So: “Silent Titans”, an RPG setting / adventure with text by Patrick Stuart and art by Dirk Detweiler Leichty.
Great art and writing in a very handsome volume. (To my hands, it feels better-made than the current-edition D&D tomes; publisher Jacob Hurst’s previous efforts were the Hot Springs Island books, similarly lavish.) Here it is on the leaf-strewn floor of my living room:
And since I have a terrible phone camera that refuses to focus, some screenshots from the “Silent Titans” PDF:
Virtually every review I’ve read of “Silent Titans” has been glowing. Here’s a fun one: a lit-crit deep reading of the text.
It’s up for a battery of 2019 ENnies -- Cartography, Writing, Production Values, Product of the Year.
I guess this doubles as my ENnie endorsement post? You should vote for “Silent Titans”, when the time comes. (Or “Mothership”. Or “Troika!”. Or Luka Rejec’s “Ultraviolet Grasslands”. All of those are good.)
I’m a Patrick Stuart fan. “Silent Titans” doesn’t change this.
The book’s setting, Wir-Heal, is at once English-countryside pastoral and post-modern dreary, and hopelessly warped by the presence of the titular Titans -- “quasi-living multidimensional hyper-intelligences from an unimaginably distant future”.
Think future-Cthulhus, whose nightmare-dreamings are leaking into the reality of the land under which they lie.
And what nightmares these are! Take the Predator Lane: a living highway that chases player-characters like a “wolf tracking their scent”.
Or the Radio Noise Men: “patches of screeching radio noise in humanoid shape”.
Or Targeted Individuals: “silent, people-shaped, racing heat-images”, with crosshair-ed screens for faces. Their face-screens display their target -- you! -- from a top-down, spy-satellite perspective, and this zooms in as they run towards you. They blow up when they arrive.
The anthropomorphic representation of drone warfare, as an RPG monster. Holy shit, that’s crazy good.
Dirk’s art is a joy to stare at. His stuff is so unlike anything else in RPGs currently. I also love how obviously not-made-on-a-computer it is; such a pleasure, seeing the quality of lines made by a pen touching paper.
That he doesn’t get an ENnie nomination for “Silent Titan” ’s art feels like a snub.
If there’s one quibble I have with the book, it’s this:
The art and the writing are maybe too appropriate for each other.
“Cracked concrete coast defences, iron exposed. Wrack-caked steps to crow-pecked sand”, mixed with “Fields of wrecked agricultural machines bordered by gates, hedge, barbed wire and cow traps”.
The writing is moody; the images surreal.
The art is mind-bendy in similar ways, as if reality’s perspective lines were dosed with psychedelics.
Which is brilliantly setting-appropriate. But there were times, in the reading (and in the playing; I’ve been in a “Silent Titans” campaign for some months, now), when it was hard to grok the imagery -- how a particular monster looks; what the landscape looks like; which other bit of text this bit of text is alluding to --
and I wished the art was ever so slightly more mundane, more anchored, so my literal brain could grasp things quicker.
The adventure + setting stuff feels refreshingly unfamiliar.
This would be a liability elsewhere, but “Silent Titans” understands the need to orientate GMs. Patrick spends some time discussing how to improv detail, atmosphere, and “wholeness”:
“The sense of wholeness I aim for is the same you might have walking through your hometown to the front door of your living space. You know vaguely and generally where everything is and what things would make sense to be where, but you are not obsessively considering every single small detail.”
There are also thorough takes on the principles that underlie interesting RPG encounters:
“Remember: in times of immediate danger, every spatial decision is also a moral decision.”
“If a creature has a deep, resonant poetic reason to be, for instance, “Dumb and Dangerous”, which is integrated into the world and makes sense, then so much the better. But the more important principle is that it have something interesting the PCs can DO with it.”
A good reminder! Especially for the more indulgent writers among us.
These notes alone are worth the price of admission, I think.
One of the book’s appendices is an interview with Chris McDowall, whose “Into The Odd” system “Silent Titans” uses.
It’s an insightful little chat:
PATRICK: Is “Into The Odd” a problem-solving game?
CHRIS: For me the dual cores of the game are Exploration and Problem Solving. If you do it really well then either of those can stand alone. I’ve had long chunks of sessions where there isn’t a huge amount of conflict, but the players are just enjoying “Bastion” and laughing at some ridiculous situation or character. Likewise, I’ve had sessions where the world became largely irrelevant in the face of pure dungeon problem solving, but the real magic is when you get them working together.
Both, but problem solving more clearly, are things that tabletop games still do better than videogames. No videogame offers the tactical infinity of a tabletop RPG, so whatever game I’m running I’m going to be looking at how best to focus in on that strength.
It’s one of those elements that often benefits from an absence of mechanics, rather than needing their support, so “Into The Odd” was definitely designed with that in mind.
And this bit about how “rules =/= the game”, in RPGs:
Also worth the price of admission!
My favourite thing about “Silent Titans”? It is a love letter to the place Patrick comes from:
“I created ‘Wir-Heal’ based almost entirely on the feel and impression of my home, the Wirral. Its lonely, post-industrial, ‘time-lost’ nature is my literalisation of the feel and mood of the place where I live.”
In his closing notes, Patrick explains that Hugh Lupus, a character in the book, is a real figure from the vicinity of the Wirral -- just as Legion’s Fort, the city he rules, is a phantasm of the actual city of Chester.
Ditto Mister Samuel Moreton, “who really did ride about in an omnibus with a bunch of cronies treating the Court like a street gang using legal powers it took an act of Parliament to remove. But who was not, literally, a Wolf.”
(And I know that the painted boats in Elles Mere is based on real-life painted boats Patrick encountered in some canal. I know this because I seem to remember him blogging about them? But I can’t for the life of me find that particular post.)
"Silent Titan” ’s specificity makes it a somewhat intimate work. It is a glimpse into the author’s own geography, a window into their lived reality. Patrick indulges his fascination with the Wirral peninsula; because of this, the Wirral is made fascinating to us, also.
This channeling of the personal and the specific should happen more often, in RPG works. Patrick seems to think so, too. Here he talks about the Wrecked Heptarchy, the blank setting that borders Wir-Heal:
“You almost certainly live somewhere too. Your own part of the Wrecked Heptarchy could be based on your impressions of your home. If you are the kind of imaginative introvert who usually buys this kind of thing its likely that you have already imagined your local streets as zones of adventure, that would be a good place to start.”
Get “Silent Titans” HERE.
