War to the end of the 19th century (or perhaps to the First World War, depending on whom you ask and where exactly you're talking about).

Why's it boring? Because total hegemony by the United States is a fait accompli. For everybody else, the wicked and the just alike, in every sense—historically, culturally, geopolitically—it's all over but the crying. The Confederacy is gone. The Mormon Rebellion is over. Mexico has been conquered. The border with Canada is settled. Russia is out of the picture. France is out of the picture. Native American resistance continues in fits and spurts, but it is doomed to fail; the war has been lost for decades, if not a century or longer. On an individual level, of course, there's plenty of potential for conflict and adventure (up to a point), but at a societal level, there is no real conflict and no potential for change. It's a lifeless world.

(As a side note, it's also not merely a racist fantasy, but an unsporting racist fantasy, one in which the colonizers can't possibly fail. Compare the also fantastically racist South Asian setting of Rupyard Kipling stories like “The Man Who Would Be King”: You've still got all sorts of fucked-up white supremacist assumptions baked in, but instead of the patronizingly mournful idea of the Vanishing Indian—history's sun setting on a picturesque but irrelevant race doomed to extinction—there's a sense of the indigenous people as an indivisible part of an inimical, unconquerable landscape. Better? No. More respectful? Kind of a win some, lose some situation. But a more gameable assumption about the setting! To Zedeck Siew's excellent Twitter observations about decolonizing D&D, handily collected here by W. F. Smith at Prismatic Wasteland, I add a corollary: We should not avert our eyes from D&D's colonialism, but, in the spirit of those colonizers par excellence and all-around degenerates the British upper class, we should, by Jove, be sportsmanlike about it. Or seem to be.)

The West is good at beginnings, offering all kinds of exciting reasons for characters to head for the frontier, many of which come with baked-in vendettas, rivalries, nemeses, and other animosities. The ex-slave trying to make the most of her hard-won freedom, looking over her shoulder for Confederate sympathizers. The Union veteran unable to readjust to civilian life, jumping at every sound and loathing Johnny Reb. The young woman fleeing an unhappy engagement, or an unhappy marriage, or a scandal of some kind. The disgraced physician (or lawyer, or journalist) who wants to start over with a blank slate. The dilettante son of a rich family, itching to escape the constraints of upper-class urban life.

But, especially in campaign play, especially if experience brings even a modest increase in power, especially with even a hint of domain or faction play, it all falls apart. You win a gunfight or two, you find some buried Spanish gold, you rout the Klan…now what? Conversely, you're an outlaw: You rob banks, hold up stagecoaches, derail a train. Your infamy grows. The Marshals come for you. Now where? There are no rival factions to play against each other, no rebel prince to pledge your loyalty to; there isn't even a frontier, really. There's just the inexorable grind of Manifest Destiny. It's manifested California and Oregon already, and Washington is just around the corner (if it hasn't happened yet). The “frontier” is a shrinking patch of wilderness, a shrinking population of hopeless people hemmed in and subject to the final spasms of a slow-motion genocide. It would be unappealing even if it weren't so sordid (and don't get me wrong; it's absolutely morally repugnant). There's no uncertainty. No possibility.

* * *

Above, I said that “few” Western settings and systems stuck. I see people praise Aces & Eights and Dogs in the Vineyard once in a while, but it seems to me that the big one, the closest to an enduring success, has been Deadlands (besides, it's the only one I've read; I ended up with a copy of Deadlands Reloaded thanks to some bygone PDF bundle). I don't like the setting, to be clear up front—neither before nor after the retcon of the Confederacy—but I do think it understands the assignment, as they say, and that understanding has been part of its success.

The decision to use a supernatural deus ex machina to shake up the American balance of power in the late 19th century probably wouldn't do it for me even if it weren't aided and abetted (even post-retcon) by Lost Cause propaganda. It's not just racist; it's goofy and, even with its “a wizard did it” handwaving, implausible. But putting independent Mormons, multiple Native American polities, Chinese pirate lords, a Haitian robber baron, and some kind of zombie California in there? That's the right idea, even if the setting can't make the weakness of the United States make sense and weighs everything down with a heavy and very Manifestly Destined metaplot.

"How would you do it, Michael?" I don't hear you ask. But obviously I've been thinking about it, so: Just stop clinging to the post–Civil War American West. Keep your duels at high noon, train robberies, bank heists, stagecoach chases, abandoned silver mines, and all that. Keep your saguaros and tumbleweeds, if you must. But whip up a good old secondary world for them. Mix and match different eras of North American colonial history, and stir in some South African history too.

Keep the basic premise: overland expansion by an Anglo-analogue empire. For the flavor, mash up the American revolution, the Confederacy, the Mormon Rebellion, and the Boer Wars (throw in the English Civil Wars and Europe's 1848 revolutions for good measure): A republican revolution “back home” failed, but it's had a partial success here in the colonies, with separatists establishing several fragile independent republics on the frontier. These new republics are egalitarian (for some people) lands of opportunity, with an economic dynamism and social mobility (for some people) that put “back home” to shame. They're also variously run by, or at least harbor, slavers, genocidaires, and intolerant religious zealots. Win some, lose some!

On the far side of the colonized continent, mash up Russia, France, and China: A culturally distinct great power from across the sea is sailing up and down the coast. They've established some port cities, but are less interested in large-scale settlement than they are in trade and resource extraction. Where the Anglo empire tends to rely on exclusion and ethnic cleansing, and the separatist republics on outright genocide, the Franco-Sino-Russians have developed a policy of nonaggression and cooperation with the indigenous people, organizing native auxiliaries to supplement their limited military presence and pouring advanced weapons into indigenous hands in exchange for furs, spices, jewels, or whatever it is the land is rich in.

Combine Mexico (reaching back to pre-Colombian cultures for inspiration) with the Zulus: A third power, erroneously conflated by the settlers with the indigenous people whom they in some superficial respects physically resemble, is making their own bid for regional hegemony, pressing in by land from another direction. Better organized and more technologically advanced than the other colonizers give them credit for, they are led by the greatest military genius of the era. The more battles they win, the more lurid racist propaganda the Anglo-types will hurl at them.

Voilà! An unstable balance of power, villains and antiheroes aplenty, and the wind of change blowing across the frontier—but with the future entirely uncertain. Sprinkle the ancient ruins of a lost empire around for some classic D&D or voguish science fantasy flavor. Delicious!

Back to the Future

The House of Tomorrow in Philco-Ford's "1999 A.D."

When 1999 arrived, I was 14 years old and halfway through my first year of high school. I had a Pentium PC and a 56k modem, and the internet was my oyster. It was the year of Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike, the year I realized that there was infinitely more content available for my favorite games online than what had come in the box. I played just about every Half-Life map and mod that existed, then played everything I could find for Unreal and Quake II, then worked my way back to the motherlode that was the original Quake's fan community.

At that age, I loved nothing more than computer games, and 1999 was a great year for them. The Longest Journey, Homeworld, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, System Shock 2, Planescape: Torment, and Quake III Arena all came out that year, as did FreeSpace 2, the first game I ever published any content for (I had messed around with Worldcraft, trying to make simple Half-Life maps, but never shared them online). It wasn't much, but it was my first step into the world of modding, the DIY side of the hobby, the social world of games—making them, sharing them, theorizing and bickering about them.

I don't think I started my LiveJournal until a year or two later, but 1999 was also the year LiveJournal was launched, so there's that too: a link to my one previous foray into blogging, which was also the first thing I did on the internet that brought me real, lasting human connections, including two friendships that endure to this day. One of them, it turned out, lived practically around the corner, so we quickly became real-life friends (and dated briefly, a footnote in her romantic history but a landmark in mine); the other lived halfway across the country, and yet we've managed to sustain an almost entirely epistolary relationship that's still going strong more than two decades later.

* * *

So what's "1999 A.D." about? The name is snappy and hopefully distinctive, and it's adjacent to 2000 AD, which is kinda fun, but it also, self-importantly, represents an ethos. The year 1999 was, for me, a time of tremendous optimism, when it seemed like my own creativity, and the world of games I loved, had limitless potential. 1999 stands for a broader societal optimism, too, both because it had been, decades earlier, the horizon on which we could see a sure-to-be-better future society, and because, in retrospect, it was, for all the anxiety about Y2K, one last moment of stability and prosperity (for many Americans, at least) before the 21st century's long slide into the suck began.

Computer games, for me, never really lived up to the promise they held in 1999, which is partly because I was a starry-eyed child then, and partly because the breakneck pace of technological advancement slowed enough, around the turn of the century, that our dreams of synthetic intelligence and infinite artificial worlds had to be deferred for at least a few decades, but also largely because games soon became a huge business and a lot of the creativity, ambition, and wildness were beaten out of them by the invisible hand of the market. 1999 was the crest of the wave, for me; later in high school, I devoted more time to the outdoors, to parties, and to getting high, and (a little) less to games. I got into World of Warcraft a few years later, which monopolized all of my gaming time and game-related social energy for a while. I got out of it, eventually. I got into Destiny 2, Hearthstone, Marvel Snap. I got out of those, too. I play PC games sometimes, still—I'll probably write about them at some point—but I don't love them the way I did. TTRPGs, though? I'm belatedly smitten.

I came to TTRPGs very late, especially for somebody who was such a huge nerd as a teenager; I started during the pandemic, playing long-distance D&D 5e on Zoom with one of my best friends, her partner, and some friends of theirs. To no one's surprise, least of all my own, I loved it. I started thinking about running a campaign, starting looking at other systems, started poking around online, knowing, this time, that there would be infinitely more content available than what had come in the box or the book.

I found Dan D's Throne of Salt sometime early last year. Saw this post and knew I had to run a science-fiction campaign of my own. Found Marcia B.'s Traverse Fantasy. Started listening to Astronomica. Found Skerples' Coins and Scrolls. Started accumulating PDFs: Stars Without Number supplements, Mothership modules, miscellaneous old Traveller stuff, all sorts of zines, Skerples' beautiful book. Started a SWN campaign with my 5e group (and two more friends, including my very best) when our two and half years of fantasy adventure drew to a close. Started filling notebooks and sketch pads with notes and doodles and maps and deck plans. Started itching to share my ideas.

* * *

Since my first forays into Half-Life mapping forums, I've pretty much always been active in some kind of online community somewhere: LiveJournal, punk music bulletin boards, WoW forums, Reddit (RIP r/chapotraphouse), Twitter. My activity has waxed and waned, but there's always something going on. In recent years, that something has tended to be unsatisfying, if not downright alienating. Even before Musk's coup at Twitter, social media wasn't feeling very social. Parasocial, sure. Antisocial, asocial. Howling into the void. The shrieking of the damned.

Around this time last year, I started reviewing every film I watched on Letterboxd—the only one of a number of resolutions I made at the start of 2023 (write a poem every day, write about every book I read, draft a novel) that stuck. I have a few followers; I get a few likes. It's cute, it's fun, but it's not much of a dialogue, not much of a community. Just scratches that old itch, makes me want something more substantial, more real. The grove of avant-garde TTRPG blogs I've started to wander through may be a tiny world, but it's a world of conversation, collaboration, creativity. A living world. It's exciting! It takes me all the way back to 1999.