wap/zb"r

weird jew, language communist

[prahlrus]

The Arabian Nights, Ranked

So, I finally finished reading Husain Haddawy’s 1990 translation of the Arabian Nights (and the 1995 supplement containing the stories of Sindbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Ala al-Din and the Magic Lamp. In order to pat myself on the back for that accomplishment, here is a ranking of all those stories in order of how much I enjoyed them.

(General CW about the stories themselves: racism, misogyny, sexual violence, regular violence, occaisional anti-semitism. This list doesn’t go into details.)

The Three Apples — This story starts out as a `whodunit' murder mystery that is quickly (if a little anticlimactically) resolved, but then launches into the story of `The Two Viziers, Nur al-Din Ali al-Misri and Badr al-Din Hasan al-Basri' which I found the most entertaining and memorable of the stories in the Nights.

The Porter and the Three Ladies — The is in my opinion the best frame tale in the Nights, beating out `The Hunchback' and `The Fisherman and the Demon' more narrowly and `The Merchant and the Demon' by a wide margin. In my opinion it had the best mix of strange symmetry, recurring themes, and taunting suspense. Quite memorable.

Qamar al-Zaman and His Two Sons — This story really has two parts, the first is the story of Qamar al-Zaman and his beloved, and the second is the story of the two sons. In my opinion, the first part is the best tale is the most skillful combination of the motifs that recur throughout the Nights---demon matchmakers, fated lovers and far-off cities full of murderous Magians---but the second part wasn't really to my liking. The first part had what seemed to me to be interesting queer things happening and allowed its women to be characters, but the second part was solidly hetero and misogynist in its characterization.

Jullanar of the Sea — This story is much more fantastical than most of the Nights, in that much of the action takes place under the ocean, where a race of wealthy and magical people live. It's one of the better `questing for a marriage' and `struggling to return from a distant land' tales.

The Hunchback — The frame tale here is not quite as good in my opinion as `The Porter and the Three Ladies,' but it ranks pretty highly if only on the virtue of the unnamed barber character, whose wonderful combination of self-awareness and un-self-awareness is definitely a comic highlight of the Nights.

The Fisherman and the Demon — Again, this is mostly a so-so frame story, but the end (the story of the enchanted king) is very good and classic.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves — I kind of knew this story going in, but only from a half-remembered episode of Wishbone. The original was fairly good and exciting, but Ali Baba does very little in it; almost all the ingenuity in the story is thanks to his slave, Marjana, who is rewarded by being freed and married to Ali Baba's son.

Sindbad the Sailor — I was honestly a little disappointed by Sindbad. Some of the voyages have memorable moments, but overall I found the seven voyages very repetitive.

The Slave-girl Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din Ali ibn-Khaqan — In general I found the romances of the Nights pretty dull. It's a lot of two people, both `as beutiful as the full moon' swooning over how beautiful the other one is. 'Qamar al-Zaman' was like that too, but it was full enough of over interesting things to make it to the top section of my list. 'Anis al-Jalis and Nur al-Din Ali ibn Khaqan' is mostly memorable for the more or less inexplicable way that the Commander of the Faithful Harun al-Rashid disguises himself as a fisherman and personally fries up fish just in order to inveigle his way into a party with the lovers.

The Merchant and the Demon — The first story, and the one that is best-connected to the overall frame of 'King Shahrayar and Shahrazad.' It's not bad, but not especially memorable in my book, and is the weakest frame tale in the Nights.

King Shahrayar and Shahrazad — Part of this story is definitely the most well-known part of the Nights. The less well-known part, however, is the extreme preoccupation with women's sexual fidelity. This story is all about men reacting to their wives' adultery in exaggerated but never actually punished by the narrative ways.

Ala al-Din and the Magic Lamp — As I had been told, the original 'Ala al-Din and the Magic Lamp' is very different than the Disney version. However, I was very much not impressed by it. I found that Ala al-Din's only character growth was in money and privilege, and his solution to every problem was just to wish for it. I didn't find any charm in the character.

Nur al-Din Ali ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-girl Shams al-Nahar — As I said earlier, I didn't really care for most of the romances in the Nights. This was my least favorite. The only entertaining moment is when the lovers are kidnapped by bandits who then return them because they're so impressed by how beautiful they are. Other than that it's just the lovesick pining of two people who have only actually met each other twice or three times for pages and pages.

[todaysbird]

‘pest’ birds alignment chart

[boxodice]

Dragon Hoard- Apollo.

She’s a tricky one who doesn’t like being near the populace, She has a heart of gold and a flare for magic.

[prahlrus]

The signs as their actions upon the destruction of the temple according to Avraham ibn Ezra (עַד אָנָה בִּכְיָה בְצִיּוֹן וּמִסְפֵּד בִּירוּשָׁלָיִם)

Aries: Aries the first cried in bitter spirits. Because his lambs were led to the slaughter.

Taurus: The howling of Taurus was heard in the heights. Because on our necks we were all pursued.

Gemini: The star of Gemini seemed separated. Because the blood of brothers was poured out like water.

Cancer: Cancer sought to fall to the ground. Because we fainted because of thirst [this concerns crabs because they grow in water]

Leo: The heights poured forth because of Leo. Because our roaring didn’t ascend to the heights.

Virgo: Maidens were killed and also youths. Because of this Virgo darkened her face [in mourning]

Libra: Libra turned and asked mercy [rather than impartial justice which you would usually expect from scales]. Because death had been chosen for us over life.

Scorpio: Scorpio wore fear and trembling. Because our Rock [i.e. G-d] judged us with the sword and with famine.

Sagittarius: Springs of water descended, tears like a river. Because the sign of Sagittarius [Hebrew = the sign of the rainbow, a symbol of God's promise not to destroy the world] wasn’t given to us.

Aquarius: Water covered our heads. But where Aquarius [lit. the bucket] was full, our palate was dry.

Capricorn: We offered our offering and it wasn’t received. And Capricorn--- the goat of our sins was interrupted.

Pisces: Merciful women boiled their children. And the constellation of Pisces [which is to do with fertility because of Hebrew puns] hid its eyes.

[prahlrus]

more manarian things

i realize that last night’s post about the manarian probably makes very little sense, so maybe i’ll explain a little more of what’s going on with this setting.

the Manarian is a whole galaxy inhabited by lost of technologically advanced alien species. there are no humans in the setting, but most of the aliens we created were roughly humanoid.

the thematic core of the setting, in my mind, has always been the Triwars, which is a galactic war fought between three major powers: norph, havok and canog.  the norph were the species i was always most attached to. they’re these guys:

this is the “new” design for the norph species. it updates my older one by removing the “pillar foot” look that a lot of old manarian species have b/c i designed them at a time when i thought feet (and specifically toes) were foolish extremities and gives them explicit gills. i don’t have access to my old sketchbooks right now, but the general look is very similar to the old norph.

so too with the havok. i didn’t really change their design at all, they’re still artificially animated, vaguely malevolent, gelatinous humanoids:

the havok and the norph are traditional enemies. usually the Triwars are considered the “present” or immediate past of the setting. when i’ve written a conclusion for them, the norph win.

both species are artificial; the norph were created by the za’agar and the norph by the zelktar. in the original lore, these were two different species, but in the new lore these are two political factions of the same species, the zær. in the new lore, the canog are also creations of the zær. the canog were based on the zær’s own genes, the norph on the wildlife native to the rhinox system and the havok are completely artificial. the three species represent increasingly radical attempts by the mainstream zær, za’agar and zelktar factions, respectively, to create the “perfect being.”

however, long before the civilizations of these species could really develop, the conflict between the za’agar and zelktar became a galactic war that rapidly spread and wiped out not only the entire zær species but most of their neighbors as well.

after this disaster, the galaxy enjoys an era of relative peace and prosperity as these younger civilizations grow. during this time, the dominant galactic civilizations are the Rox Protectorate (which was mostly untouched by the “biogenesis war”) and the Kotonn Empire (a successor state to the C!ansh Empire, which fell during it). however, they are soon upstaged by the zær’s creations. the havok are the most aggressive of the three and are cast as the antagonists of the Triwars.

here’s the blurb that i wrote as a hook for the post-Triwars setting i’m working on:

The Triwars are over but the wreckage remains.

Half an age of war has left the major powers scarred and bankrupt, and their spaceways choked with damaged, half-operative weapons of war.

Now, from the fringes come the refugee and the migrant, the pirate and the plunderer, the scavenger and the scrounger alike to strip and salvage what they can or die trying. This is the time of the tekleric.

New players have emerged: the mysterio, for generations itinerant riddlers and wanderers, are now the (precarious) princes of those who pick over the bones of the hulks of war. Eiqen raiders, formerly restricted to the galactic rim have crept out to trouble major spaceways.

which brings me nicely to the mysterio, the species i’d point out as critical to the identity of the manarian. in the old lore, they did not have a homeworld but formed in the vacuum of space and live on spaceships. they always wore armored suits and helmets, and no outsider had ever seen them without.

in the new lore, i tried to keep somewhat close to that? now, they are relatives of the orox, who were exiled for a crime in a bygone age and have refused to settle anywhere permanently. as constant spacefarers, they always wear their spacesuits, although i’ve changed their designs to be more lithe and flexible:

tekleric is a profession among the mysterio that involves entering space-wrecks for scrap and salvage. it has grown in importance since the end of the Triwars, and its associated industries are now among the most prominent in the galactic economy.

anyway, that’s some manarian stuff. hope you enjoyed.

[prahlrus]

here’s a sketch map that i made tonight of important systems in (at least my current revision of) the Manarian. i spent a lot of fruitless time trying to work out character classes or archetypes for the game, until it hit me that the best way to integrate characters into the setting was by giving them specific places to come from.

right now instead of a character class you pick a point of origin, which constrains your species choice and gives you certain background options (were you a veteran in the Triwars, for which side, and so on). then you just pick your character abilities and go with it.

the names are probably not of that much interest, but i thought ppl might like to see it in comparison the following map, which i made more than nine years ago:

(if you’re going to ask me why the new map is a sketch and the old one looks so much nicer i say to you: hush)

the datestamp on the file says 2009, but based on my own sense of how i would have done things at that time, i think the map was probably made much earlier and copied around then.

a few things i’ll say about the consistencies/changes:

first, there are lots of similarities. Auden is still at the center of everything, and the systems associated with the Tripowers (Rhinox for Norph, Havine for Havok, Canog for Canog) are all there and distributed ~similarly.

i changed many of their names, but i did like that -sulio naming convention, so i kept that for a belt of systems that were once colonies of a single power but have since been carved up by other powers.

an omission: the region i used to call “Trisector Beta” of Scet/Squirk, Geo and Henobia is gone. they were always a fairly poorly integrated part of the Manarian. i rendered down their species concepts and used the parts i liked of it to flesh out the Aoru backstory. related to that: Yuki and Curu have been relocated.

i cut back the Curite empire significantly, which was never as big of a deal as the 2009 map seems to suggest?

Proz and Necra were also a very poorly conceived part of the setting. i have cut most of that out and left the workable parts for backstory lore, not relevant to the present-day setting.

emotionally i have to say: i love doing this. this project makes me quite happy just to keep playing with. all of these species and systems and concepts are my old friends and messing around with them again is a delight. this map, for example, is more than ten years in the making!

[prahlrus]

i’m typesetting a bencher and this page was a bona fide nightmare to get looking nice, as the code reveals. however it looks great and i love it.

[prahlrus]

finally got to a creature design for these guys that i liked. they’re called the Quiet People and they are creatures VAGABONDS OF VENUS which is an rpg i’m running for some of my friends these days.

[prahlrus]

here’s a glimpse into a my world-building process for this manarian stuff. this is a spreadsheet that i used to cross-reference and combine the lists of species that appeared in previous drafts of manarian-related documents i had written (right) into the list for my new version (left). 

i tried to be relatively conservative, discarding little unless it was truly redundant (like the ioth, who were never clearly distinguished from the ichen) or never really fleshed out (like the prozians).

[prahlrus]

Looking at the climate of the retrograde Earth, one might conclude that the study falsifies the conclusion of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz that for all that may be wrong with Earth, humankind lives in the 'best of all possible worlds.'

https://eos.org/articles/reversing-earths-spin-moves-deserts-reshapes-ocean-currents

thank God for the elaborate climatological modeling tools to falsify early modern theodicies

[prahlrus]

me: i should uh, do any amount of work today also me: i should write a 1400 word tumblr post about dnd instead

[prahlrus]

dnd feelings

i’m going to talk about my dnd feelings at some length until perhaps it will become clear why i’m working on the dnd homebrew project that i am.

this post has become extremely long, so i’m hiding most of it below.

on 4/20 (no relation) of 2016, i tweeted, apropo of encountering The Fantasy Trip for the first time: 

i think The Fantasy Trip is more or less the game i imagined DnD was before i ever actually encountered its rules

before i explain that, let me give a little bit of context.

context: TFT was the ultimate precursor to GURPS, the tabletop rpg that loomed large over my high school years and still occupies a place in my heart. if you want to read more about it, here’s a dedicated fansite and here’s a review by a longtime player.

personal context: my first edition of dnd was 3E, and when i opened the book i remember seeing that first chapter on abilities and thinking to myself “oh, that makes sense, the game probably has some set of mechanical abilities that represent the different things different characters can do and the game is about combining those in different ways to make the character you want.” then i read about how, in dnd, ‘ability’ meant ‘ability scores,’ of which there were only six and everyone had them.

in contrast, when i, fifteen years later, opened TFT, i was confronted by exactly that: a set of completely modular mechanics that characters can have, and a very minimal set of rules for combining them. it was a moment of great healing.

dnd 3E did actually what i expected it to have, in the end, but the modular mechanical abilities were spread throughout different parts of the system, their largest concentration as feats and spells, but also attached to different races and classes. however, the non-modular class-level-based mechanics were the beating heart of most dnd characters (on a continuum, of course, from the least module-friendly barbarian up through the specialist classes into the terrifying bonus feat engine that was the 3E fighter and summiting in the endlessly variable wizard) and i felt, although i don’t think i was able to put words to this feeling until i got into GURPS years later, that dnd was too rigid and inflexible in the kinds of characters it allows you to make.

now, there are a couple of good reasons why a game would be very rigid about how it allows you to combine its mechanics:

some of those mechanics might combine in balance-upsetting ways. in particular, dnd (and its imitators) are cautious to keep the best combat defenses and durability separate from the best offensive abilities. see, for example: restricting spellcasters from wearing armor and penalizing barbarians and monks who do so.

allowing players to choose any arbitrary collection of abilities leads to a kind of combinatorial explosion in character builds and can be paralyzing to non-obsessive players. this creates a huge burden of knowledge, which only grows as more content is added to the game.

the second of these seems like it became a failure point for 3.5E after a while. even though the design of the game was supposed to front-load the largest choices about your character, the gradual multiplication of race, class, prestige class, feat and spell options (to say nothing of magic items!) increased the burden of knowledge to an unmanageable level. 

of course, it was still a playable game and people were welcome to filter out the parts they didn’t like or the books they didn’t know that well, but what become core pieces of the game wound up spread over altogether too many books (for example, the tiefling race in Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and the warlock in Complete Arcane). in 4E, i think the intention was to limit this by basically making all character builds basically palette swaps of the fighter/rogue/wizard/cleric quartet. as far as i’m concerned, that fell flat because the preposterous, somewhat broken variety of 3.5E was actually core to the appeal.

now, a person might read the above and think that i would hate 5E because it does exactly the things that i was upset at 3E for doing: 5E takes its pool of modular mechanics and packages them up in classes and subclasses. sure, there are character backgrounds (honestly, an extremely good addition, although i don’t think i’m thrilled with the execution) and a small pool of feats, but the mechanical bulk of character creation is bundled up in your choice of race, class and subclass. certain classes (especially dedicating spellcasters) and subclasses (battle master, the elemental monk tradition) let you dial up the complexity ceiling, but the floor remains low.

it might be that i’ve mellowed in my old age or that i’ve seen how some of my non-dnd-playing friends were able to easily get into 5E, but i really sympathize with the design decisions. the designers have two objectives in a character creation system: giving characters cool powers and not overwhelming players with options. the class/subclass structure is a good way to limit the explosion of choices and make a more accessible game.

it also makes a game that’s strictly linear in its expansion. 

ever new subclass added to the game adds exactly that: one subclass. a new spell might add a little more complexity, if it’s available to multiple caster classes, but in general each new thing adds only itself to the game, not itself plus a thousand possibilities of combination.

aside: i definitely don’t love the kitchen sink of 3.5E with all its expansions. not enough designers set about to design replacements for core material, and too many design supplements to it. although i never owned it, i really like the “variant players’ handbook” idea of Arcana Unearthed/Evolved. imo, every book that introduced new races or core classes should have offered the suggestion of what races or classes to remove from the game if you were including the new ones.

anyway, here’s the line of design thinking it led me down:

what if the subclasses were another layer, like backgrounds are, that gets chosen independently of class?

there’d need to be some way to make sure that classes with different core mechanics (like fighters and wizards) get different mechanics from the “same” subclass.

each mechanic should still be as modular as possible. The restrictions on who can have it should be at the level of the module, not the level of the ‘subclass.’

the ‘subclasses’ will be themed lists of features (which can have prerequisites) and spells, that characters can choose from as they gain levels.

in my original sketch, the related ‘wild’ classes (barbarian, druid, ranger) could be created by applying a ‘wild’ theme to the prototypical classes of fighter, magic-user and specialist, respectively. for this not to feel as flat as dnd 4e, the themes would need to have significant differences in the kinds of mechanics they offered. for this not to feel as overwhelming as 3E, each theme would have to be well-focused.

the state of the project now is that i’m replacing both alignment (because i never liked the dnd alignments too much in the first place) and subclasses as these ‘themes,’ which i’m calling ‘alignments.’ one alignment, for example, is based on order and protection. its spell list  largely overlaps with the cleric spell list, and its features are mostly defensive and healing mechanics. a magic-user in this theme might be able to become fairly tank-y, but they wouldn’t have the damage output of magic-users in the other themes, that don’t have the same sorts of straight survivability features.

anyway that’s the extremely involved homebrew dnd project i’m working on right now:

design the three template classes that will be themed by choosing an alignment.

draw up a list of mechanics i want to be modular

assign them and the list of spells to my custom set of alignments

i have designed the template classes and listed 220 different features (feats). there are five different alignments, each of which has access to 58 feats. 20 are more generic and open to characters of any alignment.

i still have to write full rules text for the feats and probably design 10-20 new spells to fill out a couple of the lists. but i’d say that i am actually very close to having a playable total rebuild of dnd 5e?

go me, i guess.

[ftcreature]

Children, this is dirt. 

 dirt?dirt?  dirt?dirt? dirt?dirt? dirt?  dirt?    dirt? dirt?    dirt? 

[prahlrus]

i drew the four matriarchs (Soreh, Rivke, Leah and Rahel) potentially as part of making a very jewish deck of cards but also maybe just for their own sake. i also lined them up with two other famous jewish fours: the four levels of interpretation and the letters of the name (in reverse order, the way they correspond to the four worlds of creation)

[prahlrus]

here’s my 2018 haggadah in all it’s glory!

if you are interested, you can use the source code to typeset it for yourself from the github page here.

[prahlrus]

talking yr ear off about a thing only my child-self cares abt

so i’m still drawing breath which is to say that i recently started working on a weird rpg project. what’s weird about this project is that it is among my least broadly-appealing ideas for a game (although an honest look at my drafts folder would show that that is far from the truth) in that it is a roleplaying game set in the space opera universe that i, my brother and a couple of my childhood friends played in as children.

if i’m going to write games out of a weird sense of genre nostalgia, i might as well go straight for the jugular about it, right?

when i was still in elementary school, i want to say in second or third grade, my brother a friend and i created what i think was the first anything associated with this universe (we came to call it the Manarian): a couple spaceships and their alien pilots, made from polymer clay and baked hard in my toaster oven. we made them in stages, baking the pilot, then pressing the pilot into the spaceship and baking it separately, then molding a detachable add-on onto the back of the spaceship and baking that separately. the result was a fairly good, multi-part toy that we created ourselves. i’ve since lost the toy, but we named the alien species and that formed the nexus of our universe’s lore.

i definitely can’t trace the origins of most of the elements of the Manarian, because the thing that it served us best for was as a place to wholeheartedly and blatantly copy things we liked about other SFF media we were consuming at the time. but it also was a long-term collaborative creative project, carried out in sessions with weeks of downtime in between mostly in the media of drawings and play-acting. 

how much of the play-acting you did as a kid do you remember? i don’t remember most of it, but i do still have a lot of the bits and pieces. i do have a bunch of the in-character emails that i received (although not the ones i sent, those are locked up in an email account i'd need to recover) from a friend of mine between play sessions. as far as drawings go, thankfully, i’ve saved most of the sketchbooks i’ve ever kept; only the loose paper (and that’s what my friends and i usually drew on together) has been lost to time. and i have my other major source: a dozen or so incomplete and unfinished encyclopedias or other reference works that i started at various times from middle school on till high. many hard drives later, i have somehow managed to keep track of most of them.

they usually follow the following format, with varying degrees of follow-through

1. weirdly long and detailed mythology 2. galactic history, building up to the “Triwars” that were either ongoing or had recently ended 3. descriptions of the intelligent species of the Manarian (a variable list with 12-20 mostly stable members) 4. a “science” section that mostly talked about guns, psionic powers, FTL travel or computers.

i’ll level with you, most of my actual material is pretty bad. (let me put it more positively: gosh, i’ve improved a lot as a writer since i was in middle school!) however, i discovered that parts of one of the encyclopedias i had delegated out to be written by different friends. and it may just be that i can’t see the virtues of my own writing because, well, i wrote it, but my friends are so good and creative! my own Manarian writing is frequently afflicted by what i’ll call the “encyclopedic mode” where i have some finite set of categories and i need to fill all of those out for each thing and occasionally i’ll stick on a little flourish or greeble but mostly it’s relatively dry. or maybe it’s just that i approached it like a collating and cross-referencing project and they approached it as creative writing. regardless, i’m continually shook by their ability to produce just brilliant-ass nonsense.

anyway, now i’m in the thick of this project, which is a lot of going back and collating and rewriting the more boring/hackeneyed parts and fitting things into the rough shape that the Manarian has in my head. 

honestly, i love it. i’m excited and gushy about this project to a degree i rarely am, and it feels really good to be going back and writing some of these names again.

[prahlrus]

And Moses said, Those are your goblins to day; for to day is a sabbath unto the Lord: to day ye shall not draw goblins in the field. Six days ye shall draw them; but on the seventh day, which is the sabbath, in it there shall be none.

GOBLIN WEEK 2018, DAY SEVEN

As with last year, I thought we might wrap up with an undeniably happy gob.