aprilmarch

In which I continue to play Lichdom. (See the first post to learn more about the game.)

King of Hearts
The Archivist is awaken by the sound of his lair being bombed. His wards, ancient and formidable, hold on - but the assault is so powerful and relentless that even such wards will break after some time, especially now that his magical power is drained by his ill-fated attempt to bargain with Death.

Ichabod soon appears (in  somewhat ridiculous light blue silk pajamas) to inform that he knows who is responsible for the bombing - he can tell by the sound of the airplanes. It's a small but highly belicose country, which for the last few centuries has always been at odds with Ichabod's country. The Archivist isn't sure if Ichabod can be trusted, but this is simple to resolve: all it takes is the coordinates of the enemy country's capital.

Shortly afterwards, the Archivist and Ichabod appear out of thin air in front of a startled president and several startled generals, who had been up to then pouring over battle maps and pizza boxes. Ichabod's knowledge proved true: they were indeed responsible for the bombing. Apparently they had heard of the Archivist's sacrifice in the warzone, despite whatever provisions Ichabod had taken to mantain that secret, and they had deemed it unacceptable that a wizard would deal with the dark arts so openly. The president refused to call off the attack on the lair, even if the Archivist killed everyone in that room, for it would be a honorable martyr's death for him.

Ichabod laughed them off as zealots - he was clearly too trusting that the Archivist's power would stand with him. But the Archivist was open to negociation. He asked if there was anything, anything at all, that he could do to have the attack called off. The president had him swear not to open congress with demons. That was easily done; there were much more avenues to search. But, still reluctant, the president asked the Archivist to abandon whoever had brought him into sin.

It took a moment for the Archivist to connect the dots - he had been for too long too removed from human affairs. But he knew this country and Ichabod's were always at war. He realized that the president merely wanted Ichabod's secrets. He didn't know Ichabod was responsible, but it was a fairly solid guess. Or maybe he even knew - who can tell what his spies had seen that day in the warzone.

The Archivist was a bit reluctant to abandon who had been a useful ally, and took no joy on Ichabod's terrified expression as the guards carried them to who knows where. But when he returned to his lair, it was silent. The attacks had been on the cusp of breaking their wards, but they remained intact and he could attend to them in the morning easily.

Eight of Hearts
Once again alone in his lair, the Archivist took his time to lick his wounds. Without Ichabod, he needed something new to be his tether to the mundane world. He could no longer expect himself to be forgotten.

The religious fervor of the president inspired him. He knew that it was common that, whenever a religion took power, other smaller religions would grow in its shadow to oppose it. If the two countries had been at war for so long, then it was almost certain that Ichabod's compatriots would have developed such a belief.

His travels to investigate this suspicion were grueling, as he had no interest or ability in talking or spying. But they were fruitful. While Ichabod's country had a state religion that was actually the same as their enemy's, except for a few tenets of little importance, there were people who thought opposing an enemy state was more important than fitting in, who followed a religion based on devil worship and the gathering of power. And it turned out that, amongst this cult, his name was already whispered about, for his actions were known.

Finding out about this cult had been difficult, but becoming its leader had been as easy as dropping his disguise.

It took him only a few months to suss out which cult members had real magic power and then teaching them simple spells through which they could communicate. It was very simple, and the cult, despite being composed of many people, was nowhere as useful as Ichabod had been, but it was good enough for his needs.

I've not been around here for quite some time (this is quite the understatement), mostly because I've been around on Tumblr, where my shitposts of a very similar quality have the potential to reach, in optimal conditions, upwards of fourteen people (!). However, I've decided to bring anything more substantial that I create here, since I think a bloggier platform is better for this kind of thing, usually easier to read on and marginally less likely to nuke my archives in their entirety.

And the next thing I want to do is tear through the limits of morality in a quest for eternal life.

Yes, I'm going to play the solo RPG Lichdom.



Lichdom is a game in which you play as a powerful mage trying to become a lich. It uses a deck of cards in conjunction with dice rolls to generate a story. Some cards just generate prompts with no mechanical weight, but most of them set of crises that have a very solid chance of crushing my lil wizard to smithereens.

For the time being, I'm going to describe the world I've created for the game. Lichdom has very detailed tools for creating a world, and I'm not using them at all. (Already I'm being kind of a hypocrite, since I hate it when actual plays of an RPG ignore part of their rules, since I usually follow them when I'm curious about how the game works.) Partly this is because I came up with a world in my mind already while thinking about the game, and partly because I don't want my game to take place in the sword-and-sorcery style setting the game strongly alludes to. Although this is a lie: the prompts are generic enough that I could use them to create a world in any setting I want, and the prompts in the actual game are about as generic, so the only actual reason for not using them is that I don't wanna.

I wanted a world with high magic but modern technology, but the setting kind of needs to have a kind of attrition that we don't get in a world with a United Nations (although, well, *vague gesture towards everything*) so I'm playing in a kind of para-apocalyptic setting; the world feels the same as ours, but unbeknownst to most people an apocalyptic catastrophe has already begun and is unlikely to be stopped.

So here's what I came up with:

Thousands of years ago, it was the Age of Gods. Great powerful beings lived among the population - well, not really among them, more like above them - and mortals could beseech them for power and favours. Humankind gathered under the auspices of the good gods of civilization and knowledge, while evil gods of destruction prowled the edges of humankind's domain. This was all well and good for a few thousand years, until a group of great warriors killed a god of pain and suffering. While this event first brought joy to people due to the weakening of the dangerous evil gods, it also caused two important pieces of information to come to light. First, even though the god of pain and suffering was dead, both still existed in the world. Second, human beings can kill a god.

It took some time for people to figure out what it mean, but it soon led to a period known as the Godslayings, the twilight of the Age of Gods. Humanity first slayed all the evil gods, then all the neutral gods, then turned themselves to the good gods. Soon enough every god of the old world was either dead, enslaved or MIA. Humankind studied the scraps of their power that were left behind and learned to harness it for its own ends. Thus began the Age of Magic.

The Age of Magic was a prosperous time for most of humankind, with humans capable of harnessing the powers of the gods but unhindered by their dictates. Even for the lowliest peasants who could not study magic, this was a better world. A new kind of elite would soon appear in this world, though: the Great Wizards, those who were both specially talented at magic and specially driven to study it. In a world without gods, their power had no rival other than each other. Some of them waged wars so dreadful that the devastation left in their wake would cast the petty demands of the gods in a good light. But although the Great Wizards had no enemies other than themselves, that would prove to be enough; after a thousand years of fights, almost all of them had perished at the hands of another. Only those rare few that didn not seek power above all, for themselves or at the behest of a mudane patron, have survived to the end of this age.

For this age is about to end, although the people don't know it yet. Few Great Wizards remain; the other wizards have forgotten most of their craft and can bring very little power to bear; and modern technology arrives as a great equalizer to all realms. In a few years, a great war will erupt, nuclear bombs will be fired, and the Age of Magic will come to its end in fire and pain, sending humankind down the Age of Ruins. But even this will be of small concern to our character, The Archivist, one of the last surviving Great Wizards.

The Archivist, whose birth name is long, forgotten, appears almost like a shade, a human shape wrapped in a burial shroud. Only a close inspection can reveal that the burial shroud is actually a delicately weaved suit, in a very deep dark blue, inlaid with gold. His face appears cloaked in shadow - actually an enchanted face mask. His pronouns are he/him, though mostly out of tradition, since he barely seems himself as human any more. Under his shroud - which he only takes off to eat and sleep - he's a gnarled old husk of a person. He uses magic to float around because his legs barely respond to him any more.

Like all surviving Great Wizards, he had no interest in power by itself: he wanted to attain and study all spells. That was made difficult by the fact that other Great Wizards would not willingly part with their signature spells. That was fine with the Archivist: he would start by studying those spells that were readily available to him, and he would collect rarer tomes as it becamse possible. Since he was not involved in great wizarding wars and his spell-hogging peers were, he was actually able to grow his collection quite a bit simply by being the first in the scene, or the only Great Wizard in the scene.

He set up his lair - pardon, his Archives - in a location called The Blight's Eye. Once the capital of a great empire, they betrayed the Goddess of Fertility so that she could be killed, one of the last gods to fall during the Godslayings. As she bled to death, she called out a great curse: as far as her voice would carry, no living thing would grow. The city had to be abandoned, and the once lush forest that surrounded it would eventually turn into a barren land, worse than a desert, since even in a desert plants and animals grow. But this was a boon for the Archives: the curse would stop many of the things that could damage books and tomes. As for food, the Archivist simply casts a spell that faithfully reproduces an entire meal from nothing.

The Archivist lived as a hermit in his lair, leaving only once every few decades when news came to him that new tomes might be aquired - usually when a wizard had died, or a great wizarding school had gone under and was liquidating its stock. He cared little for the outside world other than these small incursions. But even someone as distracted and withdrawn as him was bound to eventually notice that the world had changed. Fewer and fewer Great Wizards remained; everywhere he went to, tensions were high and war was on the horizon, if it hadn't already erupted.

The decision to become a lich came easily. So few Great Wizards remained to challenge his notion. His great powers slowed his aging, and his lair in the Blight's Eye stopped any disease from taking hold, but he could still be slain by spell or bullet or even bad luck. An eternal body would solve these issues, remove the daily distractions of food and sleep, and make it much easier for him to avoid contaminating his archives. He was nothing if not pragmatic, and lichdom was, simply, the most attractive way forward. Sadly, it had always been such a taboo subject that even he had no idea of where a tome about the practice might lie. But time would be on his side.

Thus begins his quest.

Mônica, famous comic book character from Brazil, has a Ryu number of 7.

Coming to that conclusion was very difficult, and the results are probably debatable.

If you don't know what Ryu numbers are, you can take a look at the Ryu number subreddit, at the tumblr, or at the Twitter account, the latter being the one that offered the ruleset I'm using. But basically: Ryu numbers are a game/concept/activity/pointless waste of time in which one attempts to connect video game characters, through special appearances and cameos, to Ryu. The number is the amount of games that need to be cited in order to connect to Ryu. A character that's in the same game as Ryu has a number of 1. A character that's in the same game as another character that shares a game with Ryu has a number of 2, and so on.

I love this stupid crap. It's at once heartwarming and hate-inducing. It's heartwarming because it shows how there are connections between everything, and how our culture is a big giant soup of references, and how different companies can overcome their alledged rivalry to come together and do something fun. It's hate-inducing because you soon realize how many of the main pillars of the industry come down to Disney-like gigantic monstrosities that own everything their wretched eyes lay upon. I still find a lot of fun.

A funny thing you notice about Ryu numbers is that they tend to be either very small or infinite. It's likely that the vast majority of game characters don't have Ryu numbers, simply by virtue of never having a cameo in their games, or at least a cameo that connects to the larger universe. (Hat Kid from A Hat in Time is a suprirsing example of this.) However, if a character does have a connection to Ryu, it's likely to lead directly into a dense web of connection, meaning there aren't many nodes in the fastest path.

Everyone who makes Ryu numbers is always on the lookout for an interesting connection, and I'm no exception. Since I'm Brazilian, I've tried to find Brazilian characters that link to Ryu, but that's been a mostly fruitless endeavor. This is not to say there aren't any, but I'm not looking for small indie darlings, I'm looking for the big cultural stuff. Stuff like Turma da Mônica.

Turma da Mônica is a Brazilian comic about a bunch of children that has been running for over fifty years, and it's probably the largest Brazilian cultural presence for children. And they do have videogames: a couple of games for the Master System (a SEGA-built console, contemporary to the NES, that was quite succesful in Brazil) and a more recent, multi-platform game. But, sadly, they seemed to be fit the mold for most non-game characters: their games had several characters, but no one outside of their own IP, and no one appeared as cameos in other games either. Intellectual property is a harsh mistress. It seemed that my search was likely to lead nowhere.

Except...

Well. There's a rule in the Ryu number twitter that says that characters need to be identifiable, if not by name, then by appearance. For instance, if a large lumbering zombie with screws on its neck were to raise from an electrified table, it would probably count as an appearance of Frankenstein's Creature, and provide a valid connection to Ryu (such a creature appears on Super Smash Bros. Ultimate). (And yes, I know the creature in the book is completely different, but that's not the point here.)

What does this have to do with Mônica? Well, that's probably related to the other question you've had while reading this article: how did a character from a Brazilian comic get a game made about her all the way back in the eighties, when programming was a rare skillset, specially outside of the Japan-US-Europe axis? Well, the answer is that... she didn't. The 1991 Master System game Mônica no Castelo do Dragão wasn't created from scratch; it's just a localization of the 1987 Japanese title Wonder Boy in Monster Land. All the dialogue is changed, and our hero is replaced with the plucky, freakishly strong six-year-old, but literally everything else is the same.

And you know what they say. If it looks like Wonder Boy in Monster Land's final boss Meka Dragon, walks like Meka Dragon, and throws triple fireballs like Meka Dragon, it is Meka Dragon.

We have a connection.



I was hopeful when I found this. The Wonder Boy franchise is quite large, and has had numerous entries. I was certain that I would find a connection between its many protagonists and the gaming world at large.

I didn't.

Although the Wonder Boy series includes numerous games, they were much like Mônica's gang in that they only refercence their own characters and they never had a cameo on another game series. Despite my cleverness, it seemed to have been all for naught. I could connect Mônica to a little-known Japanese platformer, but the trail ended there. There was nothing more to go on. Lightning didn't strike twice in the same place.

Except that's not true at all. Lightning strikes some places dozen of times a year. And it turns out that a developer that had licenced a game to create a completely different localization would not do this only once.

In 1986, software developer Hudson decided to port the first game in the Wonder Boy franchise (named only Wonder Boy) to the Famicon. However, at some point in development, they changed plans and instead released it as a new franchise of their own, Adventure Island. I like to think this happened because they saw Wonder Boy pick up a skateboard complete with helmet and kneepads and realized that the game they were porting was probably not as medieval as they had thought. Whatever the reason, the game was a port of Wonder Boy in much the same way Mônica no Castelo do Dragão is; the main character is changed, but the levels are not. Which means we can pull the same manouver as before and connect the games using a similar enemy, correct?

Sadly, no. Unlike Mônica's game, which was a simple localization, Adventure Island is a port to a different console, with different graphical capabilities. Even though the locations in the two games are the same, they are nowhere as identical as Mônica and its original. Confusing the matter further, the games have a single boss enemy, who fights the hero repeatedly throughout the game, wearing different masks with different powers. This enemy is called King in Wonder Boy and Evil Witch Doctor in Adventure Island, and while those are titles that can certainly be held consecutively (in fact, I'd assume the first will make the second much easier to perform),it's an obvious stretch to claim that these two are the same character. Notice in the screenshot below that, even though these two images come from the same boss fight, they don't even seem to be wearing the same mask.



So, are we at a loss? Have we discovered a connection, only to have to discard it? No. There was a way out - brought about by dev error. See, in both versions of the game, the hero has to save a girl from the villain, as was the custom at the time. Wonder Boy wants to rescue his girlfriend Tina, while Master Higgins, the protagonist of Adventure Island, wants to rescue Princess Leilani. Except that Princess Leilani is only mentioned by that name in the manual; in the game itself, she's still called Tina.

If it looks like a Tina, it's been kidnapped like a Tina, and is called Tina by the game, it's the same character. Tina is a connection between the two games.

(At this point, a new connection had to be made within the Wonder Boy series itself, as the titular Wonder Boy is the protagonist of the single game to bear his name, and the series that begat Mônica's games have a different protagonist, Book, who presumably liked books so much he changed his name to it. Fortunately, I was spared from having to dive deep into Wonder Boy's lore to find out if there are any ancillary characters that could connect the games by a crowdfunded revival of the series, the 2018 game Monster Boy in Cursed Kingdom, in which both protagonists appear briefly. Boy, don't you love crowdfunding? I love it so much that I'm dropping here a link to the crowdfunding campaign of a magazine I'm an editor at! It publishes fantasy and science fiction stories from Brazilian authors in English! If you're reading this article, you're at least 60% certain to enjoy it! We have a Patreon too!)

Now I'm feeling hopeful. Adventure Island was made by Hudson. They are moderately important in the modern Japanese game industry, and in fact they are the creators of the Smash Bros. series, which has provided many connections for Ryu numbers. I was confident that I'd find a connection to Ryu through it.

If hope you're not holding your breath for a THIRD plot twist, because there isn't one. The connection is through a game called DreamMix TV World Fighters - a bizarre platform fighter created to celebrate a merger between Hudson, Konami and toy manufacturer Tanaka (the later also allows the inclusion of Megatron and someone from Beyblade). Yeah, sometimes stuff in the real world just happens satisfactorily. I have to say I found this a pretty weird game when I made this connection, but given that in the present day there's a fighting game that includes Wonder Woman, Shaggy from Scooby Doo, Finn & Jake from Adventure Time, and Arya from Game of Thrones, I now consider that game to be a precursor. In fact, I even had a choice of character, since both Simon Belmont and Solid Snake appear in both DreamMix and in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate with Ryu; I chose the latter to branch out genres a little.

And that's how Mônica ended up having a Ryu number of 7.

You may have noticed that there was no October Link Roundup. That's because I forgor 💀

I'm also considering getting these out of my blag and into my newsletter, since they're most in English anyway. This might be the last one.


Mystery Flesh Pit National Park
This think hits so many notes so well for me. For starters, the story is fantastic weird. One day, some prospectors were digging around in Texas and found a living creature, so gigantic that they literally couldn't find the end of it. A company decides to 'mine' its effluvia, and in order to make the operation more profitable, turns it into a tourist attraction. That's later made into a US National Park. That's wild.
Now, just to make me like things even more, the story is told entirely through ephemera. Leaflets, park signage, articles, government reports; the story is not told as much as it is inferred. (Okay, there's a novel underway, but that really feels like a sideshow. The tumblr is the main dish.)
Either of those would make me fall in love with the idea, but both of those together just make me want to marry it and have its children. They'd be very large.

Why So Few Violent Games?
I saw on Twitter that this month (...or maybe last month?) is the tenth anniversary of this watershed article on gaming. We've always assumed that so many games are based on violence (or, broadly, on physical phenomena, which also includes platformers, piloting, sports, etc) is because those are things that are easily simulated through data. Is it really, though? Or is it that we are more used to violence, and therefore are more ready to abstract it, in a way that conversation doesn't? (It's funny to see that even in the alternate world conjured up by that article, Doom still exists. If only you could talk to the monsters indeed.)

Feels Dumb Man: I Really, Really Hated The Pepe The Frog Documentary
I haven't seen the documentary 'reviewed' in this piece, but it's brilliant in its analysis of the Pepe memes and its sociocultural significance, as well as bringing to light (to me, at least) unsavory facts about Pepe's creator Matt Furie. However, the ending of the article (which discusses the ending of the documentary) has such a hard twist that, while I want to talk about it, I somehow don't want to spoil a nonfiction piece. Read it to the end.

Peanut Diplomacy
We know crows are smart. We know crows can hold grudges. If you are wise, you want to make friends with crows, but you don't want to be responsible for the entire wellbeing of crows, nor be dragged into the petty politics of crows. This is a person that knows how to deal with crows, and these secrets are now in the open.

Something You Have to Explain
I don't know who needs to read a fan comic shipping Aunt May and Doctor Olivia Octavius from Spiderverse, but I'm sure someone does.


Music this month is Zeal and Ardor's Come on Down.
As a bonus for my absentee month, have also the clip for Jynkx's Cartoons and Vodka.

Outro dia, conversando com um amigo (à distância, porque pandemia) ele me perguntou o que eu achava de um baralho de arquétipos. Segue a nossa conversa:

Eu: Gostei bastante. É legal pra narrativa, é legal pra coisinha mística.
Ele: Narrativa que me interessa. Eu não sou muito mistiker, sou mais cétiquer
Eu: é tudo a mesma coisa ✨
Ele: É isso que um mistiker diria!!!!!!!

OK, você pode me achar meio louco, mas o Alan Moore também acha que magia e arte são mais ou menos literalmente a mesma coisa, então você não pode discordar a menos que você também tenha tido uma obra prima adaptada para um filme medíocre. Mais especificamente, divinação e construção de narrativas são disciplinas bem próximas. O ser humano é um animal narrativo; a divinação nada mais é do que tentar descobrir o que acontece a seguir na história da vida real através da análise de texto. (Infelizmente, a vida real tem padrões muito baixos.) Mesmo que você também seja um cétiquer, o fato é que a maioria das formas de divinação são baseadas em construir narrativas, então são ferramentas muito úteis se é isso que você está tentando fazer.

Mas que tipo de oráculo você pode usar? Existem muitas técnicas divinatórias antigas e bastante utilizadas, como o tarô, mapas astrais, o I-Ching e resenhas do Yelp!, mas se você tivesse interesse em alguma delas não estaria lendo o Dreamwidth, né? Vou dividir aqui algumas ferramentas que eu uso que são bem estranhas e fora do normal, e vão fazer você ser o vidente mais legal da casa de Marte (que é que nem a casa do caralho, só que um pouquinho mais educada). Você também pode usar ela para quando chegar a um empasse nas suas histórias e parar de reclamar de uraiterbloque.

B.AKKA - BIBLIOTECA DE ARQUÉTIPOS



Era disso que eu estava falando com o meu amigo cetiquer quando ocorreu a conversa acima. Este é um baralho focado em arquétipos, o que significa que ele é mais adequado para criar personagens, apesar de que você pode usar pra criar qualquer coisa, já que tudo é um personagem de alguma forma. Não se assuste com o preço: esse é o objeto mais caro dessa lista, mas por esse valor você ganha um deck super bonitão com umas ilustrações super da hora, e instruções para uso que eu nem olhei direito porque se você sabe o que é um arquétipo você já tem uma bela ideia de como usar.

O maior problema desse baralho, além do preço, é que ele também é desenhado para usar como inspiração para marketing, então volta e meia você encontra um resquício de buzzword no meio das explicações. Mas isso não é problema, porque você sempre pode agilizar a sinergia entre os sistemas quânticos para aplicar uma AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

MONKEY FORTUNETELL (em inglês)


Descrever Monkey Fortunetell como búzios para millenials seria afobado, simplista, ofensivo para ambas as partes, e absolutamente correto.

Desenvolvido por Nathalie Lawhead, esse programinha tem o jeitinho dela de glitchware frenético e piscante (er, melhor não usar se você for epilético). Mas, no fundo, por baixo da estética porra-louca, temos um sistema divinatório simples e preciso. Você joga macacos em um tabuleiro circular. Você joga seis macacos de três cores diferentes, representando o passado, presente e o futuro. O tabuleiro é dividido em 16 setores, cada um representando uma parte da vida (marcada por um caractere de Wingdings). Um macaco de cabeça pra cima é um bom sinal, um macaco de cabeça para baixo é um mau sinal. Combine o significado dos macacos com o significado dos segmentos do tabuleiro e descubra o que as entidades superiores têm para dizer para você. Se as entidades superiores em que você acredita se recusarem a mandar mensagens através de um software estranho que tem a aparência de um site do Geocities sendo eletrocutado, arranje entidades melhores.

Infelizmente, a versão original do Fortunetell era em flash, e não pode mais ser executado pelo browser, mas ainda existe uma versão disponível para Adobe Air. Sacuda seus macacos hoje mesmo!

ASK THE STARS (em inglês)
Nada como seguir um conceito frenético e incansável com algo tão sedado e contemplativo que eu nem tenho uma imagem para colocar nessa entrada.

Ask the Stars não é um sistema divinatório: é um sistema de RPG... baseado em sistemas divinatórios. O que significa que ele é um sistema divinatório, só que não para você, para pessoas fictícias. Mas, bem, você vem acompanhando as notícias ultimamente? O que é que as pessoas fictícias têm que nós não temos?

Esse sistema usa dados de doze lados para gerar uma combinação de uma constelação e uma posição. Cada constelação significa algum aspecto, e cada posição modifica esse aspecto. No melhor estilo RPG narrativo, cada combinação é descrita com uma frase curta e uma pergunta carregada. Além disso, um dado também pode responder uma pergunta 'sim' ou 'não', mas ele a responde de uma forma não-binária. Um 5 é um Não, mas um 1 é um ABSOLUTAMENTE NÃO.

As combinações funcionam de forma primorosa, principalmente para um sistema que parece ser baseado na forma que alguém que não sabe muito de astrologia pensa que astrologia funciona. Por exemplo, A Criança, Ascendente pode trazer crescimento descontrolado, mas A Criança, Enterrada representa um erro antigo e esquecido. O Ancião, Encurvado representa uma transição de poder pacífica para uma nova geração, mas O Ancião, Colidindo representa um abuso egrégio de autoridade. São 144 combinações e elas são fenomenais.

Esse sistema funciona muito bem para criação de mundos, mas também serve para qualquer coisa. O link que eu postei vai para o post que explica o sistema, mas clique na tag para ver explicações sobre cada uma das combinações.

DIVINATION WITH POLIHEDRAL DICE (em inglês)


OK, este é meio que uma mistura das duas últimas. Como Ask the Stars, ele é baseado em usar dados de RPG para divinação. Como Monkey Fortunetell, é a obra de uma designer que eu acho genial com uma identidade marginalizada. (Sério, o jogo Dangerous Duels, também da Sophie Houlden, é uma das coisas mais divertidas que um grupo pode fazer em uma sala fechada sem tirar a roupa, e talvez mesmo assim. É super divertido mesmo quando ninguém sabe o que está fazendo, ao contrário de outras coisas que você faria depois de tirar a roupa.)

Divination é bastante simples. Cada dado representa um aspecto da pergunta, e cada número representa algum tipo de resultado. Eles podem representar intensidade, duração, natureza, e muitas outras coisas. Faça uma pergunta e role os dados que você achar relevante, depois interprete a resposta. Os resultados vão te chocar.

Ah, e sim, como a imagem dá a entender, Sophie Houlden também criou um gerador de rolagens de dados, que já vem com o sistema divinatório dela. É isso o tal de Big Dados?

BARALHO CIGANO
OK, vou confessar uma coisa para vocês: eu não sei quase nada sobre o baralho cigano. O pouco que sei... ou pelo menos acho que sei... é que ele é uma variação sobre o baralho de tarô, mas tem apenas 36 cartas, e não tem números nem naipes - é um pouco como se todas as cartas fossem arcanos maiores. Para mim, essa pequena quantidade de cartas tem muitas vantagens.

Primeiro, com menos cartas é mais fácil aprender o significado delas. Claro, o tarô é feito de um jeito que você pode deduzir o significado de um arcano menor sabendo o significado do número e do naipe, mas mesmo se você contar 23 arcanos maiores + 14 números + 4 naipes provavelmente não chega em 36 (estou com preguiça de fazer a conta.)

Segundo, enquanto tiradas no estilo do tarô são possíveis e comuns, quando tiraram para mim usaram TODAS as cartas, e eu achei extraordinário. Não sei pica nenhuma sobre como ler esse tipo de tirada, mas percebi que o importante não era apenas as posições das cartas mas também a relação entre elas. É como ter um pequeno mapa astral.

Terceiro, como todas as cartas são no estilo "arcanos maiores", elas são simplesmente mais divertidas. Quando alguém que não sabe muito de tarô pensa em uma tirada, pensa em tirar algo como A MORTE ou O DEMONHO, mas é bem mais provável (estatiscamente) que você tire, tipo, o seis de copas. O seis de copas tem um significado, claro, mas é tão chato! O baralho cigano não tem um seis de copas (ou, tipo, tem, mas não chamamos ele por esse nome). Você tira O JARDIM ou A MONTANHA ou A CARTA (é tipo uma correspondência, infelizmente não tem uma metacarta no baralho que diz "você vai ver seu futuro no baralho cigano"). É tão mais dramático!

E, sabe, o pessoal faz baralho de tarô baseado em tudo. Tem baralho de tarô de Twin Peaks. E, tipo, todos esses baralhos têm que pensar e dizer "como eu represento o seis de copas dentro do universo Twin Peaks?" Seria muito mais fácil usando o baralho cigano, em que todas as cartas têm um significado simples e preciso. Você poderia fazer um baralho cigano gamer só fazendo as figurinhas em pixel art. E são só 36 cartas, então você teria bem menos trabalho! Mas agora que você leu este parágrafo você vai ter que me pagar royalties se fizer isso.

LITERALMENTE QUALQUER BARALHO QUE TENHA ALGUMA ILUSTRAÇÃO
A grande pegada das técnicas divinatórias é que o baralho, os dados, os búzios, as varetinhas de I-ching ou seja lá o que for são só um guia: o verdadeiro poder divinatório são os amigos que nós fizemos estavam dentro de você o tempo todo. Você pode ler o futuro em cartas de Magic ou em placas de trânsito. Life of a Spell Scroll, um dos jogos da coletânea Hibernation Games (em inglês), usa cartas de tarô para montar a história de um pergaminho mágico senciente, mas as regras sugerem que você use as ilustrações das cartas se não souber o significado delas, e que você pode usar qualquer baralho ilustrado se não tiver um baralho de tarô dando sopa. Isso não serve só para jogos independentes estranhos, serve para todos os momentos em que você precisa de uma pequena inspiração!

Aquele baralho com os lugares turísticos da Espanha que seu pai te trouxe por algum motivo? Um baralho de Super Trunfo? Aquele baralho erótico que você disse que ia jogar fora? Sim, você pode usar qualquer um deles para divinação, basta um pouco de imaginação. (Se você usar o baralho erótico, por favor me conte como foi.)

Se você tiver dinheiro para gastar com besteira, primeiramente uau, no Brasil de 2021? Parabéns! Segundamente eu recomendo um dos baralhos do Projeto 54 do El Cabritón. São lindamente ilustrados, cada ilustração tem uma vibe diferente, e é um baralho normal, então se a divinação não dá certo você pode jogar um truco.



Fique feliz por eu não ter escrito esse artigo numa rede social mais famosa, senão pode apostar que eu iria encerrar com "prevejo que você vai curtir e assinar!"

The roundup is likely to be shorter again this month, and not for a reason I'm proud of: I neglected to save articles I liked in a timely manner, and forgot them 😳

Here are the articles I read this month and remembered.

Brazilian TRPG designer calls attention to the relative invisibility of games from the Global South
Because I am a weird, I found about these tweets from a compatriot of mine through a Malay game desinger on Twitter. But the sentiment is very powerful. Kickstarter allows project creators from a mere 25 countries, and if you're not in one of them, you lose a major (potential) source of revenue. This is, of course, without mentioning the extra work you need to translate your work into English (then redo the layout, which is double the work). Unless, of course, you decide to work only in English - foregoing your own home audience. There are no easy solutions, other than more crowdfunding services springing up with similar reach to Kickstarter.

Horsehistory stufy and the discovery of new areas of thought
As someone who is just interested enough in lingustics to have given up actually studying it, I loved this concept: coming up with new fields of thought by having computers randomly create new words, then trying to figure out what they mean. The piece's example of 'horsehistory', defined as the study of umconfortable history, conjures a briliant future for this idea. Sadly, I don't think this will hold. It's more likely for words to stick to concepts we do have but lack words for than for the opposite to happen; the modern history is full of perfect terms for things that were invented by visionaries about ten years before they would become useful, only to be forgotten and replaced by a blogger's turn of phrase. Or that a concept is hijacked by something close enough that's more needed - look up the history of the term 'emotional labour'. We will not study horsehistory now that we're aware it exists - we'll only look for a name for it when we develop the concept itself. Still, worth reading.

How 9/11 Became Fanfiction Canon
The massive tragedy that was the fall of the WTC towers in 2001 also exposes a peculiar part of the psyche of the US-born: they actually do believe their country is all that exists. It's all fun and games to make fun of the fact that they call their national baseball (?) championship The World Series, but 9/11 shows that they consider this tragedy to be sacrossant, beyond the scope of satire and oblivion. Of course, many people also work through their grief via the medium of fanfiction, so we must ask, what would Sam and Dean from Supernatural think about 9/11?

Into the Zone: Four Days Inside Chernobyl's Secretive 'Stalker' Culture
Speaking of massive tragedies that defined the country they took place in... get out of here, stalker. This piece takes a look at "stalkers", people who offer unlicenced tours of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Why do they do it? It's just for money, isn't it? That seems unlikely - I doubt there's a lot of money in taking people to become sterile and/or get cancer, and they'd likely make a comparable sum by being a guide with the boring, approved tours - guides that apparently have a close enough relationship with 'stalkers' to make dead drops for them. There's more to it than it looks. There's a matter of taking a national tragedy and turning it into national pride.

No music this week. Go play Unsighted instead.

OK, so here's something I thought about some time ago.

Humans are the only mammals that have monophasic sleep - that is to say, they do all their sleeping in a single phase, eight hours long. Most mammals sleep in two or more phases. (That's why cats 'nap' during the day and often wake up during the wee hours of the morning; they're not built to sleep eight hours at a time.)

However, a theory says that monophasic sleep is actually a social construct  and humans are naturally biphasic - they sleep in two phases. This theory posits that humans originally would go to sleep at sundown, sleep for four hours, wake up in the dead of night, hang out a bit (one to two hours), then go back to four more hours of sleep. There are quite a few references to 'first sleep' in ancient text. This natural flow would have been disrupted by the Industrial revolution, when the advent of electricity, along with new societal roles, caused humans to remain awake during the early evening, after which they had only eight hours to sleep in one go.

That's the science. Now for the fantasy.

A very common trope in the fantastic is the preponderance of thresholds, borders, spaces between. Anything that's not clearly one thing or other is a place where the veil of reality is thinner. Pacts with the supernatural are made at crossroads because they are such spaces: part of two streets but of neither. Midnight is the witching hour, the hour when monsters come to roost, because it is the temporal space between two days, after one has ended but before the next has begun. Anything that comes along during a threshold is innately more magical.

Well, what's more of a threshold than the idle hours between the days, when so many people happened to be awake? If that portal opens itself for a moment during midnight, then during these hours it would stay open for as long as someone was awake, and the magical world beyond could not only peek through but linger and stay. The entire world was magical for a few hours.

And if someone happened to be conceived during these hours - which must have been absurdly common - they they'd be touched, born of a different world, full of magic in their mundane bodies, and the fantastical would come to them that much more naturally.

Many stories of magic talk about a withering, a vanishing of magic. Some stories have it start during the Renaissance, some during the late Victorian times, but always around the time of the Industrial Revolution, give or take a few centuries. Why is it that magic seems to have gone away, just as the Victorians were suddenly interested in it?

Well, maybe there just weren't as many people who were good at it.

Primeiro: eu não gostaria que esse fosse o primeiro post em português do meu blague, mas o universo ri de nossos planos.

Segundo: a história a seguir é real. Eu sei que parece um frame borgesiano para amplificar um texto, e garanto a todos vocês que eu absolutamente faria algo assim, mas, nesse caso específico, é real.

Ultimamente, vários dos meus amigos decidiram lançar newsletters. Eu tinha tido uma ideia de lançar uma também, faz muito tempo, mas nunca tinha escrito nada... ou pelo menos era isso que eu pensava. Quando eu entrei na minha conta antiga da newsletter, descobri que tinha um tremendo artigo sobre conlangs (sabe, línguas artificiais, que nem o esperanto e o klingon), escrito e jamais lançado.

O motivo dele nunca ter sido lançado é simples: ele era apenas um preâmbulo para uma piada em que eu julgava as frases que você usaria para apresentar a sua conlang. Você usaria o Pai Nosso? Um trecho da Declaração Universal dos Direitos Humanos? A própria visão de mundo que você busca com a sua conlang? A frase "eu posso comer vidro, não me machuca"? Eu iria julgar cada uma dessas opções com piadas magníficas e notável fantasia, mas, helás! Esqueci-me completamente da piada que iria fazer, e fiquei só com o preâmbulo. Felizmente (ou não), sou prolixo o suficiente para que o preâmbulo talvez satisfaça.

Deixo vocês, daqui em diante, com o André do passado. O nome deste rascunho incompleto, salvo na minha newsletter, era Julho 2019 - Conlangs & Caminhões. Não faço ideia de onde os caminhões entrariam. Pela entrada de carga, geralmente.

***

Como Fazer Sua Própria Língua
Neste mês eu li In The Land of Invented Languages, da Arika Okrent. Sempre fui um pouco fascinado por línguas artificiais - normalmente conhecidas por conlangs, uma abreviação para constructed languages, linguagens construídas. Imagino que a maior parte das pessoas que estão lendo esta newsletter são nerds enormes e portanto sabem que O Senhor dos Anéis foi criado apenas para que Tolkien tivesse um mundo para uma língua que ele tinha inventado por hobby, o Quenya (mais conhecido como Élfico), já que ele era um linguista e abominava uma linguagem que existisse em um vácuo. Se Tolkien não fosse tão nerd, não teria escrito O Senhor dos Anéis, o que significaria que a maior influência moderna na fantasia medieval deixaria de existir. Como seria esse mundo? Talvez a fantasia medieval, tendo como maiores influências as histórias de Fafhrd e Gray Mouser, de Fritz Liber, e o Conan, do Robert E. Howard (que, OK, não são medievais), tivesse tido menos a ideia do bem contra o mal e fosse considerada menos simplista. Ou talvez tivesse deixado de existir. Outra influência, maior ainda: sem O Senhor dos Anéis, garanto que não exisitiria Dungeons & Dragons. Sem ele, talvez não tivéssemos o RPG de mesa... ou talvez sem este beemote ocupando a sala teríamos sistemas mais variados e mais conhecidos. Quem sabe?

Mencionei em um grupo que eu tinha comprado esse livro, e alguém mencionou um outro livro sobre criação de línguas artificiais. Naquele livro eu não tenho interesse. Existem pessoas que pagam linguistas para criar línguas novas para suas histórias de fantasia e ficção científica, e, bem, isso me parece um enorme desperdício. Existem mais de mil línguas artificiais no mundo, algumas com comunidades pequenas de falantes que adoram sua cria. Pra que criar outra? Pague alguns desses hobbistas para traduzirem o seu texto pra língua deles. Eles vão ficar com estrelinhas nos olhos e trabalhar por alegria. Eu já tinha essa ideia faz tempo, e quando descobri que a 'língua lunar' usada na excelente HQ Saga era, na verdade, o esperanto, soube que estava certo. Você vai brigar com o Brian K. Vaughan, vagabundo?

(Mas o maior problema de criar uma língua artificial, na minha opinião, é o vocabulário. De onde você vai tirar as palavras? Se você usar uma outra língua como base, sua língua fica enviesada, e fica mais parecida com um dialeto do que com uma língua. Mas de onde mais você pode tirar um vocabulário? A 'língua lógica' Loglan e sua prima open source Lojban (longa história, brevemente discutida no livro da Okrent) utilizou análise do vocabulário de todas as línguas conhecidas para tentar isolar as maneiras mais comuns de falar cada conceito, tentando assim criar uma língua que é igualmente familiar para qualquer falante do mundo. Mas inventar uma língua já é coisa de doido; fazer uma análise dessa é uma coisa de doido embrulhada numa coisa de doido maior.)

Mas na verdade eu estava pensando em outra coisa. No fim do livro, Okrent cita dezenas de línguas, com uma frase para exemplo. Se você tivesse inventado sua língua, que frase você usaria?
Era sobre isso que eu queria escrever. [Nota do André do presente: Mas não escrevi.]

Que frase usar para dar um exemplo da sua conlang?

Ideia 1: Pai Nosso, que estais no céu, santificado seja o vosso nome
Vantagens: Essa é uma frase muito antiga, e extremamente comum na civilização ocidental, que inclui metade do planeta (é isso que 'ocidental' significa). Isso significa que a maior parte as pessoas vai saber o que isso significa, além de talvez até saber essa frase em outras línguas. Além disso, a maior parte das línguas inventadas mais antigas usam essa frase como exemplo, então você vai estar fazendo parte de uma grande tradição. Uma das línguas

[o texto termina abruptamente neste ponto]

The DEATH RACE has very few rules concerning what vehicles are legal. They are so:

• A vehicle must be able to transport itself plus its driver from the starting line to the finishing line without outside assistance.
• A vehicle must not be able to cause a driver to become airborne without outside assistance.

That's it. That's all there is to it.

I mean, there are a few more. One section is about how 'outside assistance' dos not qualify if it's a vehicle's power source. It started when someone pointed out that the rules as written technically forbade solar-powered vehicles, since they needed outside assistance (solar rays) to function. The Organizers agreed and added a rule exemption for solar-powered vehicles. Someone else made fun of this ruling by saying that to be fair they should also allow vehicles powered by wind and geothermal energy, since they were drawing power from the environment just like solar-powered vehicles. Sure, you could not create a viable racing car using those energy sources, but wasn't fairness paramount? The Organizers thought this argument was hilarious and ammended the exemption to allow for any sort of energy generation that drew power from the environment, specifically including wind and geothermal power. This allowed for the rise of Dread Pirate Bobberts, the only crowd-favourite racer to have never placed better than DNF.

Honestly, most rules were created because someone complained or tried to abuse the original rules. The airborne rule happened because people entered literal airplanes in the first few races. It originally just stopped the car from becoming airborne, but then someone won a race by using a car that ejected its driver's seat as a hang-glider. They actually moved to ban any vehicle parts from becoming airborne, but someone pointed out this would ban missiles, which are in the Death Race's logo and consist of a surprising amount of its merchandising sales. (Most of those sales are plushies and keychains, not live missiles, but those are expensive and so do weigh heavily on the profit margins.) Since the current rules tie the position to the driver, that's the best way to guarantee the DEATH RACE remains a land race.

Jumping cars and ejecting seats are therefore banned, but are allowed in the down-low as long as they don't give you an undue advantage. Your vehicle can even glide, as long as it can't take off on its own. If it does, they'll probably not let you have an ejecting seat.

Can you make the entire vehicle go airborne except the driver? This question was actually asked by the driver of the Kite Car, a car that could become a jet airplane but kept tethered to the driver's cabin, which consisted of a sphere weighted to remain upright, magnetically linked to a second sphere. The Organizers decided it wasn't legal because the Kite Car could lift its driver, it's just that the driver didn't intend to; but gave it a special permission to drive anyway just to see what happened. The driver died.

Another rule says that the driver cannot directly provide motion for the vehicle; that's counted as an outside force. No bicycles, roller skates, or scooters, unless they have some sort of engine. The 'direct' part is important, because otherwise someone could claim it was against the rules to load coal into a boiler, or to switch on the engine, or to steer the cart in the right direction.

Oh, so you can't ride a bicycle, but what if you had a bicycle which instead of the pedals moving the wheels directly, they wound up a coil, and it was that coil that moved the wheel? Would that be allowed? The Organizers found that hilarious and said yes, it would, could you ride this weird windup bike on the next race?

Animals fit all the criteria for the vehicle, can I just ride a horse? Actually, yes. The Organizers find this hilarious. It's a good way to get fans against you, though - they hate that you're putting animals at risk. Humans OK - they probably know what they're getting into, unless they're poor and/or dumb, in which case they're poor and/or dumb and no one cares.

Humans are animals, can I just ride piggyback on another person? You could until very recently, and that person would count as your vehicle, but recent changes to the rules mean that every person on a vehicle counts as a driver, so that's 'outside assistance' and no longer allowed.

First, determine your starting spot in the DEATH RACE by rolling 3d4. The sum of the highest and lowest dice make up the tens of the starting position; the dice that remains is the ones. For instance, if you roll 1, 2 and 4, you add 4+1=5 and get 52 as your starting position.

The first ten racers are always incredibly rich bigshots who are somehow related to the Sponsors. Most of them actually are good drivers; those who are not can make up for it through technology. You are not one of these.

The next ten racers are a mix of people who are wealthy but not enough to be sponsors, some random thrillseekers, and 'elevated' regular racers who got someone to be their (lowercase) sponsor. All of these are excellent racers. In fact, other than raw talent in the back ranks, these are probably the best pilots in the race. You are not one of these either, which is why your starting position cannot be lower than 21.

ONE CAR, MANY RACERS
It used to be that, in order to get a position in the DEATH RACE, you had to drive through the starting line and the finish line in roughly the same vehicle. 'Roughly' is key; if your car exploded, you could bring a sufficiently large piece and still claim the prize. This rule was meant to encourage more violent interaction during the finish line, since if you blew up you'd lose a lot of places but would still be able to claim a relatively high spot if you were in the lead.

It was common for ambulances to also pick up a car piece and drive through the finish life, to give downed races a placement (sometimes posthumous).

However, a corollary to this rule was that, if you picked a piece of your car and hopped aboard another car, that car would effectively count for two. This was a minor issue until the BoomBus.

The BoomBus was a junked city bus with a massive jet engine nailed to it, driven by a skinny bearded fella named Ol' Mac. Mac stopped to give a ride to every driver ze saw stranded on the track. That year's race had been particularly heated, so by the time ze was gunning for the finish time ze had twelve racers in the bus, not even counting zirself. And ze hadn't even used the jet.

Then ze used it.

The bus blew past the people nearing the finish line before they even knew what was going on. This created some very interesting results. The last racer to be overtaken by the bus was half a second behind it, but this caused their position to drop from 59th to 63rd. And this caused a lot of complaints. Why did the people on the back of the bus got a positon in front of the car that was keeping up with it? And what should be the order of the racers inside the bus? They had photos taken at the finish line, but the flash glared off the windows and the inside of the bus was not visible, so they had only memory and honour to account for their order. This did not go smoothly.

The present rules were added the next year. Now, in order to hold a position, you just to drive through the start line in a vehicle, then drive through the finish line in a vehicle. Doesn't even have to be the same one. Everyone in a vehicle gets the same position, regardless of whether they started together or not.

This has, of course, given space to numerous new strategies. The first one is that it's possible to carjack other racers, which the Organizers find hilarious. It's also possible to scoop more than one spot by having a car that contains or breaks into smaller cars, which the Organizers also find hilarious. The tamest strategy is that it's now possible to race as a team. Quite a few people now bring a mechanic, copilot or 'spare' driver, but this is widely considered to be lame, kind of like showing up to the Tour de France with training wheels on. However, it does allow larger vehicles that do require a multi-person crew to operate, which the Organizers, unsurprisingly, find hilarious.

Ambulances still drive downed racers through the finish line, which means they are technically the winning vehicle for that racer. There are very strict guidelines to stop people employed as paramedics by the Organizers from being even near the starting line, as to avoid shenanigans.

(It's important to notice the ambulance only covers about the first and last kilometers of the track, close enough to civilization that leaving people to die would be considered unsporting. For the remainder, well, it's not called the Somewhat Severe Wounds Race.)

SEX IN THE DEATH RACE
They say there's a rule that says you score a point every time you have sex during the DEATH RACE.

This is absolute bollocks. You don't even score points during the race. You have your position and that's it.

This concept probably came out of some in-joke that was misheard out of context. Maybe someone said something about 'scoring'.

Still, lots of people like to have sex during the DEATH RACE. It's kinda of its third, unofficial thing. You have death, you have racing, and you have sex. The Sponsors like it, it makes the whole thing looks exciting and forbidden.

Some people actually believe the whole sex = points thing, and while it's fun to make fun of these people, it's in good taste to let them know about the truth - which can be actually quite hard, since they tend to think you're lying to them to make them earn less points. This has caused some racers to try to replace this story with a new fake concept that you score for having sex during the DEATH RACE but only if both parties give enthusiastic consent. They've had moderate but suprisising success with this operation.