Coda: when to set the Arthurian Nights
Writing the last couple of posts made me realize that there’s a bunch of similarities between the Arabian Nights stories and Arthurian legends:
– both are loose collections of stories bound together by a frame or core story;
– both had major popular revivals in the 19th century, based on important manuscript collections from about 500 years ago;
– both have some stories that are supposedly older than anyone can remember, with an oral tradition that allegedly predates the oldest written record;
– both contain stories that are self-consciously set in the distant past, compared with the “present” of their telling;
– but aside from some specific characters, that distant past setting is exactly like the storyteller’s present, like performing a Shakespeare play in modern dress.
It turns out they’re not unique in having this set of characteristics – you can say most of the same things about the Odyssey, Norse Mythology and the Bible.
And it struck me especially that, as readers, we tend to be bad at separating the explicit setting from the context of the stories’ recording – that mythical “long ago” when Arthur was king vs. the 15th century when Malory writes about him. That is, there’s a lot of handwringing about when the historical Arthur might have existed and whether it’s appropriate to dress his knights in plate armour, or whether the Arabian Nights are really set at the time of Harun al-Rashid or if they occupy some kind of Orientalist Unchanging Ahistoricist Fantasy Asia.
But considering them as literature, it doesn’t matter. The stories don’t care – they’re about personal temptations and overweening ambition and trusting to God/fate and the set dressing is strictly just set dressing.
But but but… all that said, there are remarkable coincidences of period: Harun’s Baghdad occupies the late 8th century, which is sorta vaguely Arthurian but more exactly it’s the time of Charlemagne, the king with Paladins and the Horn of Roland and so on. And the Syrian manuscript of the Nights is pretty much contemporary with Malory. And the 19th century revival tended to excite the same people: those Pre-Raphaelites who loved to paint the Lady of Shalott also loved Orientalist subjects. (By now we know William Morris was all over this stuff, right? His whole decorative arts career was like half Euro-medieval, half Indian prints)
If Arabia seems a long way from Chivalric Britain, it didn’t to 19th century British authors and artists. The disordered England of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe depends on the absence of Richard the Lionheart, who was off defending Christendom from the Saracens in the Third Crusade, leaving wicked King John to usurp the kingdom (and those loyal royalist Cornish were supposedly ransoming Richard with “bezants,” or so they said a century later). Bringing the Crusades home to village scale, Ivanhoe teams up with Robin Hood and a disguised King Richard against John’s crony, the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham, whom we know is wicked because he stayed home rather than fighting with the Crusaders.
As is typical for Victorian medieval women, she’s making a tapestry. Or maybe embroidering. Women and cloth, weaving as female power. And the messenger disquiets her with a piece of decorated cloth, maybe something she made? Maybe Richard’s baldrick.
For another Anglo-Chivalric/middle Eastern mashup, Pre-Raphaelitist Dante Gabriel Rossetti liked to riff on the imperial, the patriotic, and the personal by painting himself in the guise of St. George, patron saint of England, together with his wife Elisabeth Siddell (or other paramours) as the Egyptian Princess Sabra, whom Richard Johnson had created to be St. George’s wife/reward in his Elizabethan-era retelling of the George-and-dragon myth, Seven Champions of Christendom (1596).
This Sabra doesn’t look much like Elizabeth Siddell, who is much more typically Pre-Raphaelite in the 1862 version, painted just before she overdosed on laudanum.
So there’s your Shining Armour Orient, right there – the East feminized, England her protector, etc. etc. There’s a 19th century Occidentalist gaze to hang beside the Orientalist one, too: the 1835 Arabic-language Boulaq recension of the Arabian Nights introduces post-Crusading Christians in the form of piratical Genoese villains, who capture and sell Muslims – which is a neat echo of that Orientalist cliche about Barbary Corsairs enslaving white women. (To get a sense of just how big a cliche this was and how much 19th century western Orientalist artists and viewing publics loved a bit of slave-erotica, check out this enormous and exhausting catalogue of pictures of odalisques and slave girls. NSFW in parts. None of them are actually pre-Raphaelite, though, as far as I can tell).
So what to do with all this? First, it’s interesting to note that the non-historical Islamic world of the 1001 Nights partners very neatly with the non-historical England of Arthurian romances: both sets of stories were being compiled at the same time and both regard their own times as tragically fallen compared with the earlier golden ages they choose to remember. During Malory’s life, Britain was being torn apart by the Wars of the Roses and he dreamed of a uniting Arthur, to heal its divisions. At the time of the Syrian Manuscript, the unifying Caliphate of Islam was a distant memory and Caliph Harun was an emblem of a lost purpose for the overall community of believers. In both story cycles the “present” landscape is a patchwork of petty kingdoms, robber knights and false courts… so it’s easy enough to imagine characters traveling from one to the other and maybe finding there the key to their own kingdom’s renaissance. Although maybe the least interesting approach is to throw in a lone lost wanderer, like Nasir in Robin of Sherwood. It might be better to invert the viewpoint and have your party be the foreign wanderers (fresh off the boat, to borrow Tekumel’s cliche) in the newly strange deserted forests of Albion – like in The 13th Warrior. If you want to mix in the 12th century Crusades but not from the usual jingoistic perspective, check out ibn Munqidh‘s memoir – and if you want to know how to get from Chretien de Troyes’s France to the Holy Land and back by way of Norman Sicily, there’s no better sourcebook that ibn Jubayr’s Travels. Personally I’d be tempted to mix up Antar with Arthur and start a picaresque comedy of errors.
Or do a points of light campaign across the known world, tied together by a quest for the Holy Grail or a lost Excalibur. Grail mythologies have long toyed with the idea of a Templar network linking East and West, so your Arthurian Grail Quest could go… well, at least as far east as Persia – maybe Alamut, with a stop-off at Ararat to tangle with antediluvian dinosaurs or djinn. If you go with an 8th century Charlemagne/Harun axis, you could run all the way out to Talas to fight or trade with T’ang Dynasty China and pick up some of their high tech printed paper, prophetic fortune-telling cards, and automata.
Another approach would be to run with the sheer variety of the stories – Arthurists tend to emphasize a unity to the corpus but it’s really very varied, with phantom islands and faerie kingdoms and strange visions in the mists. From the Red Knight of the North and his parody Camelot to the lost lands of Lyonesse, Ys, and St Brendan’s Isle, there’s plenty of room for different interpretations of Chivalry, politics, and even geography. Add in the meddling of Arabian Nights djinn and scheming witch-princesses, Mount Qaf with its underground mountain chains and ibn Majid‘s world map with a hollow pole and you can have your knights explore (or pop up from) tunnels through any inconvenient genre space in the known or mythic worlds. Give the players al Idrisi’s map of the world and let them deduce where the hex boundaries are. To really mix things up, locate either the Arthurian or Arabian world inside a djinni’s brass jar, so that one map can travel around the other, making impossible trouble and swallowing up whole towns along the way.
So far I’ve only been messing with the set dressing, rather than really getting my teeth into the thematic cores of the two story-cycles. I’ll be honest, I have a harder time imagining either Arthurian prophecy or the Arabian Nights’s humble fatalism as suitable material for building RPGs around. Man’s helplessness in the face of fate and/or God’s plan can make for good stories with surprising endings, but how do you make them interactive? What handles do they offer players to grasp, to make their own destinies?
And most of my ideas involve keeping the two setting flavours somewhat separate, or seeing how they mess each other up, rather than making a synthesis out of them. Still, with a slight reskin, they can definitely be made to play well together – imagine a story where a bold princess is imprisoned by her evil father, the masked vizier of a hidden sultan. Fate draws her toward a trusted old servant, who happens to be secretly raising the Once and Future King, her brother. And the only way she can communicate her peril is through two unprepossessing servants, one a dwarf, the other a pompous halfwit. It turns out both the Arthurian and Arabian Nights romances have plenty of stories for a family drama like that, requiring princess rescue and the destruction of the evildoer’s fortress.
You can probably even come up with some spurious scientific-sounding jibber jabber to justify a flying carpet race through the halls of the Sultan’s palace, to find and shatter that one vulnerable jar that contains his heart.
Bèton Breton
At Adam Thornton’s request, a quick review of some English and Breton brutalist structures.
I cannot find any credits for the architect or engineer who devised this, nor for the landscape designer who made it such an iconic ritual object. It’s currently regarded as “infrastructure porn.” Welp, give it a decade and people will start to celebrate it, or not.
Brest, in Brittany, was heavily bombed during WW2, so there’s a lot of postwar reconstruction. This church and the one following seem unusually interesting, to me at least. One recalls the Dutch “maritime modern” school of Amsterdam, the other has the reticulated look of a Berlage design.
Brutalism for God continues into the 21st Century! The interior shots (click the links) make it look calm and meditative and less like a piece of electronics packaging.
I never even imagined that Ian Fleming might have named a villain after a postwar Hungarian-British architect, but apparently: “A discussion on a golf course about Ernő with Goldfinger’s cousin prompted Ian Fleming to name the James Bond adversary and villain Auric Goldfinger after Ernő—Fleming had been among the objectors to the pre-war demolition of the cottages in Hampstead that were removed to make way for Goldfinger’s house at 2 Willow Road. Goldfinger was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design… Goldfinger consulted his lawyers when Goldfinger was published in 1959, which prompted Fleming to threaten to rename the character ‘Goldprick’.”
But he didn’t. Everyone backed down, the film went ahead, and humourless Goldfinger forever afterward had to answer annoying, irrelevant questions.
You can also rent another bunker in the chain for holidays, if you feel like feeling like a Nazi artillery spotter for a week.
Pre-Raphaelite Arthur part 2
Last time I talked about some reasons why I think 19th century versions of Arthur have been ignored in RPGs. The core of my interest is really the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – a loose collection of British artists and writers who shared a certain artistic sensibility in the middle of the 19th century, who promoted a distinctive view of Britain’s medieval history and who shared an enthusiasm for rich decoration; hand-worked, non-industrial art; and thin, red-haired women. They mostly knew each other, at least through the critic John Ruskin, who promoted their exhibitions, and William Morris, who did everything – fine and decorative arts, writing, organization, editing, promotion, sales… You could decorate your whole house with Morris’s work, from the furniture and wallpaper to the books on the shelf and painting in the study. So what happens if we actually look at them?
Well, there’s really a bunch of subjects all tied up together here:
– the differences between Tennyson’s 19th century Arthur stories and Malory’s 15th century ones;
– the visual storytelling of the Pre-Raphaelites and its influence over our “look and feel” for Arthurian type stories;
– the whole idea of the “medieval world” as a setting.
Taking the last part first, both the concepts of a medieval and a renaissance period were invented after the fact – first in the mid 16th century, to differentiate the then-improving present from the crappy past, and then in every time period since, to support narratives about the present. The idea of the medieval is based on a story that says Europe (and therefore “civilisation”) had been glorious under the Roman Empire but then it was plunged into darkness on September 4, 476 AD by the Goths, and there is stayed as a cesspool of disease and depravity for a thousand years, mired in a “middle age” between two golden ages. Roman civilisation was finally “reborn” (“re-naissance”) – in Italy, of course – and could first be recognized in the form of a new naturalistic skill in painting.
This story started as an art history theory and spread to other disciplines. The idea that visual arts can offer a barometer for cultural sophistication is central to the whole concept: if people can paint with perspective then, art critics reasoned, they must have maths, rationality, and improving public health. And to this day, hardly anyone really questions that equation. By the late 18th century Edward Gibbon, having noticed that early Christian art had turned Rome away from perspective and naturalism, blamed the spread of Christianity for screwing up the Roman Empire and depriving the world of working sewage systems.
The period of “rediscovering” ancient Roman glories and learning how crap Europe had been without them is obviously tied up with the 17th and 18th century “Enlightenment” movement (a term actually used by people at the time!), which can perhaps be summed up in the sentence; “now we’re no longer superstitious medieval idiots and we can finally think for ourselves, how shall we take charge of the world?” Maybe less obviously, this same period also saw European colonialism and early imperialism spread across the world. In the late 17th century, Europeans started thinking of themselves as superior not only to their medieval ancestors but also to other peoples – in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The similarities in developing attitudes regarding the medieval past and the Orient are… striking, such that by 1800 I don’t know if either idea really makes sense without the other – Orientalism is the practice of viewing Asians as medieval and anti-medieval prejudice is a kind of Orientalism. In the second half of the 18th century European critics start calling Indian society “medieval” and “child-like” – an attitude that only strengthens right up through WW1.
But then in the 19th century, several things come together to give this Enlightenment confidence a bit of a jolt (outside France, at least) and swing the pendulum… somewhere else. First the French Revolution, which started by killing aristocrats and ended by crowning a commoner, made a lot of aristocratic rich Brits rather nervous. The rationalist French Republic had collapsed into a military dictatorship, just like the Roman Republic had (Napoleon even had a habit of dressing up as Julius Caesar, just in case you might have missed that historical echo). After Napoleon’s capture in 1815, “Romantic” movements started to question the Enlightenment’s confidence in engineering every aspect of the world and humanity – if it led to dictatorship, maybe it wasn’t so desirable? The best-known expression of this counter-movement is probably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, with its over-reaching scientist and dispossessed, sympathetic “monster” offering a pretty transparent critique of turn-of-the-19th-century society. In visual art there’s less imitating Greece and Rome, more striking dramatic poses and expressing (horny, restless, heroic) emotions.
Right: Anne-Louis Girodet: Chateaubriand Meditating on the Ruins of Rome, 1808. Thoroughly Romantic. Note how his powerful meditations ruffle up his hair, giving him a windswept and interesting air. He’s thinking “even mighty Rome could not escape the inevitable dissolution of all worldly majesty.”
Second, there’s a rise in nationalist movements all over Europe. Nationalism is a sort of religion that claims the people of this territory are different from and better than those next door. This territory’s people must therefore rule themselves independently and define what makes them so awesome. That awesomeness almost always comes from the incalculable past, maybe the beginning of time itself, and is generally found in the soil, the blood, and the spirit of the people. It tends to suddenly burst out in revolutions, where you can finally see it waving free and shocking the formerly powerful but now degenerate imperialists who were holding it back.
Third, there’s a big Gothic Revival movement over much of Northern Europe and especially Britain after about 1850, which strangely rehabilitates the medieval, bringing it into the growing nationalist mythologies.
Late 19th century buildings in Germany, Canada, and England. Source.
What? Weren’t we just clawing free of our medieval constraints? Well,
(1) those primordial nationalist roots are eternal, not constrained by the changes of time, so it’s hard to be proud of your Nation in perpetuity while also being ashamed of it before a couple of hundred years ago, and
(2) I have a sneaking suspicion it is not accidental this rehabilitation happens at the same time that “scientific” racism becomes fashionable. During the 19th century, discourses of colonialism get more racialized (at least in Britain, France, and Germany), so that colonized people are seen not so much as “backward” but as “fundamentally inferior.” Scientific racism allowed for a decoupling of anti-medievalism from colonialism, i.e. it allowed you to be both Orientalist and enthusiastic about the non-Roman bits of your history at the same time. And
(3) rapid industrialization was irreversibly reconfiguring the landscape and society of Britain and the British Empire worldwide, in ways that made it significantly less amenable to Romantic celebration. It turns out “rationalizing” business into Capitalism doesn’t spontaneously create a sort of neo-Greco-Roman ideal world. So a bunch of British intellectuals and aesthetes started pining for a simpler time before the Neo-Roman imperial movement began… or maybe they were just sick of Enlightenment neoclassicism, or maybe they wanted to show that Britain had always been great, even through its supposed “dark ages” before it rediscovered Italian civilisation.
If this sounds anti-progressive, yeah it is, although its proponents would insist they just wanted to be smart about progress and not simply accept whatever changes happened to be happening. The Gothic Revival movement was also often semi-self-consciously fantastical: they tended to decorate garden follies or make new building types – like railway stations – look reassuringly medieval on the outside while doing nothing to disguise their Dark Satanic Mills on the inside. When Gothic Revivalist Pugin contrasted the “best” of the medieval world (very often heavily idealized) with the “worst” of the Enlightenment – juxtaposing e.g. medieval almshouses with enlightenment Panopticon prisons, he deliberately glossed over the better comparative cases – medieval punishments and enlightenment charity like he wasn’t even trying to win an intellectual argument.
As I mentioned last time, you draw your boundaries where you want, to yield the specific effect you prefer. The Pre-Raphaelites drew their boundary right at the cusp between the late medieval (early Renaissance) and the High Renaissance, just before the church lost its near monopoly on approved subject matter for paintings. They decided that British painting had been cruelly hijacked and made to serve Classicist Italian models ever since Sir Joshua Reynolds had started up the Royal Academy of Arts, because Joshua felt that everything could be improved by adding ancient Rome – he thought painting had returned from the dark ages under the brush of Raphael and that Rubens and Reynolds himself were Raphael’s successors.
I dunno, personally I’m not totally convinced Reynolds was up to Raphael’s standard...
Sick of the Italian High Renaissance contraposto and chiaroscuro lighting that Raphael had championed, and sick of the slavish Classicism of the Royal Academy’s judges, who preferred eg. Jacques Louis David to the Pre-Raphaelites’ own Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelites formed a Brotherhood to celebrate the awkward poses, meticulous costume detail, and flat picture planes of the painting world that Raphael had ruined.
Their excitement about rediscovering a medieval sort of sensibility was not strictly historicist, though. They definitely said they wanted to strip away years of Enlightenment/Baroque nonsense to reveal a purer/more spiritual essence… but they didn’t want to excavate the past: instead they were interested in improving it – creating a more perfect, more authentic medievalism for their current moment. You can see the same impulse in Viollet-le-Duc’s restorations of e.g, the fortified medieval town of Carcassonne, where he harmonized the appearance of the conical roofs and added a drawbridge here and there, bringing the city, as he said, “to a complete state that may never have existed at any one time.”
Pre-Raphaelite painter John Waterhouse puts Carcassonne in the mirror behind Elaine of Astolat (a.k.a. the Lady of Shalott), a minor character from Malory who plays a much larger role in Tennyson’s 19th century Idylls of the King. She is shown here tied up in her tapestry-wool, an apt metaphor since in Tennyson’s poem, merely by leaving her womanly position at the loom, the Lady dooms herself to death. BTW I’m pretty sure that’s William Morris’s loom, that Waterhouse’s model is posing beside.
The sheer number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the Lady of Shalott is daunting. Evidently, they found her to be Tennyson’s most compelling subject.
OK, so. Tennyson. When it comes to a more perfect medievalism, it’s pretty interesting that Tennyson chose Malory’s Arthurian myths rather than, say, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as his window into the period. Both are works of literature, so neither should really be trusted as guides to their originating societies but… Chaucer drew portraits of many of the social types of his times, he was interested in peasants and millers and landowning ladies, alongside the more conventional knights and squires. He wrote about their concerns regarding marriage and wealth and poverty and birth and death and farting. Malory’s world, on the other hand, only really consists of knights and ladies, knights and quests, knights and false robber-knights. Tennyson’s main contribution is to refocus Malory from the knights onto the ladies’ experiences, retelling the stories as dramas of women and presenting those women as products and victims of their station. When people talk about the miserable state of Victorian gender politics, chances are they have Tennyson lurking in the back of their minds.
So when Sir Lancelot-the-Heartthrob uses the “favour” of Elaine of Astolat to joust and gets injured, all to defend Guinevere’s reputation, what Tennyson writes about is Elaine falling in love with Lancelot while she tends his wounds, Lancelot ignoring her (for honour and because secretly he loves Guinevere), and Elaine dying of a broken heart. Note, even though this is Elaine’s story, her agency in it is restricted to loading herself into a boat and clutching an accusatory love letter to Lancelot, so that her dead body drifts down to Camelot and her story is finally heard posthumously, causing the court to weep.
…if you were writing an RPG about Chaucer, you would need massive sourcebooks about all the various walks of life and society. You’d want varied character classes and backgrounds etc. An RPG about Malory (other than Pendragon) might be best served as a limited-frame storygame, where the players take the two roles of Knight and Lady, and the quest objects and background are generated ad hoc. A game based on Tennyson’s Idylls of the King would probably be single-player storygame (the Lady), with the object of getting Arthur to understand anything about your life, with nothing but flowers to communicate your meaning.
Hey look, there’s another set of roundels like the ones she was weaving, only this time they’re quilted.
Gustav Dore (not a Pre-Raphaelite) also illustrated Tennyson’s Elaine, in a style that makes her look less tragic and more consumptive.
Aside: I think (and I expect I’m in the minority here) there’s a recognisable German-ness to the Dore illustrations. I add them here because I think the contrast with the Pre-Raphaelite depictions really points up how distinctive the Pre-Raphaelite vision is: the expressions and attitudes of the women, the attention given to their material culture, cloth, embroidery, jewelry, etc. and the equal attention given to “foreground” and “background” elements all suggest a larger world that extends beyond the canvas – far more, I think, than Tennyson’s poems demand.
Of course, if romantically-painted Victorian women aren’t swooning tragically, they’re vectors for sin and witchery… which I have to say, the Pre-Raphaelites really enjoyed. The villainous old gossip Vivien follows Merlin to a remote place across the sea and seduces then curses him, taking him away from Arthur’s side so that Arthur can enter his tragic final phase.
Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s witchy sister, when painted by Frederick Sandys embodies all sorts of exotic dangers, suggesting a much wider world than Malory knew:
Birmingham Museum’s label (as recorded on Wikipedia) notes that Morgan le Fay is shown “in front of a loom on which she has woven an enchanted robe, designed to consume the body of King Arthur by fire. Her appearance with her loose hair, abandoned gestures and draped leopard skin suggests a dangerous and bestial female sexuality. The green robe that Morgan is depicted wearing is actually a kimono” – so, still intimately involved with cloth and weaving, but this time weaving Arthur’s downfall!
There’s another aspect to this layer of Arthuriana, though, that I think is part of that unavoidable frame the 19th century hangs around our vision of the past. Note the Egyptianate figures on the wall behind her, the vaguely Indian-looking statuette, the magical devices on her gold dress. Also, check out the spear that wicked King Mark uses below to strike down Sir Tristram in Ford Madox Brown’s contemporary Arthurian painting, the death of Tristram/Tristan:
Where did King Mark of Cornwall get a Chinese (or Japanese?) spear? Is that an Indian dagger in his belt? What about the Turkish (or Persian) designs on the curtain behind him? There’s a clear Orientalist presence in these paintings – certainly around the villains (the heraldic Bezants that identify Mark as Cornish were supposedly gold from Byzantium paid to the Saracen for Richard I’s ransom, so they’re Oriental twice over, while still being Cornish…). But even the very unvillainous Lady of Shalott’s death-shroud in Waterhouse’s painting, above, suggests an Indian Chintz, the subject of London’s great 18th century Oriental fashion craze (which BTW started that neo-Gothic trading palace, Liberty’s of London – purveyor of William Morris fabric prints).
I think the intention of this Orientalism is probably atmospheric rather than ethnist or strictly imperialist – my sense is that the pre-Raphaelites’ perfected medieval world contained the riches of the Orient, that in our inadequate history only became visible to the British around the time of Elizabeth I. The moral lessons they sought to draw from Arthurian legends demanded setting in silks and jewels – like the ones from an ancient crown that Tennyson has Arthur distributing to his jousting champions.
As for that famously shiny armour, about 10 years after the Pre-Raphaelite painters made their mark on Arthur, a (sometimes) Pre-Raphaelite photographer added hers: Tennyson invited Julia Margaret Cameron to create another illustrated edition of his Idylls of the King in albumen prints.
Cameron used whatever props she could assemble for her photos. Here, Arthur and Lancelot are wearing Crimean War cavalry helmets, a glancing reference, perhaps, to Tennyson’s most famous poem. Or maybe there were just a lot of them lying about in the 1870s. Her Death of Arthur could be the prototype for the final departing boat shot in Boorman’s Excalibur.
I don’t think Boorman’s Excalibur is really a neo-Pre-Raphaelite film, BTW – it’s pretty clearly Wagnerian – but it’s hard not to see those cavalry helms and the very shiny knights cantering through the window of Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris,
reflected in Boorman’s ultra-high gloss, vaseline-glowing armour:
Final aside: I note that Liberty’s of London gets a credit at the end of Excalibur for “ethnic jewelry.” If that’s not a nod to the Pre-Raphaelites, I don’t know what is.
Pre-Raphaelite Arthur, part 1: Arabian Nights, Authenticity and the Arche
Over the summer I saw an exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite Arthurian artworks, which included a couple of tapestries, now owned by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame – he who took his copy of Lord of the Rings to the Glastonbury festival and (along with Moorcock) pretty much kicked off the liaison between metal and fantasy.
So I think there’s some interesting things to say about the content of Pre-Raphaelite Arthurianism but before I get there I have to clear my throat over the genealogy of Arthurian myth in popular entertainment and roleplaying circles – Arthur’s Appendix N, if you like – and why we seem to favour different ingredients of that genealogy at different times. So if you’re up for an extended musing on the history of Arthurian and British medieval representation, strap in.
While Gygax was percolating the ideas that would eventually become D&D, US popular entertainment was telling a particular set of stories about Merrie Oldee Englandeee, with Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, Gilbertson’s Ivanhoe comics,
…and Disney’s 1950s anglo-historico-romance films: The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, The Sword and the Rose, and Rob Roy.
Together, those stories form a particular view of medieval Britain that draws heavily on the 1810s to 1830s works of that inveterate romantic nationalist Sir Walter Scott, the inventor of Ivanhoe, romanticizer of Rob Roy, and inspirer of, among others, the Pre-Raphaelites and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote a whole bunch of Arthurian epic poems for them to illustrate. To get a taste of Scott’s style and how his thought was shaped by Arthurian romances, you can look at his articles in the 1824 Encyclopedia Britannica, on Chivalry, Romance, and Drama:
“In every age and country valour is held in esteem, and the more rude the period and the place, the greater respect is paid to boldness of enterprise and success in battle. But it was peculiar to the institution of Chivalry, to blend military valour with the strongest passions which actuate the human mind, the feelings of devotion and those of love.”
As for the fair maidens who excited those manly passions, they had better be chaste and pure, because “wherever women have been considered as the early, willing, and accommodating slaves of the voluptuousness of the other sex, their character has become degraded… On the other hand, the men, easily and early sated with indulgences, which soon lose their poignancy when the senses only are interested, become first indifferent, then harsh and brutal to the unfortunate slaves of their pleasures. The sated lover,—and perhaps it is the most brutal part of humanity,—is soon converted into the capricious tyrant, like the successful seducer of the modern poet.”
So you can see how 50s Hollywood might have liked Scott. His rants against “the Romish clergy, who have in all ages possessed the wisdom of serpents” are a digression I guess I don’t need to go into now. On the other hand his frequent asides on “the love of our country and its liberties” played just as well in Joe McCarthy’s day as in George W. Bush’s.
So here’s a funny thing about encountering D&D’s version of the medieval in Britain in the 1980s: that heroic Scott/Tennyson strand was deeply out of favour. Especially in its Hollywood incarnation, with shiny armour and technicolor yeomen, it provoked an emetic reaction. I don’t know exactly why Britain went all in on the Dung Ages after WW2 (although I can hazard a few guesses, based on postwar austerity and disillusionment, changing class relations, the collapse of the Empire and Britain’s prestige, etc.). I also don’t know why Tolkien seems to have been exempt from it (C S Lewis’s Narnia was less exempt: wearing its Christian and Arthurian allegory on its sleeve, it was dismissed as children’s lit). But I do know that talk of shit-covered peasants wasn’t limited to Monty Python – Holy Grail satirized a popular discourse which had obviously gone too far, but which would continue to be repeated right through the 1990s.
WFRP, obviously, encapsulates the RPG end of this mood about Britain’s past and character, but it doesn’t exhaust it: in the 70s and 80s my schooling emphasized the filth, disease, and short life expectancy of the medieval era as the bottom of a hole we had recently climbed out of. As for King Arthur, if there was any real historicity to him (and my primary school teacher was convinced there was), he was probably a Romano-British hill chieftain fighting off the Saxon invasion at the dawn of Britain’s Dark Ages – more a pitiable Alfred burning the cakes than any majestic flower of chivalry or guardian of England’s destiny.
(Aside: David Lowery’s recent Green Knight plays interestingly with Dung Ages tropes – the start of the film sees young Gawain sleeping off a hangover in a barn while the house across the muddy yard is burning. Arthur’s court is as threadbare and caveman-stark as any Trevor Nunn staging. But then Lord Generous’s tempting castle occupies a comfy Elizabethan early modernity – deviating from dung is where Gawain goes wrong, being a Son of the Soil after all)
So the Arthur I grew up with was part Monty Python, part dirt-poor resistance fighter – provided he was suitably dirty and down-at-heel. But if there was any whiff of the knight in shining armour cliche, that belonged to a discredited strand of romantic fantasies more akin to Mills&Boon bodice-rippers.
I knew there were stories behind that shiny romantic tradition (and there was Greg Stafford’s Pendragon, if you could get anyone to play it) and I knew there were images that went with those stories but… you had to kind of willfully ignore them, like in The City and The City. They were not serious or realistic or authentic (words actually used sincerely (by me!) in the 80s/90s regarding FRP rule systems).
As a result, my conception of what was properly medieval was resolutely unheroic and anti-Arthurian and I wouldn’t look seriously at the 19th century construction of Arthur for decades. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t “canonical,” it wasn’t worth bothering with: if there was any way for me to rediscover Arthur it would be by looking straight past the romantic knight tropes and past Malory’s high romantic 14th century vision (still too shiny) and trying to squint it out of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Mabinogion.
Which was stupid of me, first because Geoffrey of Monmouth is the Dave Hargrave of the 12th century, a reliable guide only to his own inventions (at best), and second because whether I ignored it or not, the 19th century work remains instrumental in forming the frame we all look through when we look back at the romances of Malory and Chretien de Troyes. Because, let’s face it, the 19th century always sits in between whatever came before and our view of it.
So I was already thinking about ideas of authenticity and historicity when I started listening to a reading of the Arabian Nights – specifically the collection edited by Muhsin Mahdi, which claims to be “the definitive Arabic edition… the oldest surviving version of the tales and considered to be the most authentic.” And it’s an interesting comparative case.
First, the 14th century Syrian manuscript Mahdi’s collection is drawn from is not the only claimant to antiquity – its reputation rests partly on its similarity to other old manuscripts. The editor notes “no one knows exactly when a given story originated, and many circulated orally for centuries before being written down,” which makes the whole question of what’s definitive hard to even discuss. But this apparent weakness in supporting the definitive claim turns out to be a secret strength for the stories’ authentic claim: “in the process of telling and retelling, they were modified to reflect the general life and customs of the Arab society that adapted them” so that the 14th century manuscript shows “a distinctive synthesis that marks the cultural and artistic history of Islam.”
Well. Maybe. I don’t know how you would prove that and I’m wary of claims to read the soul of the past, whenever they show up. In any event, choosing to cut this synthesis off at the 14th century is an editorial power move: it sorts stories into real (14th century) Islamic culture and… not. Which is how connoisseurship always works – carving out a subject on which one can become an authority. It is intensely annoying for a collector that there should be a diverse oral tradition that they can never fully capture and master. Different collectors hold up competing “original editions,” and then publishers want to cut through the confusion, claim the high ground and put out a “proper, authoritative” version, and then inevitably someone out there literally collects 1001 stories and…
And it’s a matter of interpretation and selection because, as the translator notes, the Syrian manuscript only represents one tradition of Arabian Nights storytelling. Some time after the manuscript was made, a vibrant print culture in Egypt and Europe distributed a load of reprints and rewrites, adding tales (including, notably, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad) and generally destroying the idea of a single common core of stories. Much of this print culture happened in French, which is the first language of several early editions of these “Egyptian” stories. The editor’s decision to exclude all of these and his dismissal of Aladdin and Ali Baba as forgeries (since they were written in Paris in the 18th century, maybe by an Arabic-speaking Syrian Christian migrant, and entered the corpus initially in French translation) establishes a fence between the Collectible Authentic Object and a yawning, inclusive chaos. If you let Parisian Aladdin in, do you have to include Disney’s Aladdin movies? So the omission of Sinbad and Aladdin, perversely, guarantees the authenticity claim because why would you leave the best-known pieces out unless you had a good reason?
Muhsin Mahdi has his reasons. But it’s up to you, really, where you draw your boundaries.
With the tales of Arthur and his knights, and with their place in defining the image of a medieval world, it seems to me that insisting on consulting only authentically medieval sources doesn’t do away with the problems of what to include – ignoring Malory is silly, because he’s already done much of the work of reading old Welsh for you. The Malory and Chretien de Troyes collections are famous and long-standing but not sufficient: there’s also the whole Matter of Britain still hanging out there, only partly available to non-specialists and tailing off into Welsh and Breton myths. If on the other hand we treat Arthuriana as a living tradition and draw a wide, inclusive boundary like we would with the “Egyptian” Arabian Nights, we wind up enclosing so many contradictory creations that we lose all coherence – it becomes impossible to say what isn’t Arthurian. Which is a real problem for a medium of collaborative storytelling like RPGs, where the important thing is to generate a common understanding – some stable platform that allows you to judge which actions are genre-appropriate and what does and doesn’t fit – what constitutes a knight, a quest, and a dragon, and why those elements matter.
So let’s imagine for the sake of argument we’re after a more limited, authenticky sort of specifically British Arthur and we arbitrarily discount anything from the advent of Hollywood, since that tends to change everything to fit its own shape. Before we even get around to worrying about which side of the pale Scott, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites fall on, we have to deal with Henry Tudor’s propaganda version from the late 15th century, composed just a few decades after Malory’s death. In this telling, Henry VII, as unifier of England after the Wars of the Roses, is the returned Once and Future King. He commissions a Round Table for his eldest son, Arthur (yes actually) to rule from.
Nothing Arthurian ever goes according to plan, of course, so Arthur dies in childhood, leaving his brother Henry VIII to resurrect that Round Table idea, by repainting a giant antique table he found, to present himself as King Arthur reborn.
In fact, if there was ever a real, historical person who looked and acted like a romantic, literary Arthurian knight, it’s the young Henry VIII. He loved to joust – he even set up perhaps the greatest of all tourneys to challenge the French king and knights in 1520, which makes it about the same length of time after Malory’s le Morte D’Arthur as the Lord of the Rings movies came after the book.
And he had several lovely sets of full jousting plate armour – bullet-proof and everything – made in his own Royal Armoury at Greenwich.
And he was just about the right level of deadly and doomed when it came to the women in his life, although maybe popular history hasn’t quite pieced together that jigsaw puzzle of misogyny disguised as veneration, yet. His only real flaws as an Arthurian archetype are that he got old and fat (more villainous King Mark than forever-fighting romantic lead) and that he was born too late: the 16th century isn’t quite the right period for a character whose primary chronicler died half a century before – if we still believe at all in a “right period” for Arthur.
All of the Tudors were schooled in propaganda, so it shouldn’t surprise us that during the reign of Elizabeth I, Arthur (or possibly his relative Prince Madoc) was deployed once again as the secret original conqueror of America. “The case could be made therefore that, as a descendant of Arthur and through Madoc, Elizabeth had rights to North America” – and the hated Spaniards were merely squatting on English soil.
Oddly enough, that’s not the Arthurian legend Hollywood chooses to remember. But I can’t say I blame them – the popular consensus though history has been, if you want an authentic Arthur, you have to create one yourself. Which brings us back to the Pre-Raphaelites (in the next instalment).
“O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves,
By taking true for false, or false for true;
Here, thro’ the feeble twilight of this world
Groping, how many, until we pass and reach
That other, where we see as we are seen.”
Tennyson: Geraint & Enid
Sedulous Icosahedron
The dungeon walls are mortared stone, damp and mossy. The ceiling hangs heavy with calcerous drips, lost roots and fronds of lichen. In the centre of the chamber’s north wall there is a round, ragged indent in the stonework, with stones lying scattered on the floor. A single, glossily clean, roundish boulder bulges from the indent like a pustule. Peppered with thousands of gemstones of all colours and laced with thick veins of gold, it is a treasure-hunter’s dream. And colossal! It stretches almost from floor to ceiling, a geometric marvel of sharp, triangular facets.
Approaching, you see some writing is carved on each facet – the one facing directly into the room says “START ME UP.” On the surrounding facets you read “HOW DOES IT FEEL?”, “PLEASED TO MEET YOU” and “IT’S JUST YOU AND NO ONE ELSE.” A single number 1 is visible, half buried in the wall.
If the players leave the stone alone, well, they will have left the dungeon’s single biggest treasure behind.
If they hack away at the wall and free it, it rolls onto the ground and totters a little. Instead of coming to rest on one face, its rocking motion increases until it starts rolling.
It will pursue anyone who has touched it until it crushes them. Essentially, it’s like the giant rock at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, except it never, ever gives up until it is destroyed.
diameter: roughly 9′
HP: in the thousands
It rolls initially at walking speed (4mph). For every 10′ it rolls without changing direction, it can increase speed by 5mph, up to 70mph on clear, flat terrain. It always knows where its target is. If they cross a sea, it will roll across the bottom to get to them. It is immune to fire, cold, poison (obviously) and lava damage – although if it passes through a long lava field, it will emerge red hot. If it runs into an object like a door that stops it, then it backs up as far as it can and rams it again. If 10 rams don’t knock the obstacle down, it looks for another way around it.
If it has multiple targets, it pursues the nearest one. So it is theoretically possible to trap it like Buridan’s Ass.
Good things about Phoenix Point – the world-building
OK so I’ve been kinda down on Phoenix Point here, but I have kept playing it, and although that’s mostly because I have a serious addiction problem with XCOM, it’s also because PP has some good qualities and particularly some good world-building, and I think that’s something you people would dig.
First, let’s get the yawn/eyeroll-inducing parts out of the way – yes it’s a
– postapocalyptic survival game
– with Mad Max collapsed-world petty kings
– and a “Lovecraftian” story
– and big machine guns
– and a pandemic that turns out to be aliens (always aliens), some of which look like they’re wearing your grandma’s underwear on their heads:
and more guns than people, just like America.
BUT its writers have actually read some Lovecraft, so it has a whole thing about deep time, hominid and human evolution (including a lurking shame in humanity’s DNA), long cometary periods, Yuggoth, and mind-control technologies. It even quietly raises some questions (without resolving them) about why aliens can control human minds. Is there some… basic compatibility between them?
AND YET in spite of this high level of literacy compared with most “Lovecraftian” video games, it’s still really the same level of seriousness as Stranger Things. It expresses that through occasional moments of satirical humour –
or
and it’s not even above Rickrolling you – each Haven of survivors has a motto; one of them is “Never gonna give you up.”
The soul of the game, though, is its three NPC factions, which have very distinct characters. In many ways, playing PP is about choosing between these factions – you are told quite explicitly that your own organization’s idea for winning is Pyrrhic – it’ll lead to the death of most of mankind, and anybody else’s idea is likely to be better. And each faction has its own technologies, so the wise player charts a course between them, gathering tools and strategy ideas from each. But the factions are designed as rivals with incompatible philosophies and they periodically throw questions at you, to find out whether you share their world view, and the designers have some fun framing those questions to make it uncomfortable for the player to just tell the faction what they want to hear.
They’re also…. strangely familiar. OK look, you could interpret them as takes on any number of historical prototypes – say, Romans, Persians, and Greeks; or the 3 dominant tendencies of late Weimar Germany – Nationalists, Christian Democrats, and Socialists; but to my eye, they look unmistakably like 3 (unflattering) faces of contemporary America: Authoritarian Conservatives, Religious Cultists, and Techbro Utopians. And the art does a phenomenal job of painting those three ideas, through their architecture and equipment, and their statements and approaches to problems.
The authoritarians call themselves New Jericho and their leader, Tobias West, is initially described to you as a billionaire with an uncompromising vision, but he is slowly revealed to be somewhere around Hitler on the dictator scale. Their buildings all look like mixtures of factories and barracks – the Military-Industrial Complex laid bare:
and there’s a pervasive grottiness to life in their Havens – messy mess tables for mass meals, military barrack showers and unmade beds, because who has time for niceties when there’s a war on? They’re also the only faction with propaganda billboards everywhere:
and toilet rolls; toilet rolls feature prominently.
Their APC and aircraft look distinctly like part of a Vietnam war timeline and their guns are resolutely bullet-based. You just know they get off on “rolling coal” and go hunting aliens for sport in their spare time,
and their color palette is murky cold grey and camo green.
Which could be a look for the whole game, right? Mad Max havens, the militarized future – but then you meet the cultists – the Disciples of Anu, and they seem to be living in a completely different world:
one that’s learning to live with the virus, and embracing mutation and the strange new skills they’re developing. Their ruling class are mind-controlling priests, they fly zeppelins, which are partly alive and partly blinged out,
and all their biggest buildings are temples, full of statues. In fact, they’re suspiciously well-funded – almost as if their cult leaders had been preparing for an end-of-the-world event for years before it actually happened.
And, refreshingly, they’re not necessarily the enemy. Sure, they have bad days where they start shouting at you to cleanse the world of unbelievers, but then you calmly say no and then another leader comes in and apologizes and says that’s really not their teachings. They’re sort of Neo-Sumerian or cod-Mayan, but I suspect they’re most of all Tekumel-inspired. And they just might have the best solution to the whole alien-virus-invasion problem.
They also might be onto something with their Sumerian schtick, because it turns out human (or hominid) civilization has been around a lot longer than people think and you can go dig up some Antediluvian Tech from secret Indiana Jones sites and it’s got this kinda gold floaty thing going on that’s more similar to the Disciples than anyone else:
Finally, Synedrion are the Techbro Utopians and they have two big obsessions – on one hand, Ancient Greek gods and Athenian democracy, and on the other, Silicon Valley corporate parks and Apple/Dyson product design.
Their buildings are full of cantilevered overhangs (which are kind of a nightmare in a game that shows you slices through the terrain, floor-by-floor) and giant textured glass walls (which you can’t hide behind but also can’t accurately shoot through), and their half-green-spaced parking lots are full of charging stations and fountains and trees that play havoc with your jump jets. They’ve long since abandoned petrol and bullets for cold fusion and lasers, and you just know their uniform fibers are ethically-sourced – even if they’re also long-term toxic and a landfill menace for future generations. Their planes and ground vehicles were clearly designed by the same hairdryer guru:
and with similar goals in mind – they have the fastest speeds, highest costs, and smallest passenger capacities of any vehicles in the game, because that’s who their users are, right? High-flying executives, mostly working alone. If you need to carry more people, buy two of them. Duh.
And looking at the game’s arc through the eyes of these three factions, I find myself asking (as I did with XCOM2), “what will life be like in this world, after you solve the immediate crisis?” And I’m genuinely not sure which of the factions I would choose to go live with… the game does a pretty good job of setting you up for “maybe something can be saved out of each of them, but maybe none of them is right as it stands.”
Oh, right, but that Stranger Things limit on seriousness? So each faction has a color palette – militaristic grey for New Jericho, Apple white for Synedrion, and lush purple and gold for the Disciples of Anu (though they wear it with a certain restraint that makes it look cohesive at least, if not logical).
But you the player can customize your color palettes for each soldier, or you can check the “randomize” button, and I am so glad I did the latter. Because the palette they randomize from is fabulous.
It’s always like this. Here’s what the randomizer gave me for a stealth unit, comprising a Sniper, a Priest, and an Anu Berzerker.
And you know what? I love it. I would Berzerk too. And I can always find my soldiers against a feature-rich background.
ETA: I have now finished the game and have spoilery denouement thoughts about the outros (which someone has handily collected in a video). Ending spoilers follow:
…so remember the Hitler guy? Turns out he’s more of a Hitler/Stalin figure, obsessed with purity:
and uncompromising unity. His ending gets the strongest mismatch between image and text:
although I wonder if all US players would get that it’s mismatched – after all, it’s a mainstay of American militarist propaganda that “freedom isn’t free” – you have to have a bunch of people signing away their freedom in military contracts in order to “protect the rights of every individual.” Bush’s mantra was that Iraqis must die in war so Americans may live in peace.
The Utopian ending has you freeing the aliens from being mind-controlled by their evil overlord, which is a highly interesting deviation from the Lovecraftian norm and raises Chimera Squad questions about how humans are going to live in peace with independent, intelligent species that have totally different ecological requirements. But its imagery ducks all these questions and just shows you some Syd Mead/Dymaxion architectural renders that you’ve already seen:
The one that cracks me up is the lovin’ the alien Anu Cult ending,
because of the dude with a cowboy hat and tentacles. Like “yep partner, that’s how we be naow.” Considering changing the name of this blog to “bound by the chains of an imperfect biology.”
Architectural history for gamers 2b: mountains and misdirection
So last post we’d finally got to the throne room at Kandy and discovered that maybe the god-king actually isn’t who we need to talk to. He sits there, absolutely immobile, a mysterious silhouette on a throne at the end of the ritual garden, while various courtiers tell you what he wants and how you should be bowing and scraping. What gives?
It turns out the god-king is supposed to make everything work (everything – the sun rising, the tides going in and out) just by being. Or by his Divine Will, if you want a kinda-Christian gloss on it. And so it’s vitally important for him to never lift a finger, because that would look like taking action, which is not what he’s supposed to do.
Typical PCs in this situation look around the room to see who’s really in charge – some back door or chink in the armor that can let them break into the system and make off with the loot. And Dutch East India Company officials are absolutely typical PCs. This whole throne room setup is not useful to them – you came on a pilgrimage to see a god on Earth and you got this close to the mystery, but the final veil cannot be pierced? Try telling that to the Company directors. Therefore it must be false.
And it turns out the throne room landscape is kind of a misdirection – the people who really have power are the various groups of Buddhist and Hindu priests who speak for the king and maintain the religious traditions on which the king’s power depends. The king might actually be powerless, or might be a player among players, or might be secretly running the show in spite of his immobility, but the priests can do things. A very similar situation existed in Bali during the same period, BTW – there, the real holders of power were the Buddhist priests who (can you guess?) …controlled the flow of water down the mountain.
And they need an enormous amount of water to operate – you have to flood them to germinate the rice, and then dry them out for the growing/ripening season
So how can the king of Kandy balance the power of the different priestly sects? This is where James Duncan’s book on the subject really comes alive – he gets into the court politics and the competing discourses on which court power depends, and the arena in which the power struggles play out, and in the end it’s all about landscape design.
See, everyone has a stake in the king being accepted as divine – all the different priestly groups want a stable kingdom (with themselves at the top, naturally), and that means a king that agrees with the story they’re telling in their temples. Water is life and it is right and proper that the lake (or reservoir, actually) should be next to the palace – that wave-swell wall is a reminder that “the crown adorns the kingdom, as waves adorn the sea.” But past that, everyone wants different things. The Buddhists want Kandy tobe more like the ancient Empire of Ashoka, when the water was kept for the welfare of all, and everyone came to the Buddhist temples for education. So their ideal king would open up the lake and the temples for public access and would teach the kids Buddhist scripture, and incidentally keeps the Hindus down as second-class citizens. The Hindus, on the other hand, want the kingdom to be like other Hindu kingdoms on mainland India, with access to water and temples reserved for the privileged classes, the water being nicely channeled into walled parks and gardens, the better to echo the park-like top of Mt. Meru. In their view, the lake, temples and king should all be a bit distant from the common people, tucked behind the palace walls.
Now, a canny king would play these interests off against each other, alternately favoring one faction or another, or managing to please everyone a little bit with signs that could be read favorably by any group. So he walls off part of the lake beside the palace, and makes a garden for the Hindus to enjoy, but the other shore of the lake is open access to the Buddhist commoners. Or he sequesters a shrine behind a palace canal but puts a big Buddha statue on the hill above it, or he makes rich garden apartments for the Hindu aristocrats but puts them some miles outside the center of the city, so that the aristocrats feel guilty about not staying there. And the result is an ambiguous landscape full of contradictory signs, where making a change anywhere could lead to a shift in the balance and re-reading of the signs everywhere.
The South Indian Mayamatam Shastra (a sort of architectural manual that tells you how to construct everything from a garden to a kingdom) says “if the measurements of the temple are in every way perfect, there will be perfection in the universe as well.” Which is a great way to keep all your religious advisors haggling about temple measurements, while you get on with ruling and raising taxes and waging war and peace. On the other hand, “if the king swerve ever so little from righteousness, the planets themselves will desert their orbits… rainfall will diminish, all life on Earth will cease,” which is a great way to keep your king in line.
The last king of Kandy was not particularly canny. He came up with a sneaky plan to imprison the Hindu aristocrats in a new, highly desirable set of mansions, but in selling them the idea, he also wound up walling off the most important Buddhist shrine – so his scheme of trapping the Hindus in a gilded prison just looked to the Buddhists like giving their rivals a load of gold, stolen from themselves. He demanded that Buddhist peasants do the building work and took Buddhist temple lands away to expand the lake… with the intention of rebuilding things to restore the balance later. The whole plan might possibly have worked out in the Buddhists’ favor if it had been completed, but… the Buddhists understandably saw the raw ditches being dug and the disorder in the city and a wall of earth going up around their Shrine of the Buddha’s Tooth, and… they complained to the English (who had replaced the Dutch on the coast), that this bad Tamil king was cutting down their sacred trees and creating “great mountains of earth… a place where dogs and foxes defecate at night.” Worst of all, he had built a giant monstrosity of an octagonal tower for viewing elephant races or some other such Hindu-inflected nonsense:
The very order of the world was under threat. Perhaps the English could step in and mediate, restore order, and put the king in his place?
The English, of course, didn’t care about any of that. They wanted cheap and reliable cinnamon delivered to the docks down in the coastal city of Colombo, and to spend as little time in Kandy, where the cinnamon grows, as possible. So they brought in troops and put down the king, and then put down the Buddhist elites, and set up a cinnamon extraction factory, and then chopped down the bodhi trees to make room for a tea plantation, and nobody got their lake or their mansions. They could have their Temple of the Tooth, though… once its keepers had lost their right to landscape the kingdom.
So how do you use all this in games? The first thing is, if landscape communicates, then it can also lie – or at least have multiple interpretations. Potemkin villages, carefully-framed views that have wanton destruction just outside the picture, presentations that conceal the true nature of things – Lewis Mumford said the weakest regimes tend to have the most solid-looking buildings. The second thing is, landscape is no more static than anything else – it may be expensive to dig lakes or flatten hills but landscapes also change by having different people living in them, or by being imagined differently. Whom does it serve (and whom does it flatter), when you put up or take down a wall, bridge, or dam? Access to water and farmland and streets and markets can raise some communities up and push others down. Power over the people generally involves some power for those people – and nothing makes people feel ignored and aggrieved like an imposition thrown up on their land. Forts and churches want to be able to see each other, to send signals and know that all’s well between them – what happens when you put an obstruction in the way?
To take an example from fiction, one of my favourite moments in the recent Westworld TV series is where we discover the Great Designer has been designing a whole new corner of the kingdom, with a giant bucket scoop excavator hidden over the ridge of his ersatz Western wilderness park. It’s a literal case of politics via landscape – he’s taking back control of his creation from his creations.
It’s an old joke that killing the dragon and looting its hoard will tank the local economy by flooding it with gold – but what about the land developers that were being held at bay by the prospect of being barbecued? Or the cult that can now “reclaim” their holy mountain? Or the cult that has lost their nightly firework display, that proved God was still on their side? The pilgrim routes that are disrupted, the royal roads that can now cut across the goblins’ swamp? Which provinces and ethnic groups will profit, which will be pushed up into those suddenly-open mountain pastures, forced to dig bits of dragon-glass out of them so they don’t lacerate or mutate their sheep, while the Emperor’s retired Elite Guards swipe all the fertile, long-fallow farmland? If you knock down the black monolith on Druid Mesa, how will the aliens know where to park on the next planetary alignment?
Of course, the state of politics can be expressed in a hundred ways. But the power of landscape is, it’s always there. And if it changes, you immediately know about it – when something is rotten in the state, it leaves marks on the countryside. And vice versa.
…I guess I’m just repeating what Lorenzetti said in the 14th century with his murals, the Allegory of Good and Bad Government, for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
Architectural history for gamers 2a: the holy mountain
Not Jodorowski’s hallucinatory epic (sorry) but the whole concept of holy mountains as narrative landscapes.
…recapping the end of the last post,
Before the British conquered Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), it had an independent kingdom tucked into its central highlands, called Kandy (or “Candea” in 16th century Portuguese):
…ringed by forbidding mountains:
The Kings of Kandy ruled over a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist subjects and they presented themselves as ideal priest- or philosopher-kings in both traditions, ruling an ideal spiritual kingdom that was effectively heaven on Earth. This has been a pretty common ploy throughout… most places. China, India, SE Asia, central America, Greece…. So many places, in fact, that some early historians of religions tried to come up with ur-myths about the universality of the ideal kingdom as a mirror of the kingdom of the gods, and of the ruler being a pin or axis point that locks our dirty world together with the ideal god-world, which is usually located in a city in the sky or on a bit of land that touches the sky, i.e. a mountain top.
In many Hindu traditions, that god-home mountain is Mount Meru, which is a very unusual shape:
…wider at the top than the bottom (that’s not actually perspective). It’s also square, but it’s shown trapezoidally on the picture above to show off the colors of 3 of the sides. Mt. Meru sits at the middle of the world (like Kandy in the middle of Sri Lanka), anchoring it firmly to the sky. From Mt. Meru, the world expands in all its glory until it reaches the 4 or 7 concentric seas that surround it, and beyond that is chaos and/or The Buddha. The whole thing is called a Mandala system, and it was as important to Chinese and Majapahiti political theory as to Kandyan.
The god-home has 4 rivers that spring from a single source/lake and flow down the sides of the mountain, dividing the world into 4 continents – that same scheme finds its way into various Persian and Islamic cosmographies, which explains the 4-garden paradise or chahar bagh, centered on a water cross, that you’re probably familiar with from Mughal funerary parks or late Almohad palaces.
The popularity of the mountain-as-center probably has something to do with mountains being so damn visible from everywhere (and, just occasionally, powerfully explosive). There’s also a common feature that they tend to have people living on them who are regarded as original – either culturally older than valley-dwellers or at least less tractable – it’s an old saw that “civilizations can’t climb hills,” and the Portuguese and Dutch took a lot longer to colonize the hilly center of Sri Lanka than the accessible coast, just like the Romans had had a harder time Imperializing the mountain-dwelling Basques and Caucasus-folks than the valley-dwelling Goths and Franks (although James Scott says we’ve got it backwards – valley people get driven up into the hills in attempts to escape oppressive valley governments, which would support the general principle that ideologies are usually created to cover up the truth, not to represent it). And it’s remarkable how many stories there are around the world about mountains being the origin points for civilizations or the holders of ancient truth and wisdom – the Bugis have a creation myth in which they climbed down out of the sky, from the mountains of Sulawesi. In the Bible, Noah’s family repopulates the world after the flood from the peak of Mt. Ararat (an origin story asserted by, among others, Turkmenbashi).
So mountains come with inbuilt concepts of power and purity – whether that stems from their proximity to heaven or the strange vibrations in the air above the mountaintop, or their harshness, which is imagined to make people stronger. Concepts that stand in direct contradiction to the facts – that mountains suck for supporting polities (they generally have terrible topsoil and worse communications) and have historically hardly ever been origin points for empires (yes yes I know, the Inca. But they’re a special case – no beasts of burden or competition from lowlanders to speak of – they can be seen as more of a community of desperate solidarity than an ambitious and expansive imperial project).
OK so back to Kandy and its political ideology of being a mountain god-kingdom. In the 16th-18th centuries, if you applied to send an embassy to the kingdom from one of the cities down on the coast, they would send you a guide and the whole thing was presented as a pilgrimage. You’d have to bring gifts and pack elephants and it would take weeks.
And the path up the mountains was strictly laid out by the guide: setting out from a courtyard with a bodhi tree (like the one the Buddha died under) you pass through 7 “thorn gates” to have your initiation checked before reaching another bodhi tree just outside the hidden valley
and beyond that, you’d wait at the border of the great lake – source of the life-giving rivers of Sri Lanka.
If the chamberlain invited you across, then you’d ascend another 7 layers at the palace.
from the Wave Swell Wall (symbolizing the waters of the lake) to the Meru Gate, to the Cloud Drift Wall (entering heaven), to the Terrace (with a floor like the sea), Upper Terrace, Lower Audience Hall and, finally, the Throne Room, where the king was displayed, remotely, at the end of another indoor stage-set-like garden, attended by courtiers who would interpret your requests.
So, how to use all this in games?
…published adventures often make some use of landscape in setting the scene – the entrance to the dungeon is in the ruins of a long-lost civilization, multiple layers of history inform the presence of different factions of enemies – but they seldom make the landscape set the scene in a way that makes it relevant to the current action, that frames what the game will really be about. Two notable exceptions are Patrick and Scrap’s Deep Carbon Observatory and Zedeck Siew’s Lorn Song of the Bachelor – the latter, in particular, has the landscape reconfiguring as the adventure runs, to show the current state of play. (Go read those books. I don’t want to spoiler them)
A great example from video game is Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango, which not only uses a Holy Mountain pilgrimage as its overall frame, it also uses that frame to make it natural that the interaction possibilities and interconnection of spaces reduce steadily as you progress along the game’s journey. It’s a Noir detective story set in the Mexican Land of the Dead, and you start out in a mythologized, Americanized-Modern Mexico City:
which is a whole lot like Raymond Chandler’s LA, plus some of that kinda-Mayan styling that was so popular in the American West in the 1930s. The soundtrack is Mariachi bands and 40s jazz. The plot propels you out of this, into a sort of Tom Waits fool’s journey of thorny forests and doomed dockside casinos and a damnation/redemption narrative that’s more Spanish and Catholic in mood and Casablanca/Third Man in style, with art reminiscent of Diego Rivera murals, all set to tangos and 20s speakeasy jazz.
Along the way, your Jacquayed dungeons get steadily smaller and the puzzles get more elemental, until finally you reach the spiritual showdown, and it’s… a pre-Columbian mountaintop (perhaps Monte Alban) with nothing but the wind, heaven, hell, and pan pipes.
The story these shifting landscapes tell is one of choices narrowing down into destiny – you start in an expansive city, trying to do your job and accidentally discovering something’s wrong. Along your journey you get into claustrophobic environments of the trapped dead – souls who have lost their way and have nothing left to do but gamble and make each other miserable, clustered in a little town in a canyon, dominated by symbols of how they can’t escape – a gigantic ship and zeppelin that are unreachable because they’re too expensive, because you don’t have the right ticket. And finally the place of judgment is all sheer faces of stone with no refuges or toeholds.
It’s also, by the way, the kind of narrative of Mexican nationalism you get if you go on a tour to see the ancient ruins – you start in the (relative) lowlands, taking in the big city sights to see how modern Mexico can be, then go up into the Spanish heritage staging towns below Monte Alban or Teotihuacan, and finally… stones, grass and sky. What we have left of the Aztecs, Zapotecs and Mayans.
Another way to go with this is to pick up on the fact that this little paradise is just a mirror of the greater one that you can’t visit. If mountain-shaped temples get their power from mimesis of the Original Mountain, like franchise outlets of a Master Brand, then having something go wrong with the power network is a great way to launch a campaign – what if the life-waters stop flowing from the Paradise spring? Or communications stop between the franchise and Head Office? What if the orcs next door have their own alternative mountain cult and the townsfolk are converting for access to cheap candy? Then the landscape the players know from their own local temple can inform their investigation – first as a standard to hold the rest of the world to (“hey, these pyramids don’t look anything like the ones we have back home!”), later maybe as a sign of how badly things have gone wrong (“you mean we’re the only ones that kill the goblins?”)
part 3 – Mountains of Lies – coming soon…
Architectural History for Gamers 2: telling stories with spaces
We’ve talked about communicating via city walls and we’ve talked about buildings that want to tell you about their character, but we haven’t really talked about ways that ordering things in space can itself communicate messages. How landscape and architecture tell stories – about what happens in them, and about their visitors’ station.
So…
…a giant mountain smokes in the distance, looming through all 400 pages of book 2. It’s your certain doom, but maybe your salvation;
or: you stand on a cliff overlooking a rich land of golden fields. Only the black rock fingers in the east spoil this view of an orderly, heavenly kingdom;
or: the thick moss curtaining the river banks suddenly opens to reveal a vine-covered temple, nearly reclaimed by the jungle. The dungeon lies under the central pyramid;
or: north of The Wall, all is snow and meandering tracks up craggy mountainsides that spiral on and on into the bleak white. Nothing could live here, which is why the dead have annexed it;
or: this place is not a place of honor. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.
These are all communicative landscapes – they tell you what to expect will happen where the landscape gets special – and they transform you as you approach the special bit.
First, though, a few bits of theoretical orientation to bear in mind:
- there’s no meaningful distinction between landscape and architecture. (a) Landscape is often designed and sculpted – golf courses and American cemeteries get that picturesque quality by judicious use of earth-moving equipment and planting trees in just the right places. (b) You can’t possibly build a whole holy mountain (yes you can) but you can tell people which way to go up it by putting a path there, and then you can put, like, stages of the cross or something along that path to turn your little river-grotto into Jesus’s cave or whatever. Or you can just tell stories about it, that reconfigure its parts into a memory palace for your story elements, or you can tell people they must be this holy to go there.
- architecture communicates social order – it situates its users and assigns them a status, it expresses social hierarchy and specific roles – who is in charge of or responsible for whom. This is generally the most important thing architecture does – more than keeping the rain off or the grain dry. Social order is king: dry followers and dry grain, if they’re involved at all, are generally part of the project of social ordering.* And usually architecture does this as part of a complicated textual program that involves writing and rituals and everyday practice and rites of passage and so on. Very often, the actual built architecture refers to another place that’s so special you can’t go there, you just have to imagine it, so the architecture you can see is just a pale imitation of that greater, deeper reality, which means the users have to fill in the missing details (or scrub out the non-ideal intrusions) themselves.
- architecture is in the first place the assembling of ideas, and a lot of architecture is composed of nothing else. Societies “produce spaces” to keep their functions separate or to usefully intertwine certain concepts (like, say, indoctrination of children, by having them be born only inside a controlled institution, which is also where they’ll get their moral education). So landscape design is as much about steering the visitor’s thoughts and opinions as it is about moving their body.
It’s at around this point that someone (usually Vitruvius) inevitably complains that architecture is most of all practical. It has to be fit for purpose. But what purpose? Things aren’t “just practical,” they’re practical because they support a practice, which is to say, a ritual of putting society in its place.
So to really understand what a bit of architecture/landscape is doing – the full program of ideas it’s serving – you’ll probably have to read (and, yes, maybe even dance) about it. But also, there is a bit of this big program that is (maybe must be) communicated through spatial arrangement. Probably because it communicates below the level of discourse – that is, it doesn’t tell you in words (that you could disagree with, if you heard them) what it means, it just is and continues to be all the time you’re moving through it. You understand maybe without being able to put into words what you’ve understood. Holy mountains are solid and tall and difficult to climb – they have a sort of morality of perseverance built right into them, just like alcohol and hangovers contain a morality of brief euphoria and lingering painful consequences.
Landscape, even more that buildings, is a thing you generally can’t experience all at once, so its communications tend to happen over time, in series.
The pilgrim trail prepares the visitors by having them follow a specific path where you can frame their views and by revealing things one after another – so they can work like story beats, but also so the visitor can be put into a particular mood before they get shown the next thing.
After walking a few hundred miles of pilgrim track from Paris to get to Rocamadour in the south of France, you are first of all greeted with a sort of player map of the site, that shows the Ordinary People (like you) at the bottom, and then a set of gatehouses guarding the Holy People at the top:
Once you’ve checked into your lowly guesthouse at the bottom of the cliff,
you climb up a twisty path to get to the holy places
and along the way, when you’re out of breath and you’ve been turned around half a dozen times and everything gets a mystical soft-focus glow, you get shown the (local) Cave of Christ’s Sepulchre…
…hidden behind a gate, and… it’s oddly convincing that this is a sort of extension of Jerusalem.
So when you get to the paved abbey/church at the top and you finally get to go into another dark… cave-like structure:
you’re ready for revelations that you feel you’ve earned – special realizations reserved just for you, from the blue-shrouded figure above the altar.
The point here is, it doesn’t work if you can stroll in straight from the market. With apologies to Charles Reade, “make ’em shlep, make ’em wheeze, make ’em wait.”
If this sort of thing is good for spiritual awakening, it’s also good for inspiring awe in a king’s subjects.
Before the British conquered Ceylon, it had an independent kingdom tucked into its central highlands, called Kandy
or “Candea” in 16th century Portuguese, ringed by forbidding mountains.
Part 2 to follow……
* for a really cool and complicated, totalizing vision of architecture ordering society, check out Pierre Bourdieu’s classic study of the Berber (or Kabyle) House, in which all the episodes of social life, birth, marriage and death, are set out in the ideal ordering of a family home. One of Bourdieu’s observations is that the whole world of traditional Berber men is made up of stuff that’s offered properly to the right or the left hand – a sort of manly ordering of the habits of the body, and that inside the house that whole order is reversed… because the house is orientated for the woman, who sits at her loom facing the door, waiting for her man to come home with his hunting trophies.
How to have fun playing Phoenix Point
I persisted with Phoenix Point, the alt-universe version of XCOM by the original designer, and it’s almost, mostly a good game! But most players are never able to access that goodness because, as I’ve noted before, it has some serious problems with information design. And its interface and gameplay are different from XCOM in some important ways, which it fails to tell you about… which is weird when you consider that the majority of Phoenix Point players are apparently XCOM players who are looking for similar games.
So here’s a quick guide to getting past the problems and finding the fun in PP, to keep you from having to go through 3 restarts and waste dozens of hours like I did. I’m not really offering a strategy guide – this video does a good job of that – I’m doing something more basic: letting you know about pitfalls in the basic presentation of the game. If you think it might be fun after reading this, you’ll probably have fun with it. My next post on the topic will be about the game’s world-building, which is actually quite good.
- Disable the Festering Skies DLC. It might be because I’m running it on a Mac, or it might be a bug or a weird RNG artifact, or maybe I’m just not appreciating the fun of being stopped cold after 20 hours of play, but my experience is, it doesn’t work. And from watching videos it seems like it wouldn’t be much fun even if it did. On the downside, you’ll miss out on fighting with aircraft!!! On the upside, even when they work, the aircraft fights seem to be like a bad phone minigame. So, avoid.
- “Cheat” in every way you can think of. The game expects it – seems, in fact, to actively encourage it. This is a design philosophy I’m familiar with from reports of how Gygax ran his D&D games – Gary expected you to listen closely to what he was saying, look for exploits (like oil flask grenades), and try to outwit him. That’s what this game is about, too. A very basic case in point: some players think it’s bad form to exploit the inventory system, which operates in a kind of no-space dimension, teleporting gear to wherever you want it, so you can strip the armor off one person in Mexico and put it on another one in India. I’m here to tell you, it’s supposed to be like that. The game is full of weird, non-naturalistic boundaries about when things are in a definite place or no-place: trust it when it offers you a crock. Moreover, its resource economy, in which you can’t build a research lab because you’re using all your materials making bullets, is balanced (to the extent it’s balanced at all) with teleporting bullets in mind. So if there’s a misprint, exploit it. And be ready to savescum around some balance issues. In particular….
- Check if your starting position is unwinnable. You cannot trust the RNG on this, either at the individual mission level or the whole game level. Regarding individual missions, nobody gave any serious thought to ranking the enemies and balancing encounters, so when you load a level, sometimes it will have 3 boss monsters that all attack you at once, and sometimes they’ll be 3 entry-level mooks. I am giving you permission to reload (the game autosaves just before every mission, probably for exactly this reason). Regarding the whole game, if it starts you in South America, you should probably restart. In any event, before you get invested in playing the game, you should spend an hour just scouting around with your aircraft to make sure that there are representatives of all 3 NPC factions somewhere near you – and then reload so you don’t lose all that valuable early-game time. If one faction is missing, then many of the winning strategies are simply unavailable to you. You could treat that as hard mode, but the game is already hard mode.
- Watch the interface closely, it often contains more information than it really tells you up front. If you mouse over an enemy, for instance, it shows you how far than enemy can run, or the area of effect of its attack, which is information it otherwise withholds. And double-check your troops’ loadouts – PP is just fine with sending your people out to missions without any weapons or armor.
- Try not to rely on metaphors or what the game interface implies – the fact is, PP operates in its own universe, which only sometimes looks like ours. For instance, the ring around your airplane that contracts as you fly seems like it could be an indicator of the remaining range before you refuel. It isn’t. It does represent a sort of range, but it resets every time you pass over any Point of Interest, no matter what it is – an unknown thing, the base of an enemy you’re at war with, a thing that used to be unknown but you spent time examining it and now you know there’s nothing there. Doesn’t matter, a dot on the map resets your airplane range. Another example: after you build a Containment Facility, you can capture disease-aliens but only, only if you paralyze them – mind control doesn’t count. Or the manufacture/scrap screen – you can guns to get resources back from them, but you can’t scrap vehicles. That’s just the physics of PP, same as teleporting inventory.
- Pay attention to what is spatially located and what isn’t. Some buildings inside your bases only serve the particular base they’re in (power gen, aircraft hangars, satellite uplinks, medical bays). Others can be anywhere and just contribute to a global counter (research labs, manufacturing facilities, archaeology labs, stores). New gear, vehicles, and recruits get auto-delivered to whichever base you state… and you have to watch the interface like a hawk because you will definitely accidentally send them to Base #1, the default, unless you’re hyper-vigilant.
- Only build what you really need. Activating bases is expensive – broadly speaking, you should only activate them where their satellite scanning range will reach red mist zones. And every base needs power generation and a satellite uplink, but apart from that, you should limit what else you build. As a rule of thumb, a total of 4 research labs, 4 manufacturing sites, and 2 stores is enough for your worldwide empire. I also assign 2 bases to be stables for training and healing recruits – those act as squad headquarters and I put one in the Americas and another in Eurasia, to be able to respond to haven defense missions before they expire. Each stable gets 2 living quarters (repairs troop fatigue), 2 medical bays (repairs troop damage), and 2 training facilities (which give xp to recruits for whom you don’t currently have an aircraft) (those figures might not be optimal, but they’re working for me). Aircraft hangars and access lifts are irrelevant – in theory they could repair aircraft, in practice that’s never needed unless you foolishly activated Festering Skies. One more thing: you will have to go to Antarctica (which is just like any other continent – has people and farmland and so on). Some people think that means you need a base at the south end of South America, but my experience says this is not true – if you’re flying Helios aircraft, which you should be, you can get to Antarctica without building a special base for it.
- Beware of accidental clicking. Sometimes you get a second chance (like when you’re assigning gear to troops most of the time before you go on a mission but not always) but in general, once you’ve clicked there’s no undo. I use TAB to go through any list – personnel, bases, whatever, because it’s unambiguous that I’m selecting from a menu, not choosing to do something with the current item.
9. (super important) The soldier advancement screen doesn’t work the way you’d expect from XCOM. It looks superficially similar, but it’s NOT QUITE.
On the left there’s your dude’s own inventory of stuff they’re carrying, and under that the no-space complete inventory window. Familiar enough. But on the right, there’s skill advancement and above that – the interface to increase your character’s Strength, Willpower, and Speed. I didn’t spot that for 40 hours, and it’s the thing you should do first.
Speed is the single most important stat for any character. Spend points on it first. Then Willpower, which is both your morale (your ability to keep fighting) and a resource you spend during fights to power your special abilities/skills. Only bother with skills once you’ve improved both Speed and Will to at least 12, and then balance stat and skill increases to maximize them all. Strength is the least important – it determines your damage with melee weapons (only important for Heavies, Berserkers, and people who have the randomly-assigned “use melee weapons” talent) and how much loot you can carry from scavenging missions. Only increase it when there’s nothing else left to spend points on.
At 4th level, every character unlocks the ability to multi-class. And every character should multi-class – but probably only after they’re 5th level in the first class, with good high stats. There are only 3 classes to start with – Sniper, Assault (runner), and Heavy (melee/jumper/heavy gunner), and the only multi-class really worth pursuing out of those is Sniper/Heavy, because you can use the Heavy’s jumpjets to reach a high sniping platform. But as you befriend the 3 NPC factions, you can unlock their classes… and then things get wild. This page explains the exploits that open up by combining different classes’ abilities, and they’re in general not obvious.
I draw your attention to the typical PP logic behind the Berserker (pictured in the example above). You first encounter berserkers as fast-running melee specialists, cracking heads for the Disciples of Anu – their heavy pistols make them annoying at close range and they will cut you to ribbons if you let them get into melee range, and they are all born with a giant hammer in one hand, so… melee troops, right? No.
“Berserkers are essentially a meta-class. There is no reason at all to use Berserker as melee fighters. It’s probably the one thing they are actually bad at, and this is neatly reflected by their skill set.”
Their first skill is Armor Break (shredding, in XCOM parlance), but “using this with a melee weapon is a very poor choice indeed.” It turns out one killer app is to multi-class berserker and sniper – the berserker can learn a skill of very limited utility – turning their 2AP melee attack into 1AP, allowing them to melee twice as often in one round at the cost of being useless the next round… but if they’re also a sniper, that turns a 3AP sniping shot into 1AP, and if they get the armored head mutation you can overcome the next-round hangover and…
…..it’s a big collection of Gygaxian crocks: exploits that lurk just below the surface that a new player sees, that completely change the balance of the system for “system masters.” And the whole game is built like that. A further crock: pay attention to your characters’ randomly-assigned talents, because if a character can buy e.g. sniper rifle talent, then you don’t necessarily need them to have the sniper class, so then you could use the skill crocks from 2 other classes with your sniper rifle. Multi-crocking, if you will.
On missions:
- Forget XCOM and its move-then-shoot structure. In PP you can not only shoot-then-move, you can also split up your move action square by square, and unspent squares remain available after you’ve done anything else. So never move like you would in XCOM, where you advance to a good shooting position and stay there to shoot. No. Instead, advance just far enough that you can possibly hit an enemy (the interface shows you a line of sight if one exists), then shoot, then use your remaining movement squares after shooting to sneak back into cover before ending your turn.
- Always, always click “free aim.” This lets you look down the gun sights and reveals several important things…
(a) that your gun can’t see the enemy (heavy weapons are fired from knee height), therefore you won’t hit them;
(b) that a friend is in the way, so you’ll hit them instead;
(c) that the enemy’s waiting animation periodically exposes their head – wait for that moment, then hit “free aim,” which freezes them;
(d) that if you moved sideways one square, you’d quadruple your chance of hitting the target. - Sniper rifles are like other guns but better. PP is very proud of its “realistic” shooting mechanic, which is “your bullet hits some pixel inside the gun sight.” In recompense, it doesn’t care at all about other weapon features, like e.g. having a minimum range for sniper rifles or rocket launchers. So use your sniper rifle from melee range and shoot them in the nostril. But be warned, there is one exception: Hera paralysis pistols. If you stand right next to an enemy and try to shoot them with that, the game doesn’t understand and pretends there’s no target. So leave 1 square of empty space between yourself and your Hera target.
- Shoot them in the leg. Heads in PP control specific functions… but not life. Aliens’ heads are often purely decorative. And heads are small, therefore harder to hit. But legs are always important. Also, the best place to shoot an enemy in order to do the most damage is the place you’ve already destroyed – you’ve probably shredded the armor or other special factors off it, so all your damage goes through.
- Everyone has 3 kinds of HP – health (shown on the health bar over their head), will (morale – never explicitly stated but you can guess a lot of the time, and it’s affected by lots of factors during a fight), and resistance to paralysis (explicitly stated after you’ve hit them with some paralyzing ray). The shortest path to victory is identifying which one of these is lowest and attacking that.
OK, so now you’re actually playing the game. How should you treat the NPCs? Where should you concentrate your efforts?
- One of the questions I often ask of a game is, “what sort of philosophy does this game have? What’s the rewarded approach? Should I be a good, co-operative, pro-social pan-humanist or a selfish, nationalistic psychopath?” PP’s answer is, you must start as a psychopath but later switch to co-operative. This is because you cannot begin useful social relations with the NPC factions until you’ve done some crimes for them – specifically, sabotaging (not merely raiding!) the specific facility they ask for. Each wants you to sabotage another faction, so you must do the sabotage round robin and attack all 3 factions to please the others as quickly as possible. Because for some reason in the first week of game time, people get less upset with you. After that, you must be nice to them all and try to climb the ladder of their trust, which never again demands that you hurt relations with the others. It makes no sense but it’s true. You are frequently encouraged to screw the factions in various ways (steal their research, raid their bases, opine against their philosophies) but you should resist because the costs always outweigh the benefits after that first learning sabotage moment.
- Winning is all about exploring quickly, and that takes aircraft. You start with 1 Manticore – the aircraft your own faction can make. The sooner you can get a second, the quicker you can double your exploration rate. AND your success on missions depends strongly on fielding a full squad of 8 soldiers, which (essentially) means deploying 2 aircraft to each mission. AND as your awareness of the world increases, so does your responsibility for defending faction havens, so eventually you’ll need at least 2 full squads, which is to say 4 aircraft. So build more aircraft as quickly as you can. You could steal them (it’s actually trivially easy to do so by exploiting a land vehicle) but see the costs of annoying the NPC factions in the preceding point. Players who make videos say “heist 2 Helios aircraft from Synedrion immediately, you’ll progress much faster” but (a) I’ve never had the opportunity to do so and (b) their advice might be out of date or just irrelevant, depending on where the Synedrion havens are and just how quickly the faction-annoyance costs change and… you really, really want Synedrion as a friend, so my advice is, it’s probably better to build your own aircraft and befriend Synedrion and eventually they’ll teach you to build your own Helioses. I did that, it was fine.
- You do want Helioses, though. Aircraft speed is a very important factor in (a) how fast you can explore, (b) your ability to defend havens that are attacked by aliens. Faster aircraft = fewer squads needed, so even though Helioses are expensive, they work out cheaper because you can get away with fewer squads. Anu’s Tiamats are just bad and dumb except if you use them for the Legacy of the Ancients content, below, and New Jericho’s Thunderbirds are never better for anything. Oh, also, you might think that the greater range of the Tiamat would be important in, say, crossing the oceans. It isn’t. The only way from Eurasia to the Americas (and the only way from Antarctica to South Africa or Australia) is over the north pole. Effectively, PP is played on a Dymaxion Projection minus the sea areas, so think of that when you’re deciding where to put your stables.
- Make friends with all the factions, like the video strategy guide linked at the top of this post says. I think the priority order is Synedrion, then Anu, then New Jericho, but really you want to be besties with all of them, because that’s how you unlock their character classes, skills, tools, research and (in the end) win conditions, all of which are better than just relying on your own organization’s inventions.
- Exploit vehicles and the weird mechanics of how your dudes ride in vehicles. Missions to get vehicles are 100x easier with a vehicle. But mostly leave the vehicles in your bases, because they can’t level up and that means robbing your dudes of xp.
- Don’t worry about which of your dudes kills which enemies – xp are handed out to the whole squad for mission success far more than for individual kills.
- Trade with faction havens. You (almost) can’t avoid making a profit, and trading is built into the game’s expectations. And each faction trades one of the three resources, so keep all the factions happy and trade with them.
- Build replacement equipment. You start with a generous package of guns and armor, but they will all get destroyed. The game doesn’t tell you this, nor does it say “oh no your equipment got destroyed,” it’s just missing one day when you go to equip it on a character. Don’t build lots of it in advance, just a couple of spares so you don’t run short. Oh, and keep your wonderful Hel II cannons to use on only the toughest enemies. You won’t get any more until you research them, which you can’t do until you’ve performed an autopsy on a late-game alien enemy, so guard those Hel II rounds.
- Pursue the Legacy of the Ancients content, which starts with a mission called Rise by sin, by virtue fall, because it unlocks superior weapons, including the most important single weapon in the game – a sniper rifle with the damage of a heavy cannon. On paper, this weapon doesn’t look like a game changer, but (a) most alien effects have shorter ranges than the sniper rifle, (b) lots of enemies’ toughness is designed to be just outside the damage effectiveness of ordinary sniper rifles, and (c) there are various crocks that make it easier to shoot more than once a round with a sniper rifle, so… it adds up. OK, but… this content has its own interface stuff, which is the worst-explained part of a badly-explained game. So here is a walkthrough, which I hope will make things clearer:
– after you’ve done several story missions, you get the chance to build archaeology labs and archaeology probes, to look for Antediluvian Sites. And you get a string of missions to steal info about a series of weapons to research. So do the missions and research. But you can’t build any of these weapons without a bunch of new weird materials, so you also…
- Build exactly 4 archaeology labs, anywhere in the world – it’s the cheapest and fastest way to do everything else. 5 is a waste.
- Then build 3+ archaeology probes. You can deploy these over half the Earth’s surface, centered on whichever aircraft you have selected at the time. They show you their scan circle, so… try to optimize those circles to cover the land area efficiently. Don’t worry about the sea or isolated islands. They will do a cute pink scan-sweep for a while, then when their scans are finished they… disappear. You may or may not get a message that you’ve found something. You will not be told what you’ve found or where.
- Despair because the interface hates you and there is no help file to tell you what’s going on. OK, fine, here’s a help file:
If you’ve found something, then a new Point of Interest has been added to the Geoscape. It looks like a green eye:
i.e. almost exactly like a Synedrion haven:
so you have to scour the areas you just scanned to look for that eye. But where did you scan? The interface just hid that information! OK, go to launch another probe…. and the area you’ve already scanned will light up pink! So that’s where you look for the eye(s).
Fly out to the eye icon, click “excavate” (which starts an 8 hour counter, during which you can fly elsewhere/do other stuff) and after excavation you’ll learn it’s either:
– an orichalcum mine or forge
– a mutane gas field or refinery
– a living crystal quarry or refinery.
THEN you send a squad to do a horrifically tough mission to kill all the ancient guardian robots at the site (no, there is no option other than killing them). After THAT:
– if it’s a mine, gas field, or quarry, station an aircraft over it to slowly extract its new weird resource. The most efficient option for this is a Disciples of Anu Tiamat aircraft with one basic Muton on board (by the time you get to this content, you’ll know what all that means). This is, AFAICT, completely safe. Nothing in the game can attack that aircraft/muton (provided you’re not running Festering Skies)
– but you can’t use that resource until you have its forge/refinery. Each resource has multiple extraction sites but only one refinery.
There is no advantage to owning more than one extraction site. You can speed up extraction by stationing multiple manned aircraft over it. And you must have extraction and refinery sites for all 3 resources to make the sniper rifle. So send out probes and excavate sites exactly until you have the 6 sites you need. And only attack the sites you need – if you’ve already got an orichalcum mine and you find a second one, leave it alone.
You can use some of the resources you get to rebuild a Guardian, to help you defend the site in the future. I have been doing this and my defense missions have been comically easy… but I don’t know if that’s because I got the Guardian or not. YMMV.
So, now you should be equipped to enjoy Phoenix Point. That’s all I’ve got for now. Feel free to ask me questions – I often miss comments to this blog, so the best way to talk to me about this is to hit me up on discord, where I am richardgrenville#1863
Scrap Princess
- BEAST PEOPLE NAMES FOR BEAST PEOPLE
- Six Secret Books
- NooFutura available for purchase
- Leucrotta
- Weapon Breakage In Darksun
- Kickstarter Cognition Snare, 8th part of the Hexahedron of the Monks of Flame
- 6th Part Of Kick Starter Cognition Snare, The Hexahedron of the Flame Monks
- Kickstarter Cognition Snare: Hexahedron of the Monks of Flame : The Fouth Part
- Kickstarter Cognition Snare: Hexahedron of the Monks of Flame : The Second Part
- Demon Bone Sarcophagus Kickstarter Is Awrithe!
Reading Appendix N
- What will be number 3,000?
- DM Tales highlights The Unlucky Isles
- Warhammer 40k 10th Edition USRs in readable font size, and my binder
- Hobby philosophy: old and new paint jobs
- New baseline Blood Angels color guide
- The paint-play-paint motivation cycle (and a Chaplain color guide)
- Kill Team game four: Blood Angels vs. Veteran Guardsmen
- Kill Team battle report: Blood Angels vs. Tyranids
- Mini 40k battle report: first game of 10th Edition
- Miniature painting maxims that have helped me for the past three years
Roles, rules and rolls
- Crawling To An End
- Hex Crawl 23 #277: The Golden Hive of Shuddud
- Hex Crawl 23: Eryptos 5, Low Life
- Hex Crawl 23: Eryptos 4, Trade and Commerce
- Hex Crawl 23: Eryptos 3, Alchemy and Sorcery
- Hex Crawl 23: Eryptos 2, High Life
- Hex Crawl 23 #276: Eryptos 1, The City
- Hex Crawl 23 #275: One More for the Road
- Hex Crawl 23 #274: House of Shuna
- Hex Crawl 23 #273: Tila'a and the Memory of Tilillu
Akratic
- Erol Otus cover of Dragon Magazine now on my wall
- Eyes of a Catoblepas, Wings of an Owlbear (Greyhawk campaign)
- Against the Court of Urdor: the Heroes
- The World of Ukrasia
- Mythras Imperative enters the Age of the Orc
- The Lands and Peoples of Central Urdor
- Adapting the Court of Ardor to Ukrasia: The Court of Urdor
- Gaming Update: Mythras, Against the Darkmaster, and farewell forever to 5e D&D
- Classic Fantasy Imperative now available!
- Ukrasia: Planes and Deities
Lich house
- ACKS 2 Kickstarter - Last 24 Hours
- LOTFP Review: Winnie the Shit
- LOTFP Review: Galileo 2: Judgment Day
- LOTFP Review: Black Chamber
- Game Reports - ACKS and LOTFP
- The Strigoi - Vampire Alternative for LOTFP
- LOTFP Review: A Gift for All Norway
- Game Reports - York 1630 and ACKS Greyhawk
- LOTFP Review: Faecal Lands
- Spotlight on ACKS: Where Orcs are Evil
Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse 
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