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Save Versus All Wands Makes the Top Ten!

December 8, 2014, 3:51 pm
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Save Versus All Wands is honored to have been chosen as one of the Top Ten Gaming Blogs of 2014 by Jeffro Johnson of Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog and Castalia House. Jeffro revealed his choices on Friday (one by one and with much drum rolling and fanfare) on Google+ (later reposted on his blog). He also posted it on the new Recommend, where he is now an Expert reviewer.

Here is the list:
  1. Gaming Ballistic by Douglas Cole
  2. Dungeon Fantastic by Peter V. Dell’Orto
  3. Save Versus All Wands
  4. Delta’s D&D Hotspot by Delta 
  5. The Tao of D&D by Alexis Smolensk
  6. Semper Initiativus Unum by Wayne Rossi
  7. Hack & Slash by Courtney Campbell
  8. Don't Split the Party by Rick Stump
  9. RPG Snob by Jason Packer
  10. Pulsipher Game Design by Lewis Pulsipher
Jeffro commented on the methodology behind the rankings:
The shortlist came from whoever was writing stuff that I would link to on my blog. Every link was essentially a vote by me for who I enjoyed reading. However... the actual rankings came from what my own readers were clicking on. While some might quibble over the exact order, I think that these really are all together the best gaming blogs around. I certainly have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of them.
This is a super group of blogs and bloggers, and without false humility I feel a bit unworthy to be included on it. But I will proudly take credit for at least having the good taste to already be an enthusiastic reader of most of them. Being made aware of the others was a treat.

Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog: Microgames, Monster Games, and Role Playing Games contains a gold mine of material, stretching back an amazing ten years. There are hundreds of posts on Car Wars (the original focus of the blog), Traveller, other science fiction games such as Ogre and Star Fleet Battles, military wargames (a large and diverse assortment) as well as, of course, old school D&D. Jeffro sometimes posts material inspired by or about gaming with his children. These are quite funny but also wise, as well as being an inspiration for this relatively new father.

In addition, Jeffro is one of the in-house reviewers for the fantasy publisher Castalia House, where he is in the midst of a series of lengthy and detailed reviews of works by the "Appendix N" authors.

I should note that it was Jeffro who first brought up the Femen angle, quipping that mentioning Save Versus All Wands might spark a Femen protest. In return, I thought it might be fun to take advantage of my links in the radical feminist and performance artist communities and "create" one for him.

If he wants to do an interview with Pussy Riot, I might be able to set that up...

But being included on his list made my month.  

Cheers again and here's to another ten years, my friend.
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The Pros and Cons of Lulu

December 15, 2014, 12:13 am
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The original Lulu in To Sir, With Love (great movie, by the way)
Actually, the real original Lulu for me was my grandmother on my mother's side, Lucienne Foubert Chamberlin. Born in France in 1897, we called her "Lulu". Not sure if she was named that as a younger woman or whether that was her "grandmother" name. But she was French and slightly crazy. I think my grandfather, an all-American Iowa-born guy was enchanted by her. I wish I had known them together.

But of course I'm referring to Lulu, the print-on-demand publishing house.

For reasons I don't completely remember I first decided to put my new game, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen on Lulu as opposed to RPGNow. It was on Christmas day 2013. It's still there. The first mock-up I got looked amazing. Truth be told, I ordered ten sets to give to friends for the holiday. This was the "private" Zylarthen with many copyright violations. Actually, it was called "Seven Voyages of Xylarthen" (Gygax's original example character) and contained Balrogs, Beholders and all the rest. Actually, the "revised" public version that I released a few days later was, I think, superior. I like the "Z" better than the "X", and my "science-fiction" versions of the non-SRD monsters I think are actually superior (in a certain sense) to the originals. (Okay, that was a moment of serious non-humility.)

But, whether with an "X" or a "Z" the copies looked amazing. The creamy covers were exactly the shade I wanted. The saddle-stitched bindings were precisely right in terms of how they lay flat and were easily flipped through. Though the initial cost was high--$8.50 per volume (with only an average of $1.50 profit for me)--they were, in my view, perfect. I couldn't have imagined how any publisher or printing house (print-on-demand or otherwise) could have done a better job.

However, a few months later I ordered another mock-up set. It looked awful. In the interim, Lulu had changed printing factories and the saddle-stitch looked amateurish and ugly. In hindsight, this was fortuitous for me, as it prompted a switch to perfect binding, which, not only looked pretty good, but allowed me to offer it at a substantially lower price and make more profit per unit. But it taught me a useful lesson about Lulu: you never knew when they would make some change such that the physical product would come out differently. Thus mock-up or sample versions were of limited utility.

With that introduction, here are the pros and cons as I see them. Comments from other Lulu authors or customers would be welcome.

The Pros:
  1. Lulu is easy. They don't vet anything. All they need is a PDF (or two, counting the cover). If you're just a teeny-bit proficient at computers and uploading stuff, etc., you're set. Also, they're pretty expansive about formats and the minimum and maximum number of pages, and so on. If you want to, say, correct a typo or make a minor (or even a major) change in text, you simply delete the current PDF and upload the new one. This takes five or ten minutes. By contrast, I found RPGNow to be much more difficult to deal with on the front end. My initial attempt to upload stuff hung up for some reason, and I couldn't understand why. Also, they wouldn't allow me to do saddle-stitch with the size and page numbers that I desired. An RPGNow staff member contacted me to try to help me (though she made it clear that my requirements wouldn't fit in to their possible templates). She was perfectly helpful and polite. But the point is that on Lulu you didn't have to deal with anyone. You can just do it.
  2. At it's best, Lulu's physical product is great.
  3. Lulu doesn't seem to take too big a cut. I make a fair amount on my $5.95 booklets, for example (no, I won't tell you exactly how much).
  4. Lulu has periodic sales that make things much more attractive to your customers while not lowering your profits by 1 penny. This is a win-win situation for author and customer. I'm not sure what Lulu makes on these offers, but it's their call.
  5. Lulu doesn't censor their stuff and then lie about it, unlike RPGNow. (Oh, sorry. That was a political statement. Ignore if that annoys.)
The Cons:
  1. As implied above, you never know what the physical product is going to look like for your customers. It seems like Lulu is always changing printing factories, etc., or the printing operations are mercurial. The first perfect-bound booklets I ordered were biased towards the top. I considered compensating with the margins on my PDF but then figured that that might skew things in the opposite direction the next time. Sure enough, none of my customers complained about that. I ordered some additional copies for myself during the recent 35% sale. The margin bias was corrected, and the covers had more color. However the interior text looked more faint--almost as if they were trying to save ink. It was good enough, and I think worth the $5.95 price, but not ideal.
  2. Lulu doesn't allow you to bundle. Within a few weeks I will have a combined four-volume PDF of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen available, which I will sell for a price. But Lulu won't allow me to offer that along with, say, the physical booklets.
  3. The "preview" function makes your cover and pages look blurry and amateurish. Or maybe it has something to do with the format that I took advantage of. But still.
  4. RPGNow has a much larger audience, at least for game products. That may not be Lulu's fault, per se, but it still is a factor.
  5. The shipping costs seem too expensive (to me). Lulu seems to make some extra money there. And it varies. I swear that during the 35% off sale, the shipping costs seemed higher.
Look, overall, print-on-demand is positively utopian. I think Lulu is wonderful. I'm just trying to be accurate here.

Again, I'd love to hear any similar/opposed opinions.
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Review: Gamergate the Card Game

December 15, 2014, 11:14 pm
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In the interests of unbiased blogger journalism, I thought I would do areview of this game, authored by the prolific James Desborough of Postmortem Studios. As many of you know, it was the only game ever banned by OneBookShelf (RPGNow and DriveThroughRPG) and perhaps the only game (according to them) that perhaps ever would or will be banned by that same print-on-demand publisher ("banned", by the way, is their term). I wanted to see what the fuss was all about.

Full disclosure points:
  1. I'm against winning political arguments by bullying people, lying about people and smearing people (ooh, strong and controversial stand there, Spalding). I'm also against the politicization of gaming--even if it's a form of gaming I don't like and don't engage in. This inclines me to be pro-Gamergate.
  2. I don't like video games and think they're pernicious. I haven't played one seriously in fifteen years. I don't want my kids to play them, etc. Since Gamergate seems to be about the proper direction of video games, I'm not sure what side this puts me on.
  3. Partly for the above reason, I feel that I don't really know that much about the actual Gamergate controversy. Feel free to use that against me. What I do know seems to indicate that the facts are somewhat Byzantine. Then again, I'm inclined, due to the first point, to favor one side.
Okay, so on to the game. In PDF it comes to 17 pages. Most of these are images of cards you're supposed to assemble. Less than a page is rules. I skipped the rules, figuring they weren't that important. Plus, it's 11:40, my kids are still running around and I'm tired.

There are two sets of cards--one set for the "Gamergate" player and one set for the "Social Justice Warrior" player. Each card has a Title, an Actions row featuring one to four actions, three potential Ethics Breaches--Corruption, Outrage and Bulls__t, and some flavor text. For example, here is a sample Gamergate card:
  1. Title: #NotYourShield
  2. Actions: Modifier: Group, LOL, Pwned.
  3. Potential Ethics Breaches: Corruption: 1, Boosts all your Outrage and Bulls__t Attacker scores on this Ethics Breach by +1, Outrage:1, Bulls__t: 1.
  4. Flavor text: We're all fakes and sockpuppets.
I have no idea what any of this means.

So, here's a roundup of a random sample of cards, featuring the title and the flavor text only, with commentary by yours truly. Again, since I didn't read the rules, I don't understand them, and thus will not include Actions or Potential Ethics Breaches.

First, the Gamergate cards:
  1. Send E-mails!:Praise the Lord and pass the keyboard. Who is sending the emails? Who are they going to? Is it a good thing? Is the author being slightly self-deprecating about his own side?
  2. Send E-mails!: Still not censorship. Okay, I'm glad.
  3. The Internet is for Porn:Fap, fap, fap, fap. What does "fap" mean?
  4. Atheist Allies: Two words to strike horror into every heart. Atheism Plus. So, I guess there's a subset of Gamergate people who are atheists?
  5. GrimmyPoohs:Narcissistic enough to go in his own game. I think this is a self-deprecating reference by the author about himself. How hateful and misogynistic of him. That's so offensive.
  6. Inconvenient Facts:But, but, butt! "Butt"? Is that a sophomoric joke? I'll laugh in the car.
  7. Based Mum:A feminist if you're not. Not a feminist if you are. I think this is a reference to semi-pro-Gamergate journalist Christina Hoff Sommers. I remember her from when I used to subscribe to Reason. I like her.
  8. Intranet Republican:Wields the magical wig of snarkiness. Is this pro-Republican or not? I have no idea.
  9. Emperor of Politics:Total Shill. I think this is a reference to a pro-Gamergate guy who also seems to be anti-Israel. Subtract one from my bias towards Gamergate. Is "Total Shill" what his opponents call him or what the author thinks of him? No idea.
And so on.

And now the Social Justice Cards:
  1. Right Wing:Because your stance on abortion is totes relevant to vidya. Absolutely no idea what this means.
  2. Anime Avatar:Nobody can take you seriously with an anime avatar. I guess so. (That's SO offensive!)
  3. Dox: It's OK when we do it. I think I understand the point here, and I agree with it.
  4. Mass Censorship:You shut up, and you shut up, and you shut up, and you and you and you! Again, I think I understand the point. I'm against it.
  5. Bumbirinas:Transexual otter kin with Bod head mates will not put up with this! Again, no idea, but it sounds like it's an insult directed against a subset of transsexuals on the anti-Gamergate side.  The author obviously should be drawn and quartered for this. Slowly. How dare he?
  6. P__sbaby:I prefer 'Urinary Infant'. That's disgusting.
  7. S__tlord:I prefer 'Turd Emperor'. Even more disgusting. I have no idea what it means.
  8. Ethical Policy:Not an option Apparently. Okay, I get it. Desborough believes that anti-Gamergate people have no Ethical Policies. (Did I get that right?) That's SO offensive. Pardon me if I boycott anyone that doesn't instantly agree.
  9. But we won an Award!OK, so we fixed the result, but...shiny! Hey, I like Firefly too. I'm hip.
And so on.

To summarize: Gamergate the card game appears to be a super-inside joke that satirizes both sides, though with an obvious bias towards one.

According to Steve Wieck at OneBookShelf, it's the most awful, horrific and offensive thing they have ever hosted (worse than a game about torturing people to death, among other things). They banned it only after huddling together for a few days and thinking deep thoughts about social responsibility balanced against freedom of speech, etc., etc., etc. For Wieck, the game is equivalent to laughing about (according to his terms) racist police shooting down innocent African American teenagers.

That's:
  1. Disgusting
  2. Dishonest
  3. Ridiculous
  4. Unreasonable
  5. Insane
  6. Cowardly
  7. A threat to freedom of speech, freedom of thought and pretty much anything else you can put after "freedom of".
  8. Evil
I spent $3.50 on the game through this site. Anyone who is against bullying and lies should consider doing the same. Obviously I will never "play" the game. That's not the point.

This is the place where I might write "Fight On!". But I'm too depressed. They want to bring their smutty, dirty politics and Brown Shirt bullying tactics into tabletop gaming. You and I don't want that. But what do we do? If we don't resist, they win. If we do resist, we dirty ourselves by getting "political", just like them. Or so it seems.

I don't know the answer. 
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OSR Art Friday: The Lace & Steel Illustrations of Donna Barr

December 19, 2014, 11:37 pm
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From the original box cover

I bought the first edition of Lace & Steel--the game of faux-17th century swashbuckling and fancy court balls--in 1989, after seeing it on the shelf and flipping though it for thirty seconds. I never played it, but it has always enchanted me. Recently I realized that one of the reasons for that was its art. Unusual for its type, all of the illustrations are by one artist, Donna Barr. In addition, and also, somewhat unusually for the category, the pages are drenched in illustrations of all kinds. There are approximately 200 pages, distributed over four booklets. There are many full-page and even two-page drawings but also a huge number of smaller ones averaging out to at least three a page. Large-scale battles, duels, ladies and gentlemen at leisure or at fancy balls, monsters--warnets (intelligent giant hornets), pixies, harpies and "half-horses" (centaurs), to name a few--landscapes and maps, individual weapons, armor pieces or clothing, as well as musketeers with hangovers making faces into mirrors in the morning, are all covered.

In a roundabout way, Lace & Steel was one of the inspirations for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen. I wanted to make a 17th century "Lace & Steel" version of OD&D. That became a 16th century pseudo-Catholic version, which finally became a more conventional swords & sorcery-fairy tale version. But a few things from Lace & Steel survived almost intact--for example, the idea of using physical tokens to represent money in the game:
The author has found that a new dimension is added to game play when a player character’s funds are simulated by solid objects. One or two cent pieces can simulate copper groats, and heavy washers make good silver and gold pieces. Washers or disks can be had from any hardware store. Go for big washers (20 to 25mm is good) with small central holes, such as muffler washers. Brass washers are used for gold marks, and steel washers for silver schillings. 
“Real” money is excellent fun to use, and players soon develop odd habits such as fondling their money or stacking it into neat little piles. Parting with money can be a traumatic experience for miserly players, since they are handing over a physical object rather than just crossing a number off a piece of paper. Players will also tend to keep a less ready tag on their wealth, which adds a bit of spice to play.
A man bathing in coins
But to get back to the art. Is it OSR? Well, the game itself--authored by the still active Paul Kidd--certainly features some supposed new school elements, such as skills. But it is twenty-five years old, released at a time when 1e AD&D was still (barely) the standard. And to me, the evocative line-drawings of Donna Barr are the polar-opposites of the video-gamish color splatterings of most contemporary RPG art. But in any case, OSR Art Friday was never intended to be ideologically rigid (whatever that might mean in this context). And part of the fun is to choose a diverse variety of examples. Donna Barr's drawings are cool. They work. In the end, that's what matters.

Who is Donna Barr? One way to get to know her is to read her long-running and frequently updated blog. As many of you know, she's an incredibly prolific and still very active writer and illustrator, known primarily for comic books or "graphic novels" (though, she prefers the label "drawn-fiction"). Her output is distinctive. Her major works or series are The Desert Peach--about Erwin Rommel's fictional brother Pfirsich, a an exuberantly homosexual Nazi general who leads a North African unit of homosexuals and assorted misfits--Stinz--about centaurs or "half-horses" interacting with normal men in a stylized German valley setting--and Bosom Enemies about two normal men who find themselves enslaved and transformed into half-horses. Obviously there's a sexual subtext to much of her material (also involving animals or, rather people that are half-animals), but without (on the main) being graphic or pornographic. Let us say, she at least occupies a niche. (Occupies? Scratch that. She dominates it and then uses it as a bridgehead.)
Musketeer with hangover making faces into his mirror in the morning
Wait, Nazis? Flamboyant, leather-clad, homosexual Nazis (that are to some extent made fun of, albeit affectionately), sexual themes involving animals or people half-way transformed into animals and then quasi-sexually dominated by other people?

BAN IT! BAN IT! BAN IT! BAN IT!

(Oh, sorry. I was temporarily seized by the spirit of the age.)

Emphasizing the sexual part doesn't do the whole justice. Her series are witty and funny and at times moving and, yes, profound. See for yourself if you can.

In the late 1980's she also did some drawings for Traveller and GURPS. But her work for Lace & Steel was her key RPG effort. That the game is now on the main forgotten does not diminish its value or influence. For example, I would be surprised if James Raggi did not riff off of it for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Used copies of the first edition are now hard to find and expensive. A second edition came out in 1998 but featured an inferior cover and a somewhat different one-volume layout. Inexplicably it discarded many of the best and largest drawings.

Donna Barr is an asset, one of the best going in the wider hobby. OSR Art Friday is proud to feature her.
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Gold Pieces Are Now Falling From Heaven

December 21, 2014, 3:01 pm
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The Introit of the Tridentine Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Advent begins with this extraordinary verse from Isaiah 45, 8:
Rorate caeli, sesuper, et nubes pluant justum: aperiatur terra, et germinet Salvatorem.
Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the earth be opened and bud forth a Saviour.
Dom Dominic Johner in his Chants of the Vatican Gradual provides this commentary, including the curious and evocative description of the post title:
What would this earth be without the Messias? A desert, an uncharted and arid waste scorched by the sun, having not one little flower or blade of grass. If new life is to spring forth, the ground must be cultivated, the clouds must send down their rain, the fructifying rain which is so valuable that the Portuguese say of the summer showers: "Gold pieces are now falling from heaven." Oh, that it might come, this rain, to penetrate into the hearts of men and awaken new life! Would that the clouds might have mercy! For the Israelites the concept of cloud was full of deep meaning: in the column of cloud God led His people through the desert; veiled by clouds He manifested Himself on Sinai; in a cloud the glory of the Most High descended upon the Temple which Solomon had built. Clouds are the symbol and the containers of life-giving rain, as well as of the grace of redemption which comes down to us from the heights of heaven, and of all the benefits and glories of the new kingdom of the Messias. When these clouds open, new life will bud forth (germinet) about Nazareth, a life of unusual beauty, rich in blossoms and fruits. We implore the descent of the Just One from heaven. But His justice will not make His countenance the less benevolent, nor His eyes the less loving. He comes not to reproach, not to drive sin-laden man away in confusion; He comes as the Saviour, calling to Himself all who are weary or burdened.
(Referenced by the Traditionalist Catholic Blog Rorate Caeli on the occasion of its ninth anniversary.)
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Alignment in OD&D and Zylarthen, Part I

December 22, 2014, 1:46 pm
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From The Dragon No. 39. Guess what alignment he is.

In these posts, I won’t be tracing or debating the changes, variances or related minutia of alignment through the editions—such as the three-point vs. five point vs. nine point systems, or the alignment languagesquestion, etc. Rather, I want to look at the notion of alignment in general.

The basic idea goes something like this (these are my words, not text contained in any edition):
Each player-character must at the start of play choose a moral outlook, called an “alignment”, which will guide and to some degree limit the choices and actions of the character within the game. Alignment, along with class and race will be one of the factors to take into consideration for proper “role-playing”.
I actually think alignment is one of the more consistent things through the various editions of Dungeons & Dragons (again, if one ignores changes at the margins such as whether there are three, five, nine or how ever many of them), so there isn’t any old school vs. new school issue here. True to form, though, OD&D had only a few lines on the matter—as opposed to the pages often spent on it in later editions:
Before the game begins it is not only necessary to select a role, but it is also necessary to determine what stance the character will take - Law, Neutrality, or Chaos…Character types are limited as follows by this alignment. Men & Magic, p. 9.
Oddly, the text then immediately switches focus to monster (not character) types, presenting three lists that outline the alignments of the various intelligent monsters. Here is the full text, including that of the above:



Note that most monsters appear on only one list. A few appear on two—either Law and Neutrality or Chaos and Neutrality—but only one—Men—appear on all three. (Technically, Lycanthropes are also on all three but that’s only because, as we’ll find out later, there are different types of them.) That there is no underline for the "Men" under Neutrality or Chaos is I assume a mistake. 

Precisely what is meant by taking a stance, or perhaps more importantly, what is meant by the labels Law, Neutrality or Chaos is not explained. Obviously, though, the composition of the lists says a lot—Unicorns and Patriarchs are Lawful, Evil Priests and Vampires are Chaotic, etc.* A bit more about alignment will be sketched in later in discussions of some of the spells and the properties of magic swords (of all things). For example, for the spell Reincarnation, we learn that a character may only be reincarnated as a creature of the same alignment.

The major points that emerge from the full text are these:

  1. Law and Chaos appear to at least track good and evil (whether they are precisely equivalent to them is left unsaid).
  2. One's alignment is pretty fundamental to one's being. It might change (perhaps as a result of a cursed item) but that would be a big deal.
  3. For Player-characters alignment is an individual choice, made early—at the time of character creation.
  4. However, for all except player-characters and perhaps some important non-player characters, alignment seems to be a collective thing. For most races, every member of that race will (it is implied) be of the same alignment. And even for those races that can vary, the variance seems to go by group. For example, in the “Men” category, Dervishes are Lawful while Pirates are Chaotic.
What is wrong with this scheme? What is right with it? Did I do anything differently in Seven Voyages of Zylarthen? More in Part II...


*Wikipedia fib alert: the entry for Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons) reads “Dwarves were Lawful and elves Chaotic, while humans could be any of the three alignments. [citation needed].” Actually, as the above makes clear, both Dwarves and Elves are listed as being potentially either Lawful or Neutral (along with Gnomes and Rocs). Good luck on that citation.
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Free Zylarthen Is About To Go Away

December 23, 2014, 12:14 am
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This isn't a sales pitch. Actually, sort of the opposite.

I launched the public version of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen on Christmas Day, 2013. So, it's been almost a year. The game itself isn't vanishing anywhere. Indeed, I intend to support and evangelize for the game with a vengeance!  But the free PDF version is about to disappear, at least for the time being. That's because I'm shortly going to offer a combined PDF of all four booklets, bookmarked and with some possible "extras", for a price. In another location I said this would happen at Christmas, but that's probably a bit early. And is Christmas really the time to take away a free thing? New Year's? We'll see. But the clock is ticking.

If you like the game, or at least want to possess a copy, you still have at least a few days to get it for free on Lulu. Obviously, the "priced" version isn't going to bankrupt anyone, but free is free. So go for it now if you are so inclined.

Thank you first of all to those who purchased the physical booklets. I really appreciate it. Sure, I can't say that I've made $100 an hour on the thing. But that last Lulu check came in handy, I'll tell you that. The physical booklets will always be available, although I am exploring every option to offer them at the highest possible quality for the lowest possible price (consistent with the fact that I have six hungry mouths to feed). Additional Zylarthen material in the form of adventures and supplements in either PDF and/or physical form is also on the horizon.

But thanks, secondly, to those who have downloaded the game, especially if you have spread the word. Here at Campion and Clitherow (the Saints names of my wife and I) we are incredibly grateful for the positive "buzz" the game has received. I have appreciated every comment, criticism and play report I have seen.
Happy dungeoneering! Guard the innocent! Avenge the wronged! May you find heaps of gold at the end of your path, or at the least a memorable and heroic demise! But above all, God grant that you find wonder everywhere!
Zylarthen is my testament and tribute to Gygax and Arneson's original conception. I hope (in whatever format) you enjoy it.
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Alignment in OD&D and Zylarthen, Part II

December 23, 2014, 10:27 pm
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One of the greatest of the Appendix N novels
So the first comment on the last post by Reverance Pavane (aka Ian Borchardt) asked some great questions that deserve more detailed answers than I initially gave. I'd like to reprint the comment in full here:
I think you are starting out with an assumption here brought on from later editions that alignment is actually "a moraloutlook." I personally don't think morality came into it until the Good/Evil dichotomy was introduced in Greyhawk. Before this it was what it literally said it was - an alignment with a faction - whether that was the seelie/unseelie of Andersons'A Broken Sword, the eternal battle of Moorcock's Elric series, or even something as obscure as the reality/unreality of Brunner's Traveller in Black. 
That being said people generally prefer order ("may you live in interesting times" is a curse for a very good reason) so Law often gets equated with being a desirable or good quality. The fact that many "monsters" are in the Chaos list make it inherently bad. 
My personal response to the original OD&D list was to consider Law to be akin to civilisation, and Chaos to be akin to the wilderness. (Although to be more precise the Chaos elements were those who either raided civilisation or directly opposed the expansion of civilization. ) As more and more of the wilderness is conquered and brought to order and settled it moves from Chaos to Law. The traditional dungeons, for example, could be considered bastions of Chaos. (This follows more of the Brunner model.)
I'm going to break this down into two questions about alignment in OD&D:
  1. Is alignment a moral outlook as opposed to (merely) an alliance with a "side"?
  2. Is Law vs. Chaos equivalent to, or does it at least track (in some fairly close sense) Good vs. Evil?
Now, I think Ian is right that by the time we get to the AD&D Players Handbook (1978), it was a moral outlook, which doesn't mean it necessarily started out that way in 1974. AD&D also introduced a nine-point alliance scheme, which explicitly contrasted the concepts of Law and Chaos with Good and Evil, and this was foreshadowed in Basic D&D (1977) with the five-point system. But this leaves unanswered the meaning of the terms before that, as well as in the Moldvay/Cook, Basic/Expert set (1981) a few years later, which reverted to the three-point system).

Also, Ian is correct in claiming that there might be a difference between successive iterations of OD&D, for example, between the first edition "The Three Little Brown Books" (1974) and Greyhawk (1975). Among other things, it might be the case that Greyhawk was a sort of bridge between the original edition and AD&D.

Let's go to the sources. First, two from Appendix N (fantasy authors and texts that Gary Gygax explicitly cited as inspirations for D&D)--Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961) and Michael Moorcock's Elric series (1961-). Here we'll crib somewhat from Jon Peterson's Playing at the World. Then we'll look at the text from to Chainmail (1971-), The Three Little Brown Books, Greyhawk and an article Gygax wrote in The Strategic Review (1976). I've read both Anderson and Moorcock but it's been a while. (No, I'm not going to reread them for this blog post.) So I'm going to rely somewhat for quotes and such on Peterson's book.

In Three Hearts and Three Lions a Danish anti-Nazi resistance fighter, Holger Carlson, finds himself transported to an alternate universe early middle-ages, where he becomes involved in a struggle between Law and Chaos. Most humans are on the side of Law, whereas elves, trolls, giants and many other monstrous creatures are on the side of Chaos. Some are neutral between the two, such as the swanmay, Alianora, whom Holger will fall in love with. Later, after he is transported back to 20th century Europe, he decides that the struggle between Law and Chaos is being fought or refought as the current war between the Allied powers and the Nazis.

Now, here the focus is obviously on sides. "Holger is frequently questioned about his allegiances: 'Which side be ye on? Law or Chaos,' Alianora asks him, to which he replies, after hesitating, 'Law, I suppose'" (Peterson, p. 181). Chaos has it's ugly and monstrous components, but it is also frequently attractive, at least superficially, exemplified by the sexually seductive elves. So while Chaos may certainly track evil, its partisans do not all go around dressed in black with skulls on their standards. That Law and Chaos are more sides and not precisely moral outlooks is apparent in the fact that Holger--an adult man who has obviously already made some important moral choices in his life--has to identify them and (so it seems) decide between them, as opposed to just being one or the other.

But these sides are not independent of personal moral behavior.
The most striking illustration of this in the novel is the incident where Holger, mindful of his missed opportunities for dalliance with the Faerie, surreptitiously palpates the breast of the sleeping Alianora--not exactly at his most pious. Virtually as soon as he does so, the party is attacked by a giant, whom Holger attempts to repel by invoking the names of the Holy Trinity. The giant replies dismissively, "Too late for that, mortal, when you've broken the good circle by your sinful wishes and not yet made act of contrition" (Peterson, p. 184).
Here and elsewhere, Chaos is linked (to a large extent) with sin and evil conduct, while Law is identified with Christian morality.

Moorcock, in his Elric series, also features a struggle between Law and Chaos. But as befits a 1960's-ish New Wavy skeptical leftist (that's not a criticism as much as I think a relatively accurate characterization) has a moral metaphysics that is a bit more, shall we say, nuanced. The hero, or more precisely anti-hero, Elric, has a Chaotic god as a patron, and carries a sword "forged by Chaos to vanquish Chaos" (Peterson, p. 182). So he variously "allies" as well as fights against both sides. Whether these sides can be slapped with the labels "Good" and "Evil" is questionable or perhaps merely semantic. Moorcock is at least coy here by flirting with the conventional interpretation, calling the Lords of Chaos "the Dukes of Hell".  However, Moorcock seems to imply that peace resides in keeping a "Balance" between the two (Peterson pp. 182-3). And while Elric is certainly not a paragon of conventional virtue, the thrust of the series is that individual moral conduct is in any case somewhat separate from the "eternal struggle" of Law and Chaos.

While Anderson's and Moorcock's conceptions of Law vs. Chaos are quite different, I'm going to jump ahead and put my cards on the table right now. However one comes down on themeaning of the terms(and we'll shortly see what OD&D and Zylarthen have to say about that), labeling the struggle as one between "Law vs. Chaos" as opposed to labeling it as "Good vs. Evil" just sounds cooler.

What's wrong with cooler?

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The God in the Cave: Guest Post by G.K. Chesterton

December 25, 2014, 1:00 am
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Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerard van Honthorst

This is Chapter 1 of Part 2 (On the Man Called Christ) of Chesterton's brilliant The Everlasting Man, published in 1925. It is without a doubt one of the most fascinating and useful books on Christ and Christianity ever penned. If that's up your alley and you haven't yet made an acquaintance with this book, then: Read it. Read about it. Or buy it.

Chesterton was as orthodox a Christian and then Catholic as one could imagine. That said, so much of what he wrote on the subject was unique, skewed (in a good way) and utterly original. Enjoy and Happy Christmas!

This sketch of the human story began in a cave; the cave which popular science associates with the cave-man and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals. The second half of human history, which was like a new creation of the world, also begins in a cave. There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present; for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem; who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night. It was here that a homeless couple had crept underground with the cattle when the doors of the crowded caravanserai had been shut in their faces; and it was here beneath the very feet of the passersby, in a cellar under the very floor of the world, that Jesus Christ was born But in that second creation there was indeed something symbolical in the roots of the primeval rock or the horns of the prehistoric herd. God also was a CaveMan, and, had also traced strange shapes of creatures, curiously colored upon the wall of the world; but the pictures that he made had come to life.

A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded. It is at least like a jest in this; that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see. He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated; and mildly condemns as improbable something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible; as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true. When that contrast between the cosmic creation and the little local infancy has been repeated, reiterated, underlined, emphasized, exulted in, sung, shouted, roared, not to say howled, in a hundred thousand hymns, carols, rhymes, rituals pictures, poems, and popular sermons, it may be suggested that we hardly need a higher critic to draw our attention to something a little odd about it; especially one of the sort that seems to take a long time to see a joke, even his own joke. But about this contrast and combination of ideas one thing may be said here, because it is relevant to the whole thesis of this book. The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in education. That sort of man is never tired of telling us that first impressions fix character by the law of causation; and he will become quite nervous if a child's visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colors on a golliwog or his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle. Yet he will think us very narrow-minded, if we say that this is exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a Jew or a Moslem or an atheist. T he difference is that every Catholic child has learned from pictures, and even every Protestant child from stones, this incredible combination of contrasted ideas as one of the very first impressions on his mind. It is not merely a theological difference. It is a psychological difference which can outlast any theologies It really is, as that sort of scientist loves to say about anything, incurable. Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether be likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savor of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God. But the two ideas are not naturally or necessarily combined. They would not be necessarily combined for an ancient Greek or a Chinaman, even for Aristotle or Confucius. It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten. It has been created in our minds by Christmas because we are Christians; because we are psychological Christians even when we are not theological ones. In other words, this combination of ideas has emphatically, in the much disputed phrase, altered human nature. There is really a difference between the man who knows it and the man who does not. It may not be a difference of moral worth, for the Moslem or the Jew might be worthier according to his lights; but it is a plain fact about the crossing of two particular lights, the conjunction of two stars in our particular horoscope. Omnipotence and impotence, or divinity and infancy, do definitely make a sort of epigram which a million repetitions cannot turn into a platitude. It is not unreasonable to call it unique.

Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet. Here begins, it is needless to say, another mighty influence for the humanization of Christendom. If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yet it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a newborn child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a newborn child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a newborn child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother, you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows I as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.

It might be suggested, in a somewhat violent image, that nothing had happened in that fold or crack in the great gray hills except that the whole universe had been turned inside out. I mean that all the eyes of wonder and worship which had been turned outwards to the largest thing were now. turned inward to the smallest. The very image will suggest all that multitudinous marvel of converging eyes that makes so much of the colored Catholic imagery like a peacock's tail., But it is true in a sense that God who bad been only a circumference was seen as a centre; and a centre is infinitely small. It is true that the spiritual spiral henceforward works inwards instead of outwards, and in that sense is centripetal and not centrifugal. The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of little things. But its traditions in art and' literature and popular fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has been said, this particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle Perhaps they have not so clearly emphasized the significance o f the divine being in the cave. Curiously enough, indeed, tradition has not very clearly emphasized the cave. It is a familiar fact that the Bethlehem scene has been represented in every possible setting of time and country, of landscape and architecture; and it is a wholly happy and admirable fact that men have conceived it as quite different according to their different individual traditions and tastes. But while all have realized that it was a stable, not so many have realized that it was a cave. Some critics have even been so silly as to suppose that there was some contradiction between the stable and the cave; in which case they cannot know much about caves or stables in Palestine. As they see differences that are not there, it is needless to add that they do not see differences that are there. When a well-known critic says, for instance, that Christ being born in a rocky cavern is like Mithras having sprung alive out of a rock, it sounds like a parody upon comparative religion. There is such a thing as the point of a story, even if it is a story in the sense of a lie. And the notion of a hero appearing, like Pallas from the brain of Zeus, mature and without a mother, is obviously the very opposite of the idea of a god being born like an ordinary baby and entirely dependent on a mother. Whichever ideal we might prefer, we should surely see that they are contrary ideals. It is as stupid to connect them because they both contain a substance called stone as to identify the punishment of the Deluge with the baptism in the Jordan because they both contain a substance called water. Whether as a myth or a mystery, Christ was obviously conceived as born in a hole in the rocks primarily because it marked the position of one outcast and homeless. Nevertheless it is true, as I have said, that the cave has not been so commonly or so clearly used as a symbol as the other realities that surrounded the first Christmas.

And the reason for this also refers to the very nature of that new world. It was in a sense the difficulty of a new dimension. Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most modes of artistic expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on different levels of life. Something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the less they could depict at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled about the streets a theater with three stages one above the other, with heaven above the earth and hell under the earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.

There is in that alone the touch of a revolution, as of the world turned upside down. It would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw bad upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast. It is profoundly true to say that after that moment there could be no slaves. There could be and were people bearing that legal title, until the Church was strong enough to weed them out, but there could be no more of the pagan repose in the mere advantage to the state of keeping it a servile state. Individuals became important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man's end. All this popular and fraternal element in the story has been rightly attached by tradition to the episode of the Shepherds; the hinds who found themselves talking face to face with the princes of heaven. But there is another aspect of the popular element as represented by the shepherds which has not perhaps been so fully developed; and which is more directly relevant here.

Men of the people, like the shepherds, men of the popular tradition, had everywhere been the makers of the mythologies. It was they who had felt most directly, with least check or chill from philosophy or the corrupt cults of civilization, the need we have already considered; the images that were adventures of the imagination; the mythology that was a sort of search the tempting and tantalizing hints of something half human in nature; the dumb significance of seasons and special places. They bad best understood that the soul of a landscape is a story and the soul of a story is a personality. But rationalism had already begun to rot away these really irrational though imaginative treasures of the peasant; even as systematic slavery had eaten the peasant out of house and home. Upon all such peasantries everywhere there was descending a dusk and twilight of disappointment, in the hour when these few men discovered what they sought. Everywhere else Arcadia was fading from the forest. Pan was dead and the shepherds were scattered like sheep. And though no man knew it, the hour was near which was to end and to fulfill all things; and though no man heard it, there was one far-off cry in an unknown tongue upon the heaving wilderness of the mountains. The shepherds had found their Shepherd.

And the thing they found was of a kind with the things they sought. The populace had been wrong in many things; but they had not been wrong in believing that holy things could have a habitation and that divinity need not disdain the limits of time and space. And the barbarian who conceived the crudest fancy about the sun being stolen and hidden in a box, or the wildest myth about the god being rescued and his enemy deceived with a stone, was nearer to the secret of the cave and knew more about the crisis of the world, than all those in the circle of cities round the Mediterranean who had become content with cold abstractions or cosmopolitan generalizations; than all those who were spinning thinner and thinner threads of thought out of the transcendentalism of Plato or the orientalism of Pythagoras. The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic; it was not a place of myths allegorized or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true. Since that hour no mythologies have been made in the world. Mythology is a search.

We all know that the popular presentation of this popular story, in so many miracle plays and carols, has given to the shepherds the costume, the language, and the landscape of the separate English and European countryside. We all know that one shepherd will talk in a Somerset dialect or another talk of driving his sheep from Conway towards the Clyde. Most of us know by this time bow true is that error, how wise, how artistic, how intensely Christian and Catholic is that anachronism. But some who have seen it in these scenes of medieval rusticity have perhaps not seen it in another sort of poetry, which it is sometimes the fashion to call artificial rather than artistic. I fear that many modem critics Will see only a faded classicism in the fact that men like Crashaw and Herrick conceived the shepherds of Bethlehem under the form of the shepherds of Virgil. Yet they were profoundly right; and in turning their Bethlehem play into a Latin Eclogue they took up one of the most important links in human history. Virgil, as we have already seen, does stand for all that saner heathenism that had overthrown the insane heathenism of human sacrifice; but the very fact that even the Virgilian virtues and the sane heathenism were in incurable decay is the whole problem to which the revelation to the shepherds is the solution. If the world bad ever had the chance to grow weary of being demoniac, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it bad grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen, except what did happen? Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a prophecy of what did happen.

But it is quite as much in the tone and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy . . . . . Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem . . . . . They might have found in that strange place all that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better than a wooden idol standing up forever for the pillar of the human family; a household god. But they and all the other mythologists would be justified in rejoicing that the event had fulfilled not merely the mysticism but the materialism of mythology. Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation. With something of the ancient voice that was supposed to have rung through the groves, it could cry again, 'We have seen, he hath seen us, a visible god.' So the ancient shepherds might have danced, and their feet have been beautiful upon the mountains, rejoicing over the philosophers. But the philosophers had also heard.

It is still a strange story, though an old one, bow they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages. They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have bad their reward. But even in order to understand that reward, we must understand that for philosophy as much as mythology, that reward was the completion of the incomplete.

Such learned men would doubtless have come, as these learned men did come, to find themselves confirmed in much that was true in their own traditions and right in their own reasoning. Confucius would have found a new foundation for the family in the very reversal of the Holy Family; Buddha would have looked upon a new renunciation, of stars rather than jewels and divinity than royalty. These learned men would still have the right to say, or rather a new right to say, that there was truth in their old teaching. But after all these learned men would have come to learn. They would have come to complete their conceptions with something they had not yet conceived; even to balance their imperfect universe with something they might once have contradicted. Buddha would have come from his impersonal paradise to worship a person. Confucius would have come from his temples of ancestor-worship to worship a child.

We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it was larger than the old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than creation; as creation had been before Christ. It included things that had not been there; it also included the things that bad been there. The point happens to be well illustrated in this example of Chinese piety, but it would be true of other pagan virtues or pagan beliefs. Nobody can doubt that a reasonable respect for parents is part of a gospel in which God himself was subject in childhood to earthly parents. But the other sense in which the --parents were subject to him does introduce an idea that is not Confucian. The infant Christ is not like the infant Confucius; our mysticism conceives him in an immortal infancy. I do not know what Confucius would have done with the Bambino, had it come to life in his arms as it did in the arms of St. Francis. But this is true in relation to all the other religions and philosophies; it is the challenge of the Church. The Church contains what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma. Where is the Holy Child amid the Stoics and the ancestor-worshippers? Where is Our Lady of the Moslems, a woman made for no man and set above all angels? Where is St. Michael of the monks of Buddha, rider and master of the trumpets, guarding for every soldier the honor of the sword? What could St. Thomas Aquinas do with the mythology of Brahmanism, he who set forth all the science and rationality and even rationalism of Christianity? Yet even if we compare Aquinas with Aristotle, at the other extreme of reason, we shall find the same sense of something added. Aquinas could understand the most logical parts of Aristotle; it is doubtful if Aristotle could have understood the most mystical parts of Aquinas.

Even where we can hardly call the Christian greater, we are forced to call him larger. But it is so to whatever philosophy or heresy or modern movement we may turn. How would Francis the Troubadour have fared among the Calvinists, or for that matter among the Utilitarians of the Manchester School? Yet men like Bossuet and Pascal could be as stern and logical as any Calvinist or Utilitarian. How would St. Joan of Arc, a woman waving on men to war with the sword, have fared among the Quakers or the Doukhabors or the Tolstoyan sect of pacifists? Yet any number of Catholic saints have spent their lives in preaching peace and preventing wars. It is the same with all the modern attempts at Syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the Creed without leaving something out. I do not mean leaving out something divine but something human; the flag or the inn or the boy's tale of battle or the hedge at the end of the field. The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the -point of history. refusal of the Christians that was the turning If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and an appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broad-mindedness and. the brotherhood of all religions.

Here it is the important point that the Magi, who stand for mysticism and philosophy, are truly conceived as seeking something new and even as finding something unexpected. That tense sense of crisis which still tingles in the Christmas story and even in every Christmas celebration, accentuates the idea of a search and a discovery. The discovery is, in this case, truly a scientific discovery. For the other mystical figures in the miracle play; for the angel and the mother, the shepherds and the soldiers of Herod, there may be aspects both simpler and more supernatural, more elemental or more emotional. But the Wise Men must be seeking wisdom; and for them there must be a light also in the intellect. And this is the light; that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal. Had Plato and Pythagoras and Aristotle stood for an instant in the light that came out of that little cave, they would have known that their own light was not universal.

It is far from certain, indeed, that they did not know it already. Philosophy also, like mythology, bad very much the air of a search. It is the realization of this truth that gives its traditional majesty and mystery to the figures of the Three Kings; the discovery that religion is broader than philosophy and that this is the broadest of religions, contained within this narrow space. The Magicians were gazing at the strange pentacle with the human triangle reversed; and they have never come to the end of their calculations about it. For it is the paradox of that group in the cave, that while our emotions about it are of childish simplicity, our thoughts about it can branch with a never-ending complexity. And we can never reach the end even of our own ideas about the child who was a father and the mother who was a child.

We might well be content to say that mythology had come with the shepherds and philosophy with the philosophers; and' that it only remained for them to combine in the recognition of religion. But there was a third element that must not be ignored and one which that religion forever refuses to ignore, in any revel or reconciliation. There was present in the primary scenes of the drama that Enemy that had rotted the legends with lust and frozen the theories into atheism, but which answered the direct challenge with something of that more direct method which we have seen in the conscious cult of the demons. In the description of that demon-worship, of the devouring detestation of innocence shown in the works of its witchcraft and the most inhuman of its human sacrifice, I have said less of its indirect and secret penetration of the saner paganism; the soaking of mythological imagination with sex; the rise of imperial pride into insanity. But both the indirect and the direct influence make themselves felt in the drama of Bethlehem. A ruler under the Roman suzerainty, probably equipped and surrounded with the Roman ornament and order though himself of eastern blood, seems in that hour to have felt stirring within him the spirit of strange things. We all know the story of how Herod, alarmed at some rumor of a mysterious rival, remembered the wild gesture of the capricious despots of Asia and ordered a massacre of suspects of the new generation of the populace. Everyone knows the story; but not everyone has perhaps noted its place in the story of the strange religions of men. Not everybody has seen the significance even of its very contrast with the Corinthian columns and Roman pavement of that conquered and superficially civilized world. Only, as the purpose in his dark spirit began to show and shine in the eyes of the Admen, a seer might perhaps have seen something like a great gray ghost that looked over his shoulder; have seen behind him filling the dome of night and hovering for the last time over history that vast and fearful face that was Moloch of the Carthaginians; awaiting his last tribute from a ruler of the races of Shem. The demons also, in that first festival of Christmas, feasted after their own fashion.

Unless we understand the presence of that enemy, we shall not only miss the point of Christianity, but even miss the point of Christmas. Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the merry makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won. All this indescribable thing that we call the Christmas atmosphere only bangs in the air as something like a lingering fragrance or fading vapor from the exultant, explosion of that one hour in the Judean hills nearly two thousand years ago. But the savor is still unmistakable, and it is something too subtle or too solitary to be covered by our use of the word peace. By the very nature of the story the rejoicings in the cavern were rejoicings in a fortress or an outlaws den; properly understood it' is not unduly flippant to say they were rejoicing in a dug-out. It is not only true that such a subterranean chamber was a hiding-place from enemies; and that the enemies were already scouring the stony plain that lay above it like a sky. It is not only that the very horse-hoofs of Herod might in that sense have passed like thunder over the sunken head of Christ. It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, of a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.

That is perhaps the mightiest of the mysteries of the cave. It is already apparent that though men are said to have looked for hell under the earth, in this case it is rather heaven that is under the earth. And there follows in this strange story the idea of an upheaval of heaven. That is the paradox of the whole position; that henceforth the highest thing can only work from below. Royalty can only return to its own by a sort of rebellion Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world. This sense that the world bad been conquered by the great usurper, and was in his possession, has been much deplored or derided by those optimists who identify enlightenment with case. But it was responsible for all that thrill of defiance and a beautiful danger that made the good news seem to be really both good and new. It was in truth against a huge unconscious usurpation that it raised a revolt, and originally so obscure a revolt. Olympus still occupied the sky like a motionless cloud molded into many mighty forms; philosophy still sat in the high places and even on the thrones of the kings, when Christ was born in the cave and Christianity in the catacombs.

In both cases we may remark the same paradox of revolution; the sense of something despised and of something feared. The cave in one aspect is only a hole or comer into Which the outcasts are swept like rubbish; yet in the other aspect it is a hiding-place of something valuable which the tyrants are seeking like treasure. In one sense they are there because the inn-keeper would not even remember them, and in another because the king can never forget them. We have already noted that this paradox appeared also in the treatment of the early Church. It was important while it was still insignificant, and certainly while it was still impotent. It was important solely because it was intolerable; and in that sense it is true to say that it was intolerable because it was intolerant. It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism. It did not try to destroy all that creation of gold and marble; but it contemplated a world without it. It dared to look right through it as though the gold and marble had been glass. Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.

Herod had his place, therefore, in the miracle play of Bethlehem because he is the menace to the Church Militant and shows it from the first as under persecution and fighting for its life. For those who think this a discord, it is a discord that sounds simultaneously with the Christmas bells. For those who think the idea of the Crusade is one that spoils the idea of the Cross, we can only say that for them the idea of the Cross is spoiled; the idea of the Cross is spoiled quite literally in the cradle. It is not here to the purpose to argue with them on the abstract ethics of fighting; the purpose in this place is merely to sum up the combination of ideas that make up the Christian and Catholic idea, and to note that all of them are already crystallized in the first Christmas story. They are three distinct and commonly contrasted things which are nevertheless one thing; but this is the only thing which can make them one. The first is the human instinct for a heaven ,that shall be as literal and almost as local as a home. It is the idea pursued by all poets and pagans making myths; that a particular place must be the shrine of the god or the abode of the blest; that fairyland is a land; or that the return of the ghost must be the resurrection of the body. I do not here ,reason about the refusal of rationalism to satisfy this need. I only say that if the rationalists refuse to satisfy it, the pagans: will not be satisfied. This is present in the story of Bethlehem and Jerusalem as it is present in the story of Delos and Delphi, and as it is not present in the whole universe of Lucretius or the whole universe of Herbert Spencer. The second element is a philosophy larger than other philosophies; larger than that of Lucretius and infinitely larger than that of Herbert Spencer. It looks at the world through a hundred windows where the ancient stoic or the modem agnostic only looks through one. It sees life with thousands of eyes belonging to thousands of different sorts of people, where the other is only the individual standpoint of a stoic or an agnostic. It has something for all moods of man, it finds work for all kinds of men, it understands secrets of psychology, it is aware of depths of evil, it is able to distinguish between real and unreal marvels and miraculous exceptions, it trains itself in tact about bard cases, all with a multiplicity and subtlety and imagination about the varieties of life which is far beyond the bald or breezy platitudes of most ancient or modem moral philosophy. In a word, there is more in it; it finds more in existence to think about; it gets more out of life. Masses of this material about our many-sided life have been added since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. But St. Thomas Aquinas alone would have found himself limited in the world of Confucius or of Comte. And the third point is this; that while it is local enough for poetry and larger than any other philosophy, it is also a challenge and a fight. While it is deliberately broadened to embrace every aspect of truth, it is still stiffly embattled against every mode of error. It gets every kind of man to fight for it, it gets every kind of weapon to fight with, it widens its knowledge of the things that are fought for and against with every art of curiosity or sympathy; but it never forgets that it is fighting. It proclaims peace on earth and never forgets why there was war in heaven.

This is the trinity of truths symbolized here by the three types in the old Christmas story; the shepherds and the kings and that other king who warred upon the children. It is simply not true to say that other religions and philosophies are in this respect its rivals. It is not true to say that any one of them combines these characters; it is not true to say that any one of them pretends to combine them. Buddhism may profess to be equally mystical; it does not even profess to be equally military. Islam may profess to be equally military; it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle. Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the, need of the mystics for miracle and sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem. No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and ,classical, or too simple and savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home. He might admire it because it was poetical, or because it was philosophical or any number of other things in separation; but not because it was itself. The truth is that there is a quite peculiar and individual character about the hold of this story on human nature; it is not in its psychological substance at all like a mere legend or the life of a great man. It does not exactly in the ordinary sense turn our minds to greatness; to those extensions and exaggerations of humanity which are turned into gods and heroes, even by the healthiest sort of hero worship. It does not exactly work outwards, adventourously to the wonders to be found at the ends of the earth. It is rather something that surprises us from behind, from the hidden and personal part of our being; like that which can sometimes take us off our guard in the pathos of small objects or the blind pieties of the poor. It is rather as if a man had ,,found an inner room in the very heart of his own house, which .,he had never suspected; and seen a light from within. It is if he found something at the back of his own heart that ,betrayed him into good. It is not made of what the world would call strong materials; or rather it is made of materials whose strength is in that winged levity with which they brush and pass. It is all that is in us but a brief tenderness that there made eternal; all that means no more than a momentary softening that is in some strange fashion become strengthening and a repose; it is the broken speech and the lost word that are made positive and suspended unbroken; as the strange kings fade into a far country and the mountains resound no more with the feet of the shepherds; and only the night and the cavern lie in fold upon fold over some-thing more human than humanity.
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Apologies and Some Maps

January 1, 2015, 4:55 pm
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This blog will be going to sleep for a week or so, as I need to focus all of my writing efforts on finishing up some additional material for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen. Among other things, I'm putting together a map-making tutorial for the forthcoming combined-volume virtual edition of the game.

The maps above and below were created using the free mapping program Hexographer and the "random" wilderness design recommendations set-forth in pp. 25-31 of Vol. 4: The Campaign. They're not the pinnacle of artistic or creative achievement, obviously, nor, as you can see, are they completely finished (each city is named "City", and each tower inhabited by an evil Magic-User is named "Evil Magic-User", among other things). But the point is they were each done from scratch in not much more than an hour or so by a non-artist (me).



So, apologies. Once the new version of Zylarthen is completed, I look forward to returning, hopefully shortly after the Feast of the Ephiphany.

Until then, may God grant you a fruitful and happy New Year (and a quick recovery from celebrating its arrival)!

Oakes
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Kingdom of the Ants

January 2, 2015, 9:12 pm
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I'm still in the midst of hacking around, randomly creating maps for inclusion in the Wilderness Creation Tutorial for the new version of Seven Voyages of Zylarthen. But I really like this one. Again, these use the suggestions in Volume 4: The Campaign, created with Hexographer. The idea is to come out with something resembling the "Wilderness Survival" map of OD&D, but with a larger scale and a bit more flavor.

Notes:

  1. This map uses the "old school" black and white icons available with the "Pro" version of Hexographer. I think it's arguably more tasteful and avoids the souped-up Greyhawk map look of the color tiles.
  2. Again, it was generated completely randomly with no cheating. This gives it some interesting aspects:
  3. What is the "village" labeled "Kingdom of the Ants"? Your players probably don't want to find out.
  4. But "Cult of Kali" is pretty self-explanatory.
  5. I like the magic school on the tip of that eastern island.
  6. What would a Dryad "city" (actually, more of the size of a village) be like?
  7. There are too many Witches (aren't there always?).
  8. The Martians get their own city, since I randomly rolled that Arid Plains would surround it. I imagine it's a dead city that the Red Martians (determined randomly, but I'm glad they were Red) have temporally occupied.
  9. The Marsh in the northwest looks unfriendly, with THREE (not one, not two but three) Evil Lords vying for control. Do not go there.
Enjoy!
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Isle of Pleasure

January 3, 2015, 8:21 pm
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One more set of randomly created Zylarthen maps.

The two above, created with Hexographer, are somewhat similar to the color and black and white schemes used to map the "Gazetteer" world of the X and GAZ series.

The color map is certainly easier to read and has the virtue of the terrain not interfering (as much) with the captions. But the black and white map seems more "OD&D" to me.

For the Zylarthen tutorial I used the black and white scheme. With a bit of thought and work I believe the captions could be massaged to fit better.

This is more of a southern world, dictated by the random roll of the dice. No swamps or jungles appeared in the south, for example. So since I wanted them, I put them higher, meaning among other things, that if you want real cold or tundra (as we all do sometimes), you presumably have to go "off-map" to the north or northeast.

The "Isle of Pleasure" is an island dominated by a Temple to Pan. God knows what goes on there. But wouldn't one want to find out?

The Mermen live in a coastal cliff village or some such. Remember that in OD&D, Mermen have legs.

For the town in the northwest I rolled that the inhabitants were "Prisoners", hence it's status as some sort of giant prison camp.

Finally, I rolled that the desert village in the southwest was inhabited by "Basilisks". So I surmised that perhaps there was some sort of sudden attack or overrun by the creatures, with preserved human bodies similar to that after a surprise volcanic eruption, such as at Vesuvius.
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City State of the Invincible Empress Jool-ee

January 4, 2015, 11:54 pm
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At the risk of testing anyone's patience, this is the FINAL test map before knuckling down and writing the tutorial. The above is an "artistic" player's map without any hex grids, but only using the terrain and icons of the free version of Hexographer. I suck at names (obviously) so partly for that reason but also partly for the fun of it, five places are named after family members. (Guess which ones. Hint: No, my children are not named "Skull" and "Gore".) But I did try to get a bit more evocative and less generic.

I actually like this look for display purposes, though the referee would have a secret color map with more precise detail. You create this by editing and sort of tracing over the previous map. The problem with the mountain and tree icons that I used is that they are "special" icons as far as Hexographer is concerned and thus more difficult to manipulate. Also, the selection is not so great. There are "dune" icons and "rough" icons but nothing precisely desert-ish. And there isn't anything that really works for jungle or swamp. But I think that's okay. Labeling can be good enough.

I know there are better cartographic resources out there in terms of the final look. But this fits with my speed.
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Murdered Cartoonist Illustrated French Dungeons & Dragons Game

January 7, 2015, 4:48 pm
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The French RPG site Le Grog reported that murdered Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Tignous (Bernard Verlhac) was a veteran games illustrator. Among other credits including Laelith for Casus Belli magazine and MEGA for Strategy Games magazine, he appears to have been the illustrator for the mid-1980's TSR board game Le Sourire Du Dragon, based on the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series. The link to the board game was made by me, and I do not read French, so any additions or corrections to this information would be welcome.


UPDATE (10:00 PM CST): It looks like the box cover was based on a promotional poster by the American artist Bill Sienkiewicz. See Dungeons & Dragons Cartoon Encyclopedia. Thus, Tignous did the board (and the cards, I assume, though they were presumably based on the original cartoon images).
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After Being "Unfriended" On Facebook, Man Vows Former "Friend" Will be Blacklisted in the RPG Community

February 7, 2015, 7:36 pm
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Alternate longer title: Man Content to Read Post After Post on Facebook Containing "Hate Speech", But When Man Is Quietly "Unfriended" by the "Hate Speech" Person, He Vows to Ruin Him in the RPG Industry.

Well, these are actual screenshots, of course. (The one's above follow the one's below.) But the following dialogue, recorded earlier this morning, comes from a source that for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous. It's a conversation between Andy Action-Markham and an unidentified woman at Starbucks:

Andy Action-Markham: So, this Spalding guy just unfriended me on Facebook.
Woman (feigning mild-interest): That's nice, honey.
Action: But you don't understand. We were "friends" and then he "unfriended" me. I can't believe he did that.
Woman: What did he say?
Action: That's the whole point. He didn't say ANYTHING. I was wondering why I wasn't seeing his posts anymore. And then this morning I decided to check. I checked his friends list and then with mounting disbelief, I checked it again. I wasn't on it.
Woman: But don't people do that all the time? Perhaps you're spending too many hours online. Haven't we talked about this before?
Action: But, but, Spalding was like, Mr. pro-free speech guy. Don't you see, that makes him a total hypocrite!
Woman: If you say so, dear.
Action: Also, he was using Facebook and Google Plus to engage in hate speech.
Woman (continuing to feign mild interest): What a jerk. But in that case, why did you stay friends with him?
Action: Well, I kept up the link on Facebook because I wanted to read what he had to say. Also when he put up a post for his chums I liked to occasionally write a snarky comment at the beginning. You know, hate speech needs to be resisted.
Woman: Then why were you surprised when he "unfriended" you?
Action: It's the principle of the thing.
Woman: Obviously.
Action: Anyway, even though he had unfriended me, I managed to figure out how to send him an Instant Message. Here, take a look, and then check out his response. He actually called me obnoxious. Can you believe it?
Woman: You don't want me to answer that, dear. I thought you earlier said you wrote comments on more than one post?
Action: Well, okay, it was four comments, but still.
Woman: What are you going to do now?
Action: Well, I sent three messages back to him.
Woman: And?
Action: He DIDN'T EVEN ANSWER THEM. Even when I called him a bigot he didn't respond. Can you believe that? He DENIED me the right to converse with him through Instant Messaging.
Woman: I see.
Action: But I'll fix him. In my final message I said I would use all my connections in the RPG community to make sure everyone is aware that Spalding engages in hate speech. He will have a very very hard time working with anyone in the community again.
Woman: Andy?
Action: Yes?
Woman: If you want my honest opinion, I think all this is because he hurt your feelings. Despite all that stuff about "hate speech" and such, it was all fine until he unfriended you. You liked him and wanted his respect. When you realized you didn't have it, you had a sort of hissy fit. We've talked about this before.
Action: Do you think if I send him another message with an apology, he'll be my friend again?
Woman: I doubt it.
Action: Well, you're my friend, aren't you? And we're still on for tonight, right?
Woman: Of course I'm your friend, Andy. But I have to wash my hair tonight. Why don't you go play on Facebook.
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After Being "Unfriended" On Facebook, Man Accuses Former "Friend" of Being a Plagiarist

February 10, 2015, 7:44 pm
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Hell hath know fury like a man spurned

It's now been a week or so since Andy-Action Markham was "unfriended" on Facebook, and three days since he discovered the humiliating slight. He's used that time to publicly accuse his former "friend" of a number of things in pursuit of his "you'll never work again in this town" threat.

But the plagiarism thing is a new development.

Now, we should note that Andy appears to be talking about my RPG "neo-clone"Seven Voyages of Zylarthen. I say this based on the context where he refers to "a (not-so-well-known) RPG game plagiarist." Here's the Facebook post:



In the year the game has been out, no one has accused me of plagiarism. No one. Ever. But here's Andy a week after he was "unfriended" making the claim. the other strange thing is that Andy was one of the most enthusiastic "+1'ers of my gaming blog and Zylarthen related posts on it. He didn't think it was plagiarized then. But after he was "unfriended," suddenly he does.

Oh sorry. I should add that the plagiarism accusation comes against Andy writing two more Instant Messages to me today and...not getting any response.

Weird.

So this is post-"unfriending". Indeed, Andy's "Spalding hates Muslims" thing is also mostly "post". Arguably, Spalding's most offensive and "anti-Muslim" post--Quien es Mas Macho? Muhammad o Cthulhu? (yes I actually wrote a post with that title)--was greeted enthusiastically by Andy who called it "funny" and said "it certainly doesn't offend me".

But Andy, why didn't you say I was "spewing hate" then? Why did you laugh along with it then?

Okay, serious note: Andy recently threatened to blacklist me in the RPG community.



He also "outed" me as an anti-gay marriage person because I related my position to him, at his prompting, in a private conversation. I won't apologize for that position. And anyone who knew that I was a faithful Catholic could hardly have thought otherwise. But I intentionally have never (I think--I could be wrong) publicly announced or made any kind of issue of that position on my Google or my gaming or political blogs for a number of reasons, including the fact that I didn't want to get "in-your-face" with people who might disagree, including my gay friends. Again, that's not so say I'm ashamed of it or want to hide it or anything else. But I don't want to evangelize for it or argue about in these forums. It's just not a battle I want to fight here and now. In truth, I think have much more in common with my gay friends and pro-gay-marriage straight friends (though perhaps not on that issue) than I do with a (straight) pissy little pain like Andy.

However, Andy has implied that I'm publicly shoving anti-gay hate down people's throats.

That's a lie.

Given that, I owe Andy nothing, including any kind of privacy hold on his messages to me. I'm going to make fun of him as long as I choose.

Tomorrow, if I have the time, we'll see Andy crying onto my shoulder at 7:30 in the morning (pre-"defriending", of course, but after he knew all the other "bad stuff" about me). I think I have those screenshots somewhere...
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"My Heart is Broken, Oakes" - A Love Story

February 11, 2015, 6:39 pm
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I'm not a big Facebook person. I have 108 friends. They're all either old school chums that have friended me out of nostalgia, a few current actual friends and coworkers, friends and family of my wife and for the last few months, a growing number of Traditional Catholics that I talk Catholicism with. Recently I have linked to my new "political" blog, and I sometimes get one or two "likes" or generic comments, but in general no one argues or argues politics.

A few days ago an old friend from Cambridge--a senior citizen mother (who is a lefty) of a school chum--got into a brief argument about violence vs. pacifism with a new Catholic virtual friend (who I presume is a righty). My lefty friend graciously ended the brief exchange by saying that "debate was good." And then I stepped in to say I valued them both. That was the end of that. 

A few months ago, Andy Action-Markham asked to "friend" me. He was a gamer guy that I knew from Google Plus and his name was familiar to me because his avatar often graced discussions linked to my gaming blog and/or about the game I published. So I accepted his "friend" invitation.

Little did I know...

Fast forward a few weeks or months. In that time Andy and I had had a few exchanges about gaming, and he'd also written a few neutral or favorable comments on Google Plus and Blogger about by new "political" blog, Mahound's Paradise, that I had started in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The blog is anti-Islam (as should be obvious from the name) but it also has a focus on discussing Jewish and Catholic issues. Anytime you criticize Islam you're going to get people calling you a "racist", "bigot" and worse, but Andy seemed to have no problem with that.

Fast forward a week. It's 3 AM and I'm randomly looking at my Facebook feed in a bored way. Indeed, scanning Facebook had always been for me a pretty intermittent and rare occurrence--something to do when bored. I might find some random thing and write a goofy comment to some school chum I hadn't seen in thirty-five years, or "like" a picture of a baby from my in-laws, etc.

So in scrolling my feed I see this:



It was from Andy, but it could just as well been from one of my lefty school chums or current friends. Now, it just so happens that another one of my Facebook friends is a gay guy who I met at the Miami Marathon a few years back. He lives in California, is a member of George Takei's LGBT running team and had some funny and good things to say about Takei. It also happens that, as some people know, I love Star Trek. So in the spirit of bleary-eyed 3 AM Facebook comradeship I decided to write something friendly. I believe I wrote something like this (I say believe because I deleted the comment and Andy claims not to have it):
Though I cannot completely support the politics, George Takei is a fellow runner and a good man. Long live Captain Sulu!
Was this the high-point of Spalding's wit, charm and precise prose? Of course not. It was a silly 3 AM Facebook comment. I went to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later and, because I stress about these things, I started to think that perhaps I shouldn't have written that comment. After all, the post seemed to be one of those Facebook moments where everyone celebrates a particular thing together. And even though I intended my post to be friendly, the "though I cannot completely support the politics" part might have annoyed some people. It's Andy's thing (or his friends' thing) and who am I to intrude into it? (Though I wasn't sure Andy or anyone else would really care.) It's not about me and my friendship with a gay runner who knew Takei or my love of Star Trek or whatever. It's about a bunch of people getting enjoyment out of mutually supporting some cause--in this case gay-marriage and related issues--together.

So I deleted the post.

Too late.

I noticed this in my email:

Or rather, that was the actual Facebook version of it. Andy's comment is on top because I had deleted my comment. So, hoping that I hadn't offended my new gaming Facebook friend I wrote him an instant message. Here is the full exchange:
That's it.

Now. Andy has recently implied that I have been inundating social media with anti-gay hate. The above deleted comment and our subsequent private exchange are the only places on Google or Facebook where I have taken a position one way or another on any issues related to gay marriage or gay issues (I think). So, therefore:

Andy Action-Markham is nothing but a psychotic liar.

Regarding the initial message, Andy has implied that I started "it" by making some sort of trollish "God Hates Fags" drive-by on his Facebook page that I then deleted to cover my tracks or whatever.

That's a lie as well, although obviously I can't prove it since I deleted it.

But if I had said something even remotely resembling that, why would Andy have behaved the way he did after I messaged him?
"God hates fags!  
"My heart is broken Oakes, but of course we can still be friends" (followed by additional cordial conversations).
Sure. 

Now, of course I am against gay-marriage. But for various reasons (some obvious, some not) I have chosen not to make an issue of it on social media. I know some of my Catholic friends would say that's cowardly. Perhaps it is.

Let's pause here. If simply knowing that Oakes Spalding is against gay marriage makes you feel that Spalding is therefore a "spewer of hate", or a "gay-hater" or a "homophobe", if, in other words, you feel that opposing gay marriage is only one step away from "God hates fags", if you believe that anyone opposed to gay marriage, even if never publicly expressing that opinion, should be, among other things blacklisted from the RPG industry, then I want you to stop reading right now. "Uncircle me" or whatever and go away. I don't want your friendship, association or business. I think you are nothing but an intolerant almost certainly anti-Christian, bigoted slime ball.

Is that because I disagree with you on the gay-marriage issue? No. Actually, it's almost the opposite. It's because you can't tolerate disagreement on it.

If you can tolerate disagreement on it, then in this context I couldn't care less whether you agree with me or not on the issue.

Welcome.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's continue.

I have been accused (and by many more people than just Andy, of being an "Islamophobe"). Now if that means I don't like Islam and think it's pernicious, evil, harmful, etc., then I plead guilty on that one. See above for whether to stay or go.

If you think that means I (or any of the other so-called "Islamophobes") "hate" Muslims, then go. 

Ditto on the Catholic thing.

Let's go back to Andy for a moment. Along with the homophobe thing he's now hitting on the Islamophobe thing. I spew hate against Muslims because I'm a racist bigot, etc., etc. Okay, what's the most offensive thing one might imagine an Islamophobe saying? How about comparing Mohammad--the founder of that lovely religion--with Cthulhu--that hundred-meter tall alien monster, and implicitly (so it might be argued) comparing Muslims with Cthulhu Mythos cultists?

Yes I did that. Pretty potentially offensive right?

Well, here's Andy, commenting on the link to that post in Facebook, looking like he's digging it (with some qualifications):



The "like" is from me. I'm that kind of guy.

(By the way, that's Cthulhu on the right. The fellow on the left is not actually that Mohammad. Seriously it isn't. It's a painting of some Egyptian guy named "Mohammad Somethingorother" that I mistakenly took off of Google. What do you think I have, a death wish?)

Now, actually, I don't think Andy is any particular friend of Islam, or has any real problem with people who don't like it. That's because, as some sort of agnostic or atheist, Andy prides himself on hating all religions. So the new "let's ban Spalding because he's an Islamophobe" thing is nothing but a pose. (Again, see above.) But as we'll see in a moment and as can be somewhat seen above, Andy hates Christians so much that if you don't like Islam and you are a Christian, that crosses the line.

Or maybe it's just if you are a Christian.

The story is almost over.

In the next week or so I made some more links to my blog on Facebook and Google Plus. Andy and I had no private or public exchanges. I made no comments about gay issues. And my blog was just as "Islamophobic" as always, though more than half the posts were about free-speech, the new anti-Semitism in Europe or wonky Traditionalist Catholic issues that no one outside that circle would probably care about either way.

But Andy started to make comments on Facebook and Google that grew more and more annoying and hostile. I actually think he was on a mission to prove that I was a hypocrite (or whatever) for choosing one religion over another. Here was the first that I left up:



The above were comments on a link where I told my Catholic friends that they might think my blog was offensive (because I approvingly quoted atheists like Bill Maher) among other things. (Steve Skojec is a well-known Catholic blogger who I like a lot. We banter around from time to time and I was trying to get his favorable attention for my blog.)

Note the contrast between my sensitivity in "intruding" on Andy's page by making an overall friendly and complimentary comment about George Takei (and then deleting it out of the same sensitivity) with Andy's insistence to "get in my face" whenever I put something up on my page. And of course, he was the only "outsider" among my "friends", but he had to pre-empt every other post to my friends with some snark on me, other Christians (at least half of my "friends") or Christianity.

So, Andy wrote three more snarky comments on Facebook and Google Plus. I left the one up on Google Plus because the vibe there is different. But the Facebook ones were annoying and (I found out later) were irritating my Catholic friends.
How "Christian" of you! 
So, help me understand Oakes - you're not a fan of this Pope, obviously. Do you think that he is illegitimate? (This sounds sort of innocuous, but in context of what he was commenting on it was inappropriate and hostile) 
So, what is your end goal with your current "hate Islam all the time" blog? Muslims should convert? Muslims should die? Muslims should come to their senses? Just want us all to know that you really, really hate Islam? We get it - you just don't like them. So what?
Again, contrast the one time where I wrote anything on his page:
I'm against gay marriage. I tried to be complementary about Takei but I shouldn't have intruded on the post. I just deleted the comment. Thanks for supporting my new blog, Andy. Take care.

I deleted the last two comments (silently) without commenting or attacking Andy, thinking he would just get the message. He didn't. When he did it again I unfriended him from Facebook, again silently, without commenting or attacking him. That of course led to this:



And then, of course, calling him "obnoxious" led to this:


At that point it became clear to me that Andy Action-Markham was dishonest, spiteful, and a sort of borderline psychotic. I had no idea how serious he was or how many people he knew in the RPG industry. But given current trends in the industry, I took the threat seriously and realized that it could have harmful results. So, I decided to (in the words of our current Pope) punch Andy back.

Andy never publicly said any of the bad stuff (that I'm a racist hate-monger who should be shunned in the RPG community) until I silently "unfriended" him on Facebook (and then responded to his frantic and more and more angry messages by curtly calling his behavior obnoxious). But perhaps he felt that way all along and was simply lying about wanting to remain friends despite our differences and laughing along with me about Mohammad being compared to Cthulhu, etc. Maybe it was all an insincere ploy to gather "evidence", as it were, on my awfulness, to later present to the RPG tribunal, or whatever.

Though, in that case, it's odd that he would so strongly feel that he had a "right" to be on my Facebook page--the lone spy, as it were among my school chums and Catholic friends.

That's my side of the love story.

And that's all about Andy (well almost all). Tomorrow we'll talk about free-speech, tolerance and hate, in general, and the curious inconsistencies regarding these that many (though by no means all) on the political "left" seem to have.
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Patrick McGoohan and The Prisoner, Part 1

February 23, 2015, 8:50 pm
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So, after taking a hiatus from game blogging for the past seven weeks, I am working my way back. Writing takes a fair amount out of me (in time, among other things), and it's difficult for me to focus on two somewhat disparate categories at once. But I'm going to make a try at doing so. The next three posts will be a bridge. They aren't about gaming, per se, but I think they will be of interest to many gamers. Because of the religious and political angles (more in evidence in parts 2 and 3) they will be cross-posted on my religious/political blog Mahound's Paradise.

I was first exposed to Patrick McGoohan and The Prisoner when I saw a re-run of the show on English television in 1983-84 while I was an undergraduate in London. When I returned to the States I became an evangelist for the show among my friends. I loved The Prisoner (which originally ran in 1967-68) and still think it is one of the finest series television has produced. At the time I was also a newbie "libertarian" and hung out on the fringes of the Libertarian Alliance folks associated with the Alternative Bookshop (closed long ago) in London. One of the LA founders, Chris Tame, wrote a paper called "Different Values" where he identified The Prisoner as quintessentially libertarian and individualist (which is sort of an obvious point, but it's wonderful essay) and cited McGoohan for playing other great individualist characters such as the title character of Ibsen's Brand on the London stage in 1959 (also videotaped by the BBC and available on DVD as well as YouTube) and John Drake in Danger Man (aka Secret Agent), 1960-62, 64-68, the forerunner of The Prisoner. McGoohan quickly became one of my heroes.

For the fun of it, here's the famous three-minute opening sequence. Absolutely brilliant:


I didn't know McGoohan's formal politics (if he had any). I did remember seeing an interview with him as a grumpy old man where he made grumpy old man snarks at Ronald Reagan. (In checking into it, I discovered that the interview I saw was made in 1985, when he was only 57 or 58. It's available on YouTube in two parts here and here). So I always imagined that the actor's politics were at least vaguely leftist.

And I still don't know precisely what his formal politics were (McGoohan passed away in 2009). And do be honest I didn't care then and I don't care now. But today (sort of randomly), I found out something fascinating that I never knew.

McGoohan was a devout Catholic.

On that tantalizing note, I'm going to leave things here. This will be a three part series of posts (this one is the first). The second part will discuss McGoohan's Catholic Faith and how it influenced his acting career. The last will discuss the individualism expressed by The Prisoner as well as by McGoohan himself in his acting choices. Is it necessarily libertarian? Can it be Catholic (presumably McGoohan thought so)? And what of the relation between libertarianism and Catholicism. Are they opposed? Can they be reconciled? I think this will be fun. But for now

Be seeing you...
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OSR Art Friday: Editing Batten (a long post with too many pictures at the end)

November 14, 2014, 11:15 pm
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This post will be annoying to some of you in that you were probably expecting a pretty color picture. Instead you will be getting many black and white pictures.

And the featured artist of the day is not some 1970's luminary but well, me. Or rather, the featured artist is the brilliant John Dickson Batten, but the post is about what I did to him.

And if that doesn't irritate you enough, be warned, I will be doing some bragging (explained below).

The post is about how I edited the illustrations of Batten to better suit their inclusion in my four booklet game, Seven Voyages of Zylarthen. The bragging is not how about how great I am compared to you. I am not great compared to you. I expect that most of you reading this post are more experienced/adept/talented at editing illustrations than I am, and that many of you are familiar with illustrations programs that I haven't even heard of. No. I'm bragging because I did it. I did it. Knowing nothing about editing or graphic design, and being generally uncoordinated and not artistic, I nevertheless figured out (temporarily) how to (arguably) do a passable job at it. That's an accomplishment I want to brag about.

A few months ago I said this about Batten:
Finally, in regards to setting, I should mention the artwork of Zylarthen. There are close to a hundred pieces, all by the same artist--the turn of the century illustrator John Dickson Batten. I said elsewhere that once I had chosen the works of Batten, the art actually began to inform the setting and even the writing. Batten's works appeared in children's fairy-tale books. But appropriately enough they were also from a diversity of sources--English, Celtic, general European, Middle-Eastern and Indian. In my humble view, the art was not merely the best art I could find for free, but was in fact precisely right for what I was trying to do. I couldn't have paid for anything better. To the extent that Zylarthen as a visual or physical product succeeds it does so due to Batten. But equally importantly, to the extent the setting and tone are interesting or attractive is also I think due to Batten. Indeed, he deserves an entire post, and will get one soon.
In the review of Zylarthen on the Save or Die! podcast. DM Liz paid the product one of its finest compliments do date (I think). To paraphrase, despite the fact that the art was public domain from approximately a hundred years ago, each piece still seemed appropriate to the subject or the page. It enhanced the work rather than looking just tacked on to fill up space. (Then her husband emphasized the point by making a joke: "hey what's that 57' Chevy doing there?")

I think it worked for three reasons:

  1. The art itself. Now, Batten didn't draw illustrations for dungeon expeditions, obviously. But the exotic, fairytale vibe was exactly right for what I was trying to do.
  2. Having drawn hundreds of illustrations for nine books, there were enough of them so that I could make informed choices as to appropriate pieces to use.
  3. I edited most of the illustrations. Obviously many of them worked on their own without any (or hardly any) touch ups. But I think if I hadn't edited the rest, they would have looked forced or slightly inappropriate. The editing was a crucial part of the process.

And some of the editing was for tone. Many of Batten's fairytale drawings were comical. I didn't want a severe tone, but I didn't wan't it silly either.

So part of this is bragging (see above). Again, not I'm so great, but, rather I did it. Most of it was just whiting stuff out, which is easy and actually almost cathartic.

I used the free program Gimp. I only learned 5% of it, but it was all I needed.

In a handful of cases I actually pasted a few images. In two instances, I actually drew small bits of my own. Once I actually sketched a foot.

But the main message is, it wasn't hard. If I could do it, you can. I suspect many of you could almost do it with your eyes closed.

So enough of these boring words. The rest of the post will feature a long line of actual examples. I think this sort of thing is interesting, but you are pardoned if you think it goes on for too long.

Before precedes After:



To me, the odd hand angle was reminiscent of the Judges Guild "Flying Turkey".



The Ducks were silly.



The original was too busy.

This was one of the only cases where I pasted something in (I duplicated the dagger). I don't know. I thought a second dagger might be more effective in combat than a mask.


Better just a corpse than a corpse with a silly man standing over him.



I love this monster. I think it's a Solian.


This was ironic in that I took a fantastical drawing and made it more mundane. The Boar went from two heads to one.

From silly to (hopefully) sinister.

The original was too well-known to leave as is.


Pure greed.

Dungeons don't have beds. Okay, maybe they don't have curtains either, but still...

The original was fine but the bird didn't fit.

This was my second choice for the magic cover. The first was a great drawing, but it just didn't seem to work on its own. I think this one works. I liked the contrast in that it was the only cover not featuring a person.

Away with that little man!


I'm not sure this totally works but people seem to like it.


These bottles were lifted from various places.

Okay, I'm proud of these drums (look on the top). Also, note that I removed the lute from the otherwise identical picture on the back cover of Volume 4 (see the blog heading picture). It just seemed too much. But that's probably just me.


I'm sort of proud of this. I edited out the arm and of course re-angled it. But the design in the center is obviously kind of screwed-up, especially if you look at it closely. I banked on readers not looking at it closely, mentally processing it as "oh, a rug", and then quickly moving on.  


Too many angels, or bird women or whatever.

I like this sullen creature.


Again, the original was too busy...

So there it is. Part of the method to my madness. Perhaps exposing the method was too much--oh dear, the magic is gone! But I figure we're all adults here and are enough interested in the craft of game design such that the above might be entertaining and useful.

It's not perfect. I know that. But we tried. This is part of how we tried...
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Patrick McGoohan and The Prisoner, Part 2, McGoohan "Had Extreme Catholic Views on Sexuality"

March 5, 2015, 6:21 am
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Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man

Also see Part 1 here.

The quote is from director David Cronenberg who directed McGoohan on the set of his classic horror film Scanners in 1981. More from Cronenberg at the end of this post. But first, let me take a few steps back...

A number of sources have dubbed McGoohan a "devout Catholic". In my experience that label is often misused by the secular media, often meaning almost the opposite of what it purports to mean--that so and so is a self-identified "Catholic" who is not devout (he or she has actually been divorced seven times or whatever). However, McGoohan was an attractive and charismatic actor who hit his stride in the 1960's and settled in Los Angeles but who was married to the same person for almost sixty years until his death. If that's not a tell, nothing is. Perhaps equally significant, he made potentially career ruining decisions about acting roles based on his Catholic beliefs. I'm not sure I know of another actor as prominent or even nearly as prominent where the same applies. Here is a relevant excerpt from an article on him in The Daily Express, published two years after his death, in turn based on Rubert Booth's biography:
A Prisoner of his Demons 
IN 1960 Patrick McGoohan was offered the role of James Bond in Dr No. 
He turned it down flat. The role went to Sean Connery, it made him an overnight star and spawned the world’s most famous movie franchise but McGoohan – who cemented his reputation playing the Bond-like character of John Drake in Sixties TV series Danger Man – never regretted his decision. 
While most men viewed Bond as an aspirational figure and most actors would have given their eye teeth for such a part McGoohan found the character contemptible and simplistic. It wasn’t just Bond’s cheapening of life with a Walther PPK which bothered him: he despised Bond’s attitude to women. He felt the same way about The Saint, a part he was offered ahead of Roger Moore and which he turned down for similar reasons. 
“I thought there was too much emphasis on sex and violence,” McGoohan said in the mid-Sixties of the Bond script. 
“It has an insidious and powerful influence on children. Would you like your son to grow up like James Bond? Since I hold these views strongly as an individual and parent I didn’t see how I could contribute to the very things to which I objected.” 
And it wasn’t just sour grapes at having turned down a role which could have given his family financial security for life. McGoohan may have had a profound work ethic and been widely admired for his abilities as an actor but his attitude towards the depiction of sex on screen was decidedly odd. 
He insisted that he would only take the part of secret agent John Drake if all salacious elements were removed and if the character was allowed to survive on his wits and fists rather than carry a gun. 
“I remember Pat being absolutely furious about one of the four pilot scripts,” recalls Ian Stuart Black, the writer of Danger Man, in a fascinating new biography of the mercurial actor who was born in New York in 1928 to Irish parents. 
“He was absolutely furious because I had him lying on a bed with a girl in order to open a safe which was behind the bed, nothing more. Pat was white faced with anger because of this apparently dishonest sexual implication.” 
But this reaction was typical says biographer Rupert Booth. “There are many similar stories of McGoohan’s heated objections to performing anything that could even remotely be considered sexual on screen,” he says. 
His attitudes may have been good news for his family but they brought him into conflict with his co-workers. 
“I was just amazed that a professional actor would not do what a professional actor should do, which is to do the story,” recalls Anthony Skene, another Danger Man writer, who witnessed McGoohan refusing to kiss a co-star. 
“You don’t let your personal foolishness get in the way but he certainly did.” 
McGoohan dismissed the criticisms. 
“Call me prissy Pat,” he once told an interviewer. “I see TV as the third parent. Every week a different girl? Served up piping hot for tea? With the children and grannies watching?” 
McGoohan’s unfashionable ideals could largely be explained by his unusual relationship with adored wife Joan – unusual by the standards of how an actor living and working in the Sixties was supposed to behave, that is. 
McGoohan was a fierce romantic and his devotion to Joan was legendary. During their 57-year marriage he wrote her love notes every day and it is believed he was always faithful. 
As a happily married man and a Catholic he made it clear he did not want his three daughters to see him engaged in a romantic liaison with another woman, even in a performance. 
“I have two guiding lights before me every second of my working day,” he once declared. “The first is my daughters. The second my religion.” 
His determination meant that Danger Man was produced to his satisfaction despite resistance from the highest levels to his “no guns, no girls” policy. 
“A high-powered sales and publicity executive arrived from New York to meet me for lunch in the studio restaurant. They wanted the guns and the girls reinstated. Without them they were convinced the series would be a resounding commercial flop.” 
McGoohan somehow persuaded the executive to let the series continue without them. “He went off and sold the completed series – minus sex and brutality – to 61 countries and they made a fortune, he later explained. 
Danger Man became a worldwide hit catapulting McGoohan to stardom...
Those linking to the Daily Express article will find that the piece goes on to describe McGoohan's drinking, his "dictatorial behavior" and a number of seemingly manic episodes of violence on the set of The Prisoner. Oh, heck, let's run those as well:
...However his dependency on alcohol was growing and in 1964 he was arrested for drink-driving. 
He spent six days in prison and was banned from driving for one year. 
HE WAS finding the conflict between his two lives increasingly difficult: the retiring family man and the workaholic actor. And the pressure was about to increase. The second series of Danger Man would make him the most highly paid television actor in the UK on £2,000 a week. 
“When an actor has a leading part in a thing like this it is all the more necessary for him to be more disciplined,” he said but behind the scenes he was struggling. 
“The Jekyll and Hyde persona that would characterise much of his time spent fi lming on his next and perhaps best-loved project, The Prisoner, were already in evidence, often linked to an over-indulgence in alcohol,” says Rupert Booth. 
Actor Gertan Klauber, who was in an episode of The Prisoner, revealed that McGoohan could take fight scenes far too far. After a lunch that “had gone on a little too long” the two actors rehearsed their scene. 
“Unfortunately I was struck several times,” says Klauber. “After the second take I said to McGoohan, ‘Please do not hit me because otherwise the whole thing will go into fisticuffs… there’s just a certain amount of pain you can take.’ And in fact it did develop in take three and four into a fighting match.” 
Booth turned up several examples of the actor being a very bad drunk. “While his conduct was mostly faultless in the outside world, with the notable exception of the drinkdriving conviction, it does seem that whilst working in the protective atmosphere of the set he was more liable to let his rock-solid self-control slip,” says Booth. 
As time went on his behaviour on set became increasingly erratic. He couldn’t tolerate the compromises of the production process and began drinking more heavily. 
ACTRESS Annette Andre, who had a part in The Prisoner, says she hated every second she spent working with McGoohan. “And that was down to Patrick. It’s no secret that I just loathed Patrick from the moment I started. I tried to be nice and he… doesn’t work with actresses at all well.” 
McGoohan’s dictatorial behaviour as star and co-creator of the cult show indicated he had little respect for other people’s feelings. As filming went on his temper became more prone to fraying and his actions more unpredictable. He was also averaging no more than two hours’ sleep a night and there were suggestions he was suffering from bipolar disorder, then known as manic depression. 
“The suave and charming Dr Jekyll had metamorphosed fully into Mr Hyde with an overwhelming drive to make the show succeed at whatever cost,” says Booth. 
According to fellow actor Mark Eden, McGoohan – who died in 2009 aged 80 – was on the verge of mental collapse back then. “I think he was having a bit of a nervous breakdown to be honest. He was terribly uptight… he had a terrible row with the director on the set, screaming. And he sacked him.” 
Eden’s experience of McGoohan’s violence was terrifying. “There was a bit where he had to get on top of me and strangle me and I had to push him off… and he was really strangling me. I looked up and I could see these mad eyes looking down at me and I thought, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone…’ and his face was contorted with rage… and he’s a big man.” 
It took every ounce of his strength to push him off. Word of McGoohan’s ferocity on set spread and his career as it had been was over.
Well, obviously his career wasn't over (though it wouldn't be the conventional career of a leading man). It should also be noted that the final third of the Express article is a somewhat negative compression of Booth's material. Booth also cites other costars who had different impressions. Angela Browne who played Number 86 in "A Change of Mind", while remarking on McGoohan's "intensity" on the set of The Prisoner found the actor "smashing". Earlier, "actually I fell in love with him; I just adored him and he was so kind to me." (Booth used material from that interview here.)

Now here is the promised Cronenberg bit (from IMDb in 2011):
Movie and TV icon Patrick McGoohan had his Scanners co-star Jennifer O'Neill in tears on the set of the cult 1981 film by ripping into her for marrying three times. 
A fervent Catholic, The Prisoner star took exception to O'Neill's personal life and didn't hold back in letting her know. 
Director David Cronenberg recalls, "He had extreme Catholic views about sexuality, which came onto the set. 
"My leading lady... came to me incredibly distraught and said, 'Patrick said, 'Are you a whore? Are you a slut?' And he started to lay into her because she'd had, like, five husbands. 
"That was Patrick, and those were the things I had to deal with as a relatively young director. He was probably the most difficult actor I ever worked with, though he gave a fantastic performance." 
At the time, O'Neill had wed three times. She went on to marry another two men and has been wed to Mervin Louque since 1997.
One should be skeptical here, among other things because in my experience people hostile to Catholicism often, frankly, make up stuff like this (see two and three posts below). But assuming McGoohan said the words (or something like them) that O'Neill said he did, it would be hard to believe that there isn't some additional context to it, as if he would just walk up to his co-star and start insulting her. Then again, the actor did have a reputation for being difficult. Perhaps it was a Mel Gibson moment.

I hope readers--Prisoner fans, Catholics and non-Catholics will find the above material interesting. Some of it--the first part of that Express interview--should be inspiring to Catholics, while other parts will no doubt confirm the anti-Catholic view that many Catholics (or many male Catholics anyway) are belligerent alcoholic misogynists.

Don't blame me, man, I just report things.

In Part 3, I'll return to The Prisoner. Is it libertarian allegory, Catholic allegory, or just a brilliant television show? Or could it be all three?

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