A deep dive

'As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.'

That's an excerpt from Bleak House, and has nothing to do with this week's post except that it perfectly evokes a diluvial theme and it's an example of masterful writing. We'll get back to that.

A partially flooded world is the setting of Bellwater, a tabletop roleplaying game about salvage crews operating in an inland sea created by a cataclysmic deluge centuries earlier. The game focuses on themes of debt, breath, and the recovery of relics from drowned cathedrals. What makes Bellwater unique is that it was written by OpenAI Codex. Ethan Mollick, who created it as an experiment in current AI capabilities, says: 'The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements.' 

I agree. I really like the game concept and the vaguely Edwardian feel of the setting. Inspired by Simon Stålenhag's Things from the Flood, you think? Possibly, but quite obliquely and among many other sources that might well include (AI being well-read if nothing else) Charles Dickens, J.G. Ballard and Marcus Sedgwick. The Old Testament swiped from the Epic of Gilgamesh, after all, so under the sun there is no new thing.

Professor Mollick does go on to point out the flaws: 'If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone.'

There's a lot of stinkingly bad writing out there, both AI-created and by human authors. Some of the latter is very popular, so it can't be that readers disdain slop. The difference is that the AI is getting better month by month, whereas the humans who are writing execrably aren't even trying to improve their craft (or their grammar). No author should just tell AI "write a book", but it can be very useful in brainstorming concepts, researching obscure details, and maintaining a world bible. Podcaster Joanna Penn explains here all the ways that authors can use AI as a useful tool of the craft, and director Ash Koosha talks about how he's used AI in filmmaking here.

If you want to take a look at Bellwater, Prof Mollick has made it available to download and has been revealing some of his experiments with early access to Claude Mythos. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who actually tries playing a game of Bellwater. You may not feel that it is done well, but reflect on what Dr Johnson said and be surprised to find it done at all.

Immersive books on your phone

In The Story is a gamebook app for readers and authors. I usually prefer to read in print myself. I can navigate the text better than on a Kindle, but it does mean that every room in my house is lined with bookshelves and there are overspill boxes in the loft. Where gamebooks are concerned, though, there's a lot to be said for an app that keeps track of keywords and stats and that means you don't have to keep flipping back and forth through the pages. That's why Down Among the Dead Men is available in digital form on the Storm Weavers store and you can read my interactive version of Frankenstein in multiple languages.

If you're an author, it looks like you can assemble your gamebook in a browser and then publish on the ITS platform. And the technology gives you access to all sorts of gameplay features such as tracking the passage of time, which is very fiddly in print gamebooks, as players of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective will know. A new medium opens up new opportunities, so although it will be nice to see some classic gamebooks like Way of the Tiger on the In The Story platform, it's the all-new content I'm looking forward to.

Portal fantasy

In the first six seasons of Doctor Who (that's the First and Second Doctor episodes, if like me you had no notion at the time about TV seasons) the TARDIS control console was largely for show. Sometimes the Doctor claimed to have ended up where he intended, but he was either unable or unwilling (and probably both) to plonk his passengers back where they started. When Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright blundered aboard, they had no idea of how long it would take for them to get back to Shoreditch in 1963.

Now suppose that's you. You've stumbled into what looks like an old police telephone box to find it's bigger on the inside. The doors, decorated on this side with huge roundels, are already closing. In a few moments the TARDIS will be dematerializing and if you go with it you might never return home (this being the First or Second Doctor, remember). Your friends and family won't have any idea what happened to you. So... will you jump back out? Or will you stay on board?

It's a variant on one of two what-if questions I'm fond of posing to party guests. Here's another one for would-be time travellers courtesy of the artist John Vernon Lord, grandfather of Inigo Hartas: you can go back to any year in history and be present as an observer at any place in that year. All languages are intelligible to you and you cannot be seen or touched. When would you pick?

If those have whet your curiosity, the Greater Good Science Centre at UC Berkeley has a whole bunch of questions like them. And here's another bit of Gedankenvergnügen while we're at it:

You may feel you'd rather just head down the pub, but if you want to join in please leave a comment.

And talking of waste...

It's been a very long time since I played in the world of Glorantha but, like Tekumel, it's another of roleplaying's famously detailed subcreations, and the way you present that so as to hook players is not by giving them the anthropology textbook or even the tourist's guide, but by immersing them in what it's like to live in that world.

The mistake there lies in telling, not showing. Bad writing is the cause of the rot in the case of much bigger IPs than Glorantha. Star Trek, Star Wars, and Marvel, for instance. Wokeness often gets blamed, but that's not the problem. Star Trek always espoused a liberal humanist ideology. The difference was that the writers used to know that if you want to embed ideas in a story, you have to explore those ideas through drama, not lecture the audience while trying to distract them with characters who talk like they're in a high school comedy. Author David R. Low explains all about that here.

A waste of a great concept

In 1975, Empire of the Petal Throne introduced roleplaying gamers to the world of Tekumel, a beautifully detailed fantasy setting that was the first of its kind to feature non-Caucasian characters in a society nothing like the usual Graeco-Roman or medieval world. In fact it was the first ever society of any kind to appear in a roleplaying game, D&D and its imitators up to that point being just "a medieval Wild West" whose society consisted of nothing but a shop to spend your loot in.

Tekumel’s creator, M.A.R. Barker, drew on inspiration from South-East Asia, the Middle East, China and Pre-Columbian civilizations without his world actually being like any of those cultures. The result was something very different from other RPGs – and from most American or European fantasy literature. What made Barker's creation so revolutionary in 1975 was its vision of entire civilizations that didn't look, think, or act like variations on medieval Europe. Barker’s greatest gift to the fantasy genre was showing us that other worlds could be genuinely other. That lesson feels more important now than ever. Paul Mason gives a taste of what I’m talking about here.

That’s not how Tekumel gamers (a small and dwindling group) usually get to approach the setting, though. For example, Bethorm is the name of one of many Tekumel-set RPGs that have appeared in the half-century since EPT. It’s also the Tsolyani word for a pocket dimension, apparently. But why do the Tsolyani have a word for "pocket dimension"? Why do they even have the concept? It can hardly be something an ordinary citizen would use in everyday life, after all.

Consider the real world. "Galaxy" was the Middle English word for the Milky Way. Nobody knew until the 1920s that we lived in one galaxy and that there are trillions of others. Nobody knew until the 1950s that the universe is billions of light-years across. We don't even now have single words for dark matter and dark energy, and they are observable (in the first case, anyway), so I'm stumped as to how even educated Tsolyani ended up coining a word for "pocket dimension".

One argument is that the Tekumel setting incudes “learning spheres” – find one, give it a twist, and you’re an instant expert in whatever was originally programmed into it. So if learning spheres are common, that means the technological know-how of yore need never have been lost. Tekumel would be like the world in Zelazny's Lord of Light, where most people think that gods and demons and magic are real, but the select few know that's all just a way of explaining science to the uneducated. And if you spoke to those select few they would know all about quantum theory, atoms, cybernetics, etc.

(There's actually a real-life equivalent of this, incidentally. When William Kamkwamba wanted to build a dynamo in his village in Malawi, he told the locals he needed to collect old bits of machinery "to do some magic" because he knew that's how they would interpret what he was doing.)

The trouble is, we’re told that learning spheres are used up when activated. And they were constructed at least 30,000 years before the present day. So I don’t think they’d be a significant factor in the education of the Tsolyani, certainly not to the extent of making the concept of pocket dimensions commonplace.

This opens up the question of how much magic is there in "real" Tekumel. I imagine a world where priests do a lot of rituals before and during a battle, and those rituals have a real effect on morale, and many soldiers will swear blind they saw miraculous things like lightning bolts, but in fact that's mostly in the mind. So this would be a low-fantasy world with no more magic than Westeros, not a pulp sci-fi setting with spells like phaser-blasts. I do realize this would be unpopular with Tekumel enthusiasts, but after all they are an endangered species. My Tekumel doesn't consist of characters discussing abstruse cosmic concepts like bethorms.

What would Tekumel look like if it were contemporary SF/fantasy rather than 1950s-influenced Planet Stories, a bit like the way Battlestar Galactica was rebooted? Most Tekumel fans seem to prefer the space opera version, a genre that was repopularized by Lucas in the '70s after all. They play games in which the rich culture of Tsolyanu, Livyanu and the other states is all but irrelevant. Instead player-characters gad about between bethorms encountering alien/human multidimensional politics and yammering about warp drive and gravity engines, while Barker's invented societies, so marvellously different from our modern world, are flattened into the same sci-fi mush you’ll see in a dozen fungible entertainment franchises. 

It makes no sense. Barker was a linguist and anthropologist and he describes wonderfully strange civilizations which he brings to life in minute detail. That's where Tekumel shines. He wasn't a scientist and his science fiction ideas are a dime a dozen. His SF is also typically mid-20th century Western in flavour, whereas the cultures he created don't resemble any historical setting, most especially not any Western one. Not that setting alone is enough to deliver a compelling story, especially not in an era of BookTok, celeb book clubs, and dopy romantasy sagas. You need characters you care about. But the setting is the environment they move in, and if it's off-the-peg then the situations are too. Lizzie and Mr Darcy's relationship means nothing outside the special context of Regency culture and socioeconomics. Jane Austen even starts the novel with an ironic statement about that.

If I were to reboot Tekumel, I’d throw out the “Doc” Smith space opera stuff and make it more about everyday life. Much less magic and much, much, much less whizzy technology. The Eyes wouldn’t have standard names; they’d be too rare for that. There wouldn’t be an internet of telepaths reliably sending messages across thousands of miles overnight. There’d be no thousand-year-old plans hatched in “pocket dimensions”, no routine encounters with robots and gadget-wielding aliens. I’d strip it all back to what really is unique and wonderful: the cultures that Barker created. As we look toward the future of fantasy gaming and fiction, his example reminds us of the beauty of diversity. The most memorable worlds aren't built on clever mechanics or exotic technologies. They're built on the patient work of imagining how people actually live, love, struggle, and die in societies radically different from our own. That's the kind of magic that never gets old.

If you want to get a head...

The first of the Fabled Lands Chapbooks series was Headcases, in which I referred jokingly to my predilection for flying head monsters. Well, I thought at the time it was a joke, but now I think I might have a serious problem. Two recent scenario books in the series, Oliver Johnson's It's Mostly Been Forgot and my own "The Honey Trap" (in Wizards of Tamor) both feature flying heads, and I just edited an old Questworld scenario by the two of us, One Night in Deliverance, and found that among the critters was an early form of the Dragon Warriors skullghast. (Though, to be fair, those Questworld skullghasts weren't quite just flying heads, they had a sort of ethereal body too.)

The only solution to my head obsession might be to go cold turkey -- or cold feet, rather. In my next scenario I'll try to include some disembodied lower extremities, and not a bonce in sight. I've been there before too, in this letter to the gentlemen of the Royal Mythological Society from Mirabilis: Year of Wonders -- but so far the heads are still way ahead in my oeuvre while the feet are trailing with that sole entry.

What will survive of us

If you're able to get into London over the next few weeks and you appreciate the works of John Whitbourn, one of the truly great writers of English fantasy and horror, you should check out his play He Was A Bugger But I Loved Him, renamed Labelled With Love (why?) as part of a double bill at the Old Red Lion Playhouse. Get your tickets here. There are no interdimensional pathways, no malicious fays, no macabre twists in reality -- but there's a deeper kind of fantasy in the mysteries of love and memory, and that's what's on display in the drama.

Theatre might be a new calling for Mr Whitbourn. He recently completed another play, The Hunt For Blunt, about Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Blunt turned out to be a Soviet spy, the so-called Fourth Man, and went to ground at Watts Gallery in Surrey when his cover was blown. That's where the play is set and where, with luck, it will be staged.