From Dungeon Kitsch to Dungeon Camp

I was going to do some writing -- about some people's resistance to my identification of gaming aesthetics as kitsch, about how it might be more productive to think of it in terms of the warmer category of "camp." With a huge warning sign that here, we are not talking about an aesthetic mode meant to bridge the gap between masculine and feminine, but rather, between the wonder of the child and the consciousness of the adult.

Then I went to re-read Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp" and discovered that most of the things I wanted to say, she had said, and all I had to do was change "Camp" to "Gaming" and a few other words (in blue). These aphorisms out of her list of 58 are perfect. The others are too tied to specific examples, to a view of camp based in gender and sexuality, or to camp as aesthetics rather than gaming as experience, to make them work.

1. To start very generally: Gaming is a certain mode of simulation. It is one way of imagining adventure within the world. That way, the way of Gaming, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of adversity, of stylization of "awesomeness".

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Gaming sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.

3. Not only is there a Gaming vision, a Gaming way of looking at things. Gaming is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "gamerly" movies, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Gaming eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Gaming. It's not all in the eye of the beholder.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Gaming:

MacGyver
Aurora monster models

The Transformers
Conan the Barbarian (stories, comics, film)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Kurosawa's films

6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Gaming." Or "too important," not marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Iain M. Banks are Gamerly, but not those of Margaret Atwood. Many examples of Gaming are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Gaming not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Gaming (example: the major films of Guillermo Del Toro) merits the most serious admiration and study.

8. Gaming is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in dungeons, the most typical and fully developed Gaming style. Dungeons, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of skulls, the living room which is really a habitation of disguised monsters.

10. Gaming sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp" (worth 500 gp); not a woman, but a "woman" (2nd Level, Thief). To perceive Gaming in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

16. Thus, the Gaming sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Gaming. Pure Gaming is always naive. Gaming which knows itself to be Gaming is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Gaming are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Dungeon designer who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine gaming -- for instance, the encounters devised for the TSR modules of the late seventies -- does not mean to be funny. Gaming "humor"-- say, the Order of the Stick -- does.

23. In naïve, or pure, Gaming, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Gaming. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Awesome), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of Gaming enthusiasm.)

29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Gaming in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Gaming taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Gaming sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.

41. The whole point of Gaming is to dethrone the serious. Gaming is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Gaming involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

44. Gaming proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Gamer taste cannot be overestimated. Gamer taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

53. Nevertheless, even though adolescents have been its vanguard, Gamer taste is much more than adolescent taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of adolescents. (The Gamer insistence on not being "serious," on playing, also connects with the adolescent's desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if adolescents hadn't more or less invented Gaming, someone else would. (To be precise, middle-aged men did.)

55. Gaming taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Gaming is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Gaming taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Gaming taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "player character." . . . Gaming taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a game," they're enjoying it. Gaming is a tender feeling.

57. Gaming taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Dark Dungeons (the tract) and The Big Bang Theory aren't Gaming.

58. The ultimate Gaming statement: it's good because it's awesome. . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.

Adversity Overload

Put together unicorns, rainbow colors, pixies, moonlight and mountains and sparkles and mystery.

Art by PristineDream on Deviantart.com

Does this fit the description of dungeon adventure kitsch? Not really. This picture may be fantasy overload but it's not dungeon overload because it lacks the element of adversity - or mortal menace and danger. Adversity is what you overload to stress the element of fantasy adventure.

There's a paradox in the ways adversity can be overloaded: either by leaning on obvious signifiers of danger, or by creating an environment where danger is concealed everywhere so that the lack of danger also signifies danger. Let's consider the obvious first.

Skulls on mountains (more the merrier...)

From the D&D cartoon

Snakes and daggers on skulls (tattoo flash by Hamera@deviantart):

Swords on seats ...

Spikes, spiders, sharks, crags, blades, fangs, claws, boulders, chasms, chains, bones, wolves, dragons, fire, lava, ice, lightning, lasers ... Adversity!

Now, the other way to overload adversity has something to do with this meme going around (first spotted in the hands of Jack Holt):

Why is Westeros not somewhere you'd want to go? Because unlike the other two worlds, there is no safe and cozy space there. Adversity is part of adventure, of course, but things become overloaded when it starts to appear everywhere, when players start to take it in and see it everywhere.

Adversity kitsch fuels the killer DM legends, the elaborate traps, the "Gotcha" monsters built to subvert and punish rational player behavior. Most of all it overloads deception to create omnipresent threat in adventure design, endlessly repeated in the kind of adventure-hook cheap heat where the inn is really run by werewolves, the farmhouse is really the head of a demon, the friendly talking badger is the charmed sock puppet of the arch-lich conspiracy, and the treasure, folks, is cursed.

So adversity overload taken to the extreme would present you with this ...

Which is just an illusion, luring you in to this:

And the change in character art after 2000 or so? From facing adversity, character designs now project adversity. Today they bristle with spikes and flanged armor-blades and energy auras, whereas before they were just poor working stiff adventurers plunged into Lava Skull Mountain. But this is all by way of getting at the next and final building block of dungeon kitsch: Awesomeness ...

Archaic Overload

Last time, I introduced the concepts of kitsch and overload. Although kitsch-criticism was developed by members and satellites of the Frankfurt School in the mid-20th century, it's been opposed since then, for its aesthetic and economic elitism, its stand against mass production and mass preferences. I tried to separate from the loaded term "kitsch" the concept that a work of art or imagination can have effect by overloading its impact - saturating its content in the direction of commonly accepted forms, rather than perpendicular to or away from them.

I don't think there's any argument that by whatever name, kitsch or overload is the dominant form in the aesthetics of both commercial and DIY adventure gaming. In fact, it can be broken down into three elements of style that begin with an "A". The first one is the overload of Archaism.

Archaism kitsch can be seen in the way artists choose to depict that quintessential adventure setting, the dungeon. Number one earmark is the set-dressing habit of "dungeon architecture." The classic fieldstone walls and ensconced torches have a tendency to adorn even chambers deep in the earth that should be hewn out of the living rock, and where torches would quickly consume all available oxygen, even if there were minions to replace them on the hour ...

The reason for the overload: if you just have economical 5' passages hewn through stone, they could be anything - a Cold War bunker entrance, a Minoan adit, a university steam tunnel. The stone blocks and iron-reinforced doors yell "Castle!" as loudly as they can. But this is not an inevitable choice. Here's an illustration by John Bingham, from Mouth of the Shadowvein, that manages to avoid the medieval style of Archaic dungeon overload (although doubling down on Adversity with its centipede floor):

The bas-reliefs, however, remind us that another way to convey Archaism is to raid the archaeological toybox: statues, reliefs, mosaics, skull doors and demon thrones. In fact, the default overload response to "What part of antiquity?" is "All of it." So we derive the typical adventure setting with its anachronistic cohabitation of Roman, Dark Age, High Medieval, cod-Renaissance, and Nation X imitations.

Fanciful depictions of never-were civilizations and lost races also go in the mix, the costumes and scenery derived from a mix of medieval and faux-barbaric sources, with sex appeal turned way up. Compare the standard loincloths-and-bangles "Conanesque" setting with ones such as Tekumel, drawing on similar source material, but with more originality.

Focus on any one period of history, and you lose the freedom of archaic overload. If the setting is medieval, the question becomes how medieval - fairy-tale medieval, or boils-and-rats medieval? The more representational you get when it comes to history, the more you have to worry about things that make history boring - for example, a party of freebooting adventurers would almost certainly be outlawed in every jurisdiction of a feudal society. So paradoxically, even as dungeon kitsch evokes the medieval, it also avoids its hard questions.

To illustrate -- early gaming illustrations, a stone's throw away from medieval wargaming, felt  free to present fairly realistic armaments:

David C Sutherland III

But later developments in art, as producers judged audience reactions, created a glossy, "generic antiquity" overload feel (note the introduction of fanciful elements like the feathers and armor molding in the Larry Elmore Dragonlance piece):

And still later, illustrations cranked up the depiction of the next overload element: Adversity. Yes, even on a costume. More next time.

Dungeon Kitsch

I am going to argue that much of the aesthetic of adventure gaming has evolved toward a form of kitsch.

That sounds pretty harsh. I don't mean it to be, exactly. So to start digging out of this rhetorical hole, what is kitsch? And is there a nicer term for it?

Religious kitsch

Well, first, I have picked out the first three meaningful photographs of "kitsch" that Google Images sees fit to provide, as anchor for the discussion.

Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl

Wikipedia opines: "a low-brow style of mass-produced art or design using popular or cultural icons." Oxford Dictionaries have it, "Art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way." But those are not quite adequate definitions, for me. They judge, but don't illuminate.

1950's-style kitsch wunderkammer

As it turns out, 20th century visual art critics had a lot to say about kitsch. Writing for the University of Chicago, Whitney Rugg sums up: "Kitsch tends to mimic the effects produced by real sensory experiences ... presenting highly charged imagery, language, or music that triggers an automatic, and therefore unreflective, emotional reaction." 

And further... "Milan Kundera calls this key quality of kitsch the 'second tear:' 'Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see the children running in the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running in the grass! It is the second tear which makes kitsch kitsch.'"

That's more like it. It's about the kitsch aesthetic, not about the kitsch object itself, which can be described as a mass-produced object that simulates opulence or sentiment through the easiest means. In the kitsch aesthetic, there are no defining features, because it necessarily piggybacks on an already achieved mode of culture, as Clement Greenberg remarked in 1939. There is not just kitsch, but cuteness kitsch, nostalgia kitsch, classical-music kitsch, military heroism kitsch, and so on. 

Religious kitsch uses excessive realism to depict what should be more stylized (see the Mary plaques, above), but modernity kitsch uses excessive stylization to wink and elbow-nudge its way into the future (see the 50's Populuxe furniture, above.) The Chinese Girl makes most sense as kitsch of the avant-garde; a magazine-art depiction given a banal exoticized subject and an unusual color choice that passes for sophistication.  

So, building on Kundera's definition, let's call a kitsch approach this: one that seeks to arouse the feelings most normal for its subject matter, by multiple straightforward and obvious means. 

It's this overloading that gives the echo effect, the second tear, the feeling that you are not only seeing something awesome or magnificent or sad, but you are sure that anyone else like you who sees this would also feel that way, pushing you outward into the comfort of conformity rather than inward into the doubts of introspection. It's also this overloading that gives rise to the ironic enjoyment -- climbing down from sophistication to a simpler palate, understanding why it's manipulative and in the same moment refusing to reject it entirely because it is so raw and vivid.

Now, here's that less judgmental name for kitsch -- overload -- although I may not always want to abandon the judgment entirely. And to my eye, Dungeon Overload, if you will, can be defined by its reaching for three A's: Antiquity, Awesomeness and Adversity. But that is a topic to continue next time.

It's Not Uncool, It's Normal!

One of the ways to deny the fundamental uncoolness of D&D is to strenuously insist that it's cool. This fuels a perennial struggle to find ways to bend role-playing games into this fiction. And this struggle has gotten harder over time.

I mean, there was a brief time at the start, before it got out in the mass media, when they could make like D&D was some kind of edgy activity that all the beautiful people were doing - something like Fletcher Pratt's or Norman Bel Geddes' chic Manhattan wargames:

And then ... nope, nope, nope...

Floundering ever since the stigma descended on roleplaying games in the 1980's, two escape routes have generally been tried. One is to fight against the shallower definition of "uncool," to try and purge away the fantasy content from a role-playing game. "This game is cool because it's about real things" - or about socially acceptable forms of escapism, anyway. At this task, roleplaying murder mysteries succeed; roleplaying games about rock bands fail (because only 11 year olds imagine themselves as members of a cool rock band); and some other attempts just merit a stunned silence.

Even in the art of roleplaying games we can see the struggle between the desire to go full-on socially uncool and pimp out your game like the ultimate stoner van or Manowar album cover, or to be "mature" and "restrained" and bring it in like a Blue Note sleeve. DCC RPG, in other words, versus Old School Hack or mine own 52 Pages. This may even apply to game mechanics, wherein lengthy tables and baroque calculations represent a certain disregard for the novice, while stripped-down and simple play holds out the hope that you might get Aunt Tillie to play with you yet.

The second escape route is to accept the fantasy scenario but to deny the truly "uncool" thing about roleplaying, the immersion and identification with character. So, we get the comparisons to chess or to improvisational theater. The former implies that it's just a game of strategy played with funny pieces, the latter implies that all the play-acting is not self-indulgent or self-threatening but done with professional control for an enraptured audience.

"We're storytelling!" No you're not. You're collaborating on a story through role-taking and the closest normal-people analogy is when a bunch of drama show writers get together in a room and work out what happens next ... but each of them takes on a part from the show ... and these parts continue year on year ... Really, the only truthful answer is:

"There is nothing else like it."

There's Cool, And Then There's Cool

When I say D&D is fundamentally uncool, what do I mean anyway? The word "cool" has shifted around so much that it's hard to know. It needs explanation.

A key text here is Robert Farris Thompson's article An Aesthetic of the Cool, from 1973, the journal African Arts. What is cool to the Gola of Liberia? Thompson quotes Warren D'Azevedo:

Ability to be nonchalant at the right moment ... to reveal no emotion in situations where emotion and sentimentality are acceptable - in other words, to act as if one's mind were in another world.

You may protest that transportation through fiction, fandom or gaming is just that, putting one's mind in another world, but this misses the point. Cool implies that the other world is a calmer, less emotional place. To travel to another world in order to excite the passions is the opposite of cool. "Coolness" by Thompson's definition is a poised posture, a place without conflict. By removing expression outward, you remove the possibility of interruption or ridicule inward.

Other writers on the aesthetics of cool among African Americans and its general percolation out to the world culture - such Mintz, Billson, and Pountain & Robins - have remarked on its potential as resistance. For Black men in America, cool has been a way to negate the clownish features laid on them  by racist iconography, to mentally check out from an environment unresponsive to their dignity and needs. The appropriation of cool, in the service of musical and other aesthetic trends, is laid forth in Pountain & Robins' 2000 book, auguring in the hipster era. Ultimately for them, cool is a "permanent state of private rebellion," a state that vanishes once it calls attention to its own coolness.

This reminds us that D&D is "uncool" in a more superficial sense, that of the well-known American high school hierarchy with its "cool kids" and "uncool kids." But in any high school there are two kinds of cool kids. You have the popular kids who show their passions for socially approved costumes, games, and fields of expertise like cheerleading, school spirit and sports. Another kind, though, set their sights outside the high school walls. They are cool toward school but this form of resistance masks their passions, aimed elsewhere: alternative cinema, drama, music, art. In high school and college I played RPGs almost as much with a set of punk rockers as with the more overtly enthusiastic nerd crew. They were socially uncool and yet - in the anthropological sense - truly cool.

In McLuhan's well-known distinction, roleplaying is one of the hottest of media, requiring hard mental and imaginative work to achieve the immersion that is its goal. Contrast this to "cool" media like television which ask for only open eyes. People who grow self-conscious or dissatisfied about roleplaying's hotness reach for the bottle of cool to cut it down.

By a nice coincidence, I recently returned to the RPG Site forum after some days absence to find an argument brewing, relevant to all these points. The initiating question was whether anyone enjoys playing RPGs in costume. As I pointed out last post, this activity is the quintessence of the FUDD (Fundamental Uncoolness of D&D) and so not surprisingly sparked off heated protestations. Many posters spoke of their desire not to look like even more a geek than they already were, under the watchful eyes of sarcastic co-workers or Bible Belt society.

But in an age of ubiquitous popularity of the Lord of the Rings films or Game of Thrones show, the uncool thing is not liking fantasy, but liking it in ... that way. That hot, immersive way that puts you at risk of disappearing entirely into the fantasy world, of regressing into childhood. That play-acting, masquerading, feasting and wassailing that Puritans have always sought to ban, that sensible people indulge in only at certain times of the year and in certain cities of the nation.

Bad enough you read the books instead of consuming media (getting hotter ... look what happened to poor Quijote). Bad enough you play a game where you take the role of a character (getting hotter ... look what happened to poor Black Leaf). But to run around wearing the costumes? To unselfconsciously declaim in a funny accent, your lineage as a noble dwarf? You're hot as hell and most people can't take the heat. They have to turn up the cool - in one of several ways.

Next: "We're Normal, Honest!"

The Fundamental Uncoolness of D&D

Having availed myself of the free download of Gygax and Mentzer's Temple of Elemental Evil last week, I was immediately stopped dead in my tracks by this ... well ... astounding opening salvo:

By any standard of modern game writing this looks overwrought, paid-by-the-word, hamfisted. There's the stumbling glee to get that awful, awful simile out, the blustering admonitions to players and the DM. Fluff phrases abound - "in the near future, and in the far as well"; "a very small part indeed"; "such is a role playing game." Oh boy, do we really need to be told that the module does not need to be played through all in one sitting? Or to "turn now" to a section on the same page?

But after the initial surge of mockery I stopped. Where have we heard this kind of voice before? Let's see...

In the notorious video that came packaged in TSR's Dragonstrike boardgame...

And wherever people lovingly, or not-so-lovingly, mock the D&D experience ...

Indeed, there is magic in the incantatory repetition of stock phrases - a magic that, from the outside, looks like utter tomfoolery. But a sure sign of total commitment to some world-within-a-world is that you feel free to make these literary gaffes, unselfconsciously, encouraging the listener or reader to join you in immersion. 

Think about the kinds of statements that sportscasters make in the heat of the moment, the kind of verbal fluff they put in there to fill time and keep interest going but that don't stand up too well on reconsideration: "The game will be won by the side that scores the most points" and so forth. 

There's even a term for this kind of material in storytelling: the oral-formulaic, epithets and stock phrases intended to keep bards in preliterate societies on point and on the beat. It has a transporting effect when recited as poetry, but put it on the printed page and it seems redundant and quaint, as Miguel de Cervantes observed in Don Quixote:

And of them all he considered none so good as the words of the famous Feliciano de Silva. For his brilliant style and those complicated sentences seemed to him very pearls, especially when he came upon those love-passages and challenges frequently written in the manner of: 'The reason for the unreason with which you treat my reason, so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty'; and also when he read: 'The high heavens that with their stars divinely fortify you in your divinity and make you deserving of the desert that your greatness deserves.'

The danger in this kind of language and this kind of transportation is of being uncool - losing self-possession and becoming lost in the fantasy world, looking a fool to someone who is not in on the game.

With this in hand we can understand why the Dragonstrike video is there in the game to begin. After all, it teaches no rules; it does not set the atmosphere for the story, so much as tell a version of it. If it exists to promote the game, packaging it inside the box is surely a bad move. No, it is there to advertise the fundamental uncoolness of D&D: the FUDD. Because losing your cool, one way or another, can be intensely fun.

The hammy acting and amateurish effects in that video are not just products of a budget limitation. The High Gygaxian prose is not just a stylistic affectation in need of an editor. Both serve to advertise the FUDD, much as Corman Henley has observed that the risible features of e-mail scams work to deter attention from people who would not fall for them anyway.

Once you understand and accept the FUDD, then many of the arguments and stylistic poses in modern roleplaying take on new meaning. Like pearl around an irritant, a thick layer of defenses has grown around the raw, pulsing shame of the FUDD, often becoming themselves tainted and identified with the uncoolness of the game. Otherwise reasonable people are driven to make statements like "D&D is not a roleplaying game" or dress up their games in cooled-down mid-20th century iconic graphics in their desperation to stave off the FUDD. I'll unpack these defenses more, in the coming days.

"D&D is uncool" - it's a statement as obvious as the nose on your face, yet like your nose, you're rarely aware of it. But what is uncool, or cool for that matter? Dare you follow along, as I spin a tale of how cool evolved - how, over the long years, it made the transformation from a tool of resistance to a tool of repression? For alas, the tale is long and I have not the time or space to tell it all in one go. Instead, gentle reader, stay your impatience until the next installation of our faithful web-log, and time indeed will tell whether or not the tale convinces you!

Excelsior!

Design Aesthetics: Simple, Detailed, Procedural

I'm stuck at a point in the 52 Pages houserules where I'm confronting two tasks that seem unpleasant.

Remember, the One Page Rules idea is about being simple, elegant, or at least enough for each chunk to fit on a Powerpoint slide using 18 point font. I'm coming up against two tasks where I really would prefer to do things differently  in actual play, so it's hard to honor the spirit of the 52.

One is my beloved carousing table. I want to fit a whole set of rules onto about 40% of a page. But it seems just too violent to chop down the many odd occurrences to a set of generic outcomes.

The other is the treasure page. Yes, I have an idea for a really super-simple approach to treasure that goes very well with the 52 Pages aesthetics, but again, I would prefer rolling up treasure on a big ornate multiple d100 table where I can get marten fur capes or octagon-cut chrysoprases or Dust of Sneezing and Choking.

See, there are three ways you can handle game mechanics. You can go Simple, where combat is: each side rolls d6, add modifiers, higher side wins. You can go Detailed, where combat means, each side rolls on a d100 table with modifiers and gets a result of what you do to someone else or what someone else does to you. (that would actually be pretty cool - an all-critical-hits approach to combat). Or you can do what most systems do and go Procedural, where there are complicated interactive rules that give the players the feeling they're making decisions.

Each aesthetic also has a standard.

• The Simple should be really simple - easy access, basic results. It should involve as few rolls, lookups, and choices as possible.
• The Detailed should be really detailed - easy access, complex results. Each table should really brim with spirit, options and creativity.
• The Procedural should, by that standard, make the players using it feel like they are making real choices, or should make the GM using it  feel like the world is making real choices. Difficult access, but complex, interactive and realistic results.

This map also lets us identify a no-man's land, where a procedure is complicated and at the same time estranges players from the feeling of choice. The pinnacle of this: the unplayable hyper-realistic kind of system that has flourished throughout the history of role-playing, where your hit on an opponent unleashes all kinds of weapon shear and armor abrasion and bone fragmentation, but ultimately it's all as boring as watching a pachinko ball cascade down. By the same token, offering too many options can also rob the players of the feeling of choice, as they thrash blindly about in the long period before they gain "system mastery."

How would this apply to treasure rules?

• The Simple would just dictate a random amount of treasure value by level, and what general form it is in.
• The Detailed would be a d100 x d100 table with all kinds of rare goods and magic items in there.
• The Procedural would take "treasure types" to the next level, basing treasure on what a creature would accumulate, or what would be found in the particular ruin; you could almost roll through the history of each room ("the tomb had a golden funeral mask; it was removed by robbers but the hidden sceptre was never found, and then in came the gnolls with five barrels of wine and a sack of silver coins.")

By this standard, the 52 Pages is about half simple and half procedural. And yes, as you'll see soon, that also applies to the treasure rules I'm working on. I'm pretty sure that when I finish the 52, the return of the repressed is going to compel me into blurting forth something really Detailed, like Pergamino Barocco.

Preposterawesome Cockodrills

The word "preposterawesome" came to mind while watching The Man With The Iron Fists. It also applied to my experiences watching Skyfall and The Hobbit. It is when you are aware that your disbelief is not just suspended, but in freefall without a parachute, but you somehow manage to suppress your x-ty-eight year old brain and enjoy it anyway with your eight-year-old brain.

There are some role-playing games that have it, mostly by Palladium. Whether Synnibar does remains to be seen, but one of my players was a Kickstarter backer and is making noises about GMing it (or rather, taking on the mantle of whatever preposterawesome name Synnibar has for the referee).

When preposterawesome fails it becomes either preposterawful (like Turkish Star Wars) because even an eight-year-old can see through it, or spuriawesome (like Sky Captain) because it tries so hard to be awesome but is obviously playing note by note from The Complete Idiot's Guide To Being Awesome, like roleplaying games that dole out Awesome Points!!! or make you roll Just Got Real Dice!!!

Anyway, the shining example of all time is undoubtedly Clark Ashton Smith's epic poem about being a Dungeon Master, "The Hashish Eater." The medium is "bad poetry" - the nightmare you might have after downing a Milton, Coleridge and Poe milkshake just before going to bed - but he just kills it anyway.

[...] They come,
The Sabaoth of retribution, drawn
From all dread spheres that knew my trespassing,
And led by vengeful fiends and dire alastors
That owned my sway aforetime! [...]
And griffin-mounted gods, and demons throned
On-sable dragons, and the cockodrills
That bear the spleenful pygmies on their backs;
And blue-faced wizards from the worlds of Saiph,
On whom Titanic scorpions fawn; and armies
That move with fronts reverted from the foe,
And strike athwart their shoulders at the shapes
The shields reflect in crystal; and eidola
Fashioned within unfathomable caves
By hands of eyeless peoples; and the blind
Worm-shapen monsters of a sunless world,
With krakens from the ultimate abyss,
And Demogorgons of the outer dark [...]

Demogorgons I can see ... kind of like medusas or draculas ... but ... cockodrills?

COCKODRILL

Paternal line: crocodile
Maternal line: hybrid of rooster (m) and mandrill (f)
HD: 5
AC: 3[17]
Damage: d12
Move: 9" (15" in water)
It lurks in a tree or the water and then jumps out and bites. If it gets a tasty morsel on the first bite it runs, but fights if it has no escape. Its hands can fling mud in your face if it has no better mode of ranged attack. With a spleenful pygmy as a rider (halfling with berserker morale), it overcomes its sneaking nature and fights as a fierce war steed.