I Wrote a Book Called Sooty Beards! Check it Out!

My first ever book written as lead project designer is finished and out for presale now!

Sooty Beards is a mostly system-agnostic micro-setting that combines the earthy majesty of an ancient dwarf-hold with the hopeless decay of a dying North American coal town.

Among other things, it contains 8 diverse regions, 8 weird new critters for your simple d20 or TROIKA! game, a host of statless narrative items like screaming lanterns and steampowered sportballs, and a set of tables to ask What Used to Be Here? and What's Here Now? The city of Vesallberg is an old place, not haunted but marked down to the very bones by the memory of what's come before.

Also, there are drunk canaries who curse a bunch. I feel like that part can't be emphasized enough.

The zine can be bought standalone or bundled with a booklet of appropriate TROIKA! backgrounds, a print of the map (with art by our excellent Charlie AF), beard & skin oil by PlusOneXP, and even a felted dwarf figurine by my dear friend and cowriter The Lawful Neutral.

The book is 100% finished and there's no crowdfunding necessary. Presale goes until March 15th, at which point we start shipping. Digital copies will deliver instantly at that point.

I really hope you enjoy the book and its grim whimsy (grimsy, if you will). Heading this project was a big step in my what's-starting-to-look-like-a-real-career as a TTRPG creator.

Ivory Tower University: A Soft Reboot?

Hey there, Burrowers.

If you've been following my blog since the beginning, well, I am kind of underserving of that crazy dedication. Thanks for that.

But more relevant to this topic, if you've been following me since the beginning, you know one of my earliest long-term projects was world-building through cheeky academic article snippets written in the Ivory Tower University setting (ITUniverse for short).

Typically I'd write from the perspective of Roberick Bertrum Litte, the reluctant bearer of the most snobbish name I ever conjured, as well as my paper-thin author avatar for when I want to mix academic cynicism with humanistic idealism. He'd write up a paper from his supplies office under the staircase, scribble in his own snarky footnotes, and then send it into circulation among a readership that even he wasn't convinced of the existence of. And for a while it was pretty good times- for me, at least.

Of course it's been years since I regularly made posts tied to the ITU, excluding occasional shout-outs in my belabored but ongoing Troika! character background series.

Some of you may have wondered "what gives?" I know I did. And I think I've finally figured out what, in fact, is giving.

I created the world that houses Deneroth and the ITU as a home for my own very, very, very modestly different take on orcs, goblins, and hobgoblins. That was the impetus for starting all of it. My first-ever post about the Fokari was meant to get the ball rolling on that. But of course you don't see any of that in the full scope of my ITU posts. Even the Fokari are just a blip on the radar compared to my lengthy and scattered writeups on life in the safely generic Ersuunian Basin (assuming Iron Age societies with 20th century social sciences still count as generic). Because every time I leaned toward writing about those cultures directly, I felt the need to justify their existence first, by creating the world around them, and then finally, hopefully placing them in the perfectly humanoid-shaped hole that would be leftover.

Basically, I fell into the trap of writing what I felt I needed to write in order to set things up, before I could get around to writing what I had wanted to. A slow accumulation of layers of stuff to get ready for the even slower peeling-back of those layers, so that I could ultimately reveal the thing I had in mind when I started my blog one summer during college.

That's a totally valid strategy for writing fiction and it can lead to a really good payoff, don't get me wrong. But I was just doing mundane, unclever worldbuilding in order to get around to the slightly less mundane and unclever worldbuilding, and at the pace I write stuff it was going nowhere fast.

It was very fatiguing, and it felt pointless sometimes, but the compulsion returned every time I returned to the ITU. Even after I took a long break to do cringy audio logs, or to write more TTRPG-related stuff and accidentally become a member of the artpunk OSR blogosphere.

A visual map of OSR blog links, traffic, and interconnections aggregated through Discord.
Somehow I wound up visible on it. I don't know who the original creator is.

Now that I've identified the issue, it's probably good to work on it. That's what my therapist usually said to do, anyway. And I think there's some old self-help saying about writing a thing down to make yourself more likely to do it?

I've decided to give ITU something in between a soft reboot and a time skip.

RBL will still be my vehicle for most of it, and pretty much everything he's touched on remains canon. But rather than writing about his subjects from a great distance of time or space like the armchair scholars he so despises, he'll be far more mobile, and focused on bringing other voices to the fore. He'll come out the gate doing what I was inching toward with my aborted Looking Southward and Backward travelogue all those years ago.

I don't want him to be like one of those YouTube personalities who give a shallow and sensationalized account of whatever "exotic" historical or geographic topic they're covering- we have enough of those in real life. Hopefully he never actually came across that way to any of you readers. But even if he didn't, this change will help me quell that minor, personal quibble about him that I've had since I started meditating on all this.

The biggest mechanical change will be that the average post reads less like a micro-article and more like an interview transcript. I wouldn't dream of getting rid of the margin notes and fictional citations, so those will reappear in some form too. The posts will also just be longer in general, both as a natural outgrowth of my increased comfort with rambling since the beginning of my blog, and as a way to cut down on the overlapping multipart numbered series that wore me down the first time around.

So, yeah. I hope to start work on ITU posts again soon, and have one out for you to read within the next few [units of time of your choosing]. I hope this little aside made sense, and I hope we both enjoy it again.

The Scrap Goblin

Goblin by Eoghan Kerrigan

After the last frantic bustle of Narblesnard and other end-of-year holidays gives way to the slow, cold quiet of winter, goblin whelps are taught to attune their prodigious ears to the sounds of nature. They listen to the lilting wind, the crackling frost, and the dripping water of icicles and tree boughs soaked black. They listen for warning of any squirrels stirring early. But above all, they listen in rapt anticipation for any hint of the Scrap Goblin swooping down on the wind or creeping over the mud.

I won't dress the topic up in layers of mystery this time. The Scrap Goblin delivers gifts to children– specifically the gifts that they cobbled together out of what most people would consider junk. From figurines whittled out of a splintered 2x4, to musical instruments made of tin cans and spare change, to stuffed animals reborn from an old pillowcase, the Scrap Goblin's presents are as varied and clever as they are outwardly "quaint".

The Scrap Goblin is not any single, clear-cut figure in folklore. Rather, they are a nebulous concept with no set age, appearance, gender, or canon of stories. And while they are generally celebrated at around the same time every year, not even their holiday has a set date. We all grow up knowing a different Scrap Goblin. We are all left waiting and wondering at what they'll bring for us this winter, while our parents quietly stitch sackcloth together in the backroom.

But this isn't an anthropological deep-dive into mythology, and I wouldn't get very far by trying to make it one. I'm not going to share everything that the Scrap Goblin can be.

Instead, I'm going to share what they are to me.

My Scrap Goblin was always the sweetly sardonic sort. He was aware of the evil of the world, and tired beyond his years for it. But he shared it in a gentle, nurturing way through jokes and little lessons that helped prepare you for it. He loved to carve wood, and favorite among my gifts from him were a toy sword, and a hobbyhorse that I could barely drag across the floor when I was younger. He was also left-handed, giving me a much-needed role model at a time when I couldn't even operate scissors without hurting myself, and when my only other hero to look to was the blond not-elf on a friend's Nintendo 64.

He had a sad and bare childhood that he didn't want others to experience.

And in retrospect, he had a bit of a horrifying apotheosis. But we'll get to that.

The Scrap Goblin was once a fairly ordinary goblin. He came from a big family in a bigger community where most of what you did, you did with a dozen other people involved or milling around close by. They were poor, but compassionate; hardworking, but not stupid. The stories didn't push some blasé narrative about the indomitable spirit of the idyllic poor– they knew the how and the why behind their position in the world. But that's a struggle for another story.

The Scrap Goblin enjoyed being around others, and often looked after his gaggle of little niblings. But he also liked to go out on his own and scavenge around the edges of the woods and the big folk towns. He liked to tinker and toil, and create new valuables out of old refuse. And over time, he realized that other goblins liked his creations too.

So he started to give them away. At first it was a random and haphazard thing– a child's toy here, a one-of-a-kind tool there. They were appreciated gifts, but nothing special. But as winter set in, hardship found the town. Sickness and hunger came, followed soon after by the specters of more immediate danger.

The Scrap Goblin's gifts became much-needed distractions, and so his mere hobby became a full-time commitment. As parcels left his little workroom weekly, the scrapheaps shrank and shrank.

But while his trinkets offered momentary respite, they did little to fix the real problems his friends and family were facing. He turned to larger and more ambitious projects to alleviate their suffering, clothing and warming them and propping up the sick. He tore down what little he had in the way of a home and turned it into material. All but the rags on his back became scrap.

He gave, and he gave. Still, it wasn't enough.

And though he had so much giving left to do, he ran out of a medium through which to give.

So he did the only thing he could do, and gave of himself.

His hair kept a balding head warm. His nose went to a little girl who'd gotten hers bitten off by a dog. His vocal cords gave new life to the nurse who sang to his patients, albeit a weak and quavering one. His fingers went to the forest foragers who ran afoul of the squirrels. His feet were fine replacements for the frostbitten, and his legbones a fine crutch made. His eyes he gave to an old couple blinded by cataracts, so they could see their youngest child one last time at his funeral. His skin made swaddling for a newborn.

Bit by bit, he gave everything of himself, until there was no self left to give– just a leftover heart, which mourned that it had never been given to anyone as it laid there on the cold, hard ground.

As the cold deepened and the second, true snow of winter fell upon the heart, his ghost rose up in the steam that billowed off of it.

The cold spoke to him, observing that he had given his heart away a long time ago. On this, the Scrap Goblin reflected, and then hesitantly agreed. It still didn't feel like he had done enough.

It never did, the cold replied. It never would. Not in a hundred lifetimes would he feel that gnawing void filled.

The Scrap Goblin asked the cold if it was willing to bet on that.

Coolly, curiously, veiling its amusement, the cold extended him an offer. Very well– it would sweep him up in its icy winds and take him far away. But when it returned next winter, it would bring him back along with it, so he could toil and make gifts anew. But he would only have until the last of the second snow melted before being taken away to wait and to rue again.

The Scrap Goblin agreed.

His steam was whisked away by the wind then, to be buffeted and torn at until the next year when he was reformed in shape, though not in flesh– while he has new fingers to work with, he will always know the absence of the real ones. With those cold little hands he worked again, turning trash into treasure for those who had so little else.

Every year since, every generation since, he has done this.

Today he serves as an inspiration for us– and as a cautionary tale against going quite as far as he did.

I think about the Scrap Goblin a lot, even when he isn't stalking the junkheaps with cardboard and masking tape in hand. I think about what his stories mean to me, and how often I fail to listen to them.

I think about all the people who have flocked to the aesthetic subculture that bears our name. I don't begrudge them one bit for the creativity and community it provides them, but I'm always a little bemused at their raw enthusiasm for it. We don't love junk and rocks and moss because we're innately funky, chaotic, or anti-capitalist– good praxis though that last one may be. We love them because they give many of us a jolt of nostalgia for our childhoods.

For some of us, we love the Scrap Goblin because scraps are all we ever got.

Goblin Brain: Swagbucks is the Dark Souls of Data Theft.

Wow. It's weird watching half of the planet suddenly adjust almost perfectly to your lifestyle and schedule. Everyone is staying indoors to the point that socialization, days of the week, and even sunlight are foreign concepts. How's it feel in my world? Regardless, I hope that all of you are safe and sanitized out there, dear Burrowers.

I hear stocks are skyrocketing for xylospongia and votive statues of Cloacina lately, if any investors are listening.

I've been making changes in my existence as well, lately. I honestly can't remember if I have or haven't mentioned it on the blog previously, but for a few years now I've been combating my perpetual unemployment with internet surveys and consumer marketing offer nonsense. Or at least, I was. As of a few weeks ago, I can say with a mixed but mostly positive bag of emotions that I have finally quit SwagBucks.

To those of you who know what that is, you can probably stop reading/listening to this post right now.

To you lucky masses who've never crossed paths with it, I have a story to tell you.

Swagbucks.com is an American rewards portal and customer loyalty program operated by a bunch of soulless husks who go by the name of Prodege, LLC. Prodege has had several projects past and present, but Swagbucks is by far the biggest. Think of it as a relic of the early 2000s internet ad revenue boom which has been struggling to adapt and survive ever since that busted. Swagbucks is a website where you earn SwagBucks, shockingly enough.

They're a virtual currency that can be spent through the site store for various rewards, the biggest attraction being store gift cards of varying sizes. You can also spend them to play the minigames hosted on the site, which include periodic spin-the-wheel and bingo games that give you more SwagBucks or other rewards to spend elsewhere.

One SwagBuck is equal to approximately one cent in US dollars, which means that the site really should have been called SwagCents instead. Or maybe they could have worked in some kind of obnoxious pun like the currency being SwagCents and the site being SwagSense. Ehh?

Gods, I hate myself...

Okay, so, SwagBucks are basically the in-game currency used to fuel micro-transactions in an online game, if for a moment you'll bear with me in stretching the definition of "game" to include mind-numbing drudgery through endlessly repetitive tasks amid thousands of other bored, apathetic non-entities. It's like a generic MMORPG with no action bars and fewer errant messages about dancing naked in Goldshire- well, ideally fewer.

You earn SwagBucks by doing the offers on the site, which include anything from printing coupons, to signing up for websites, to watching "curated" video playlists, to taking aforementioned surveys. And, excluding certain once-every-few-months offers where you can make double or more back on a ten or twenty dollar purchase, they are all of them hellishly frustrating and underpaying. Every last one of them is an exercise in Sisyphean futility, because it seems like the entire site is designed from the ground up to frustrate you into quitting.

Coupon and signup sites frequently fail to communicate a completed task back to Swagbucks for the promised reward. Playlists stretch themselves out longer and longer until you have to have your  browser focused for an hour or more just to earn two cents. Deals with third-party sites will hold your earned SwagBucks for ransom until a certain time passes, usually to prevent people from cancelling subscriptions, but then find some other way to invalidate your claim on them. The so-called "team" competitions turn the normally placid subreddit into a truly frightening pit of vitriol and middle-aged, suburban entitlement. The mini-games are more rigged than the prices offered by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler. The offers to download and play mobile games up to X level or building upgrade often have time limits on them that make actually accomplishing the offer impossible without spending more money on in-game boosts than one would make through Swagbucks doing the offer F2P. The weekly trivia game is hosted by a rotating group of company members who act as the closest thing to a human face for all of Swagbucks, so naturally they all have that kind of detached, desperate-to-appear-excited look that people get when there's a gun pointed at them just out of frame. The site's own apps consume so much processing power that they can overheat your phone, and in fact I had to retire one phone because the non-removable battery started to swell and expand to the point that the screen and volume buttons got pinched by the warping chassis until they malfunctioned and forced whatever inane pop culture news drivel they were currently displaying up to max volume- which in the depths of my cynical paranoia I also believe to have been the site's intent.

I've used the word very sparingly ever since I read the TVTropes article about it, but by far the most egregious problem is with the surveys.

Swagbucks only produces and controls a very tiny number of surveys. The vast majority of them are trawled in from their partner sites all across the internet, which means that information is decentralized and disjointed in the worst possible way. When you click on a survey in the list you're sent to the site where it's hosted, where you usually have to give your pertinent information- age, gender, state, household income, employment, family members, etc. Ideally, the site then takes that information, decides if you're a good match or not, and then either sends you to take the survey proper, or back to the landing page for more surveys.

Of course nothing is ideal in this world, and it's far more likely that you'll be pushed forward into a survey that you have nothing meaningful to contribute to. This usually ends in your disqualification (unless you get real good at making things up on the fly). That would be fine, if not for the fact that surveys will often disqualify you at the very end, once you've already answered everything and are expecting your pittance of twenty SB or so.

Even if you aren't a car owner, your survey on cars and vehicle shopping habits is dragged out to 99% completion before they yang the rug out from under you. They then, presumably, take all the information that you have them and sell it somewhere else, because my email account was perpetually flooded by things I had never signed up for- don't worry, I was "smart" enough to use a dummy account. Then you get thrown back to the landing page with nothing but a one or two-point disqualification bonus to sooth your virtual walk of shame.

Disqualification points for failed surveys sounds like a saving grace, and for a while it was- it really was. I still look back fondly on the balmy days when I first started using Swagbucks and I could make as much as five dollars a day off of disqualification points. I would just plug away at the list, control+clicking hundreds of them into separate tabs and then going through the one or two pages of preliminary questions they asked before booting me. It slowed my browser (and the rest of my decade-old computer) to a crawl, but it felt good and pretty handily reached my daily earning goals- did I mention that this place has Frigging daily quests?

Unfortunately, my success with disqualification farming was kind of a bug. I don't know when the site implemented it, but around the time they realized that they were bleeding money (by which I mean actually having to award some of it semi-regularly), Swagbucks implemented a five-disqualification maximum per day. Yet, somehow, this limit did not automatically apply to every account. Their janky site was set up in such a way that some accounts were limited, while others were not, and it only gradually became the case for all new accounts to come under the limit. This limit also reduced the points earned from disqualifications, so when my account was eventually, inexplicably given the limit all of a sudden, I was staring at a max of five cents per day.

Fortunately, I had already exploited the ever-loving crap out of the bug by creating three separate accounts to get DQs and do playlists with. I had three different machines running all day every day, sometimes overnight to collect as much of that sweet, sweet SB as I could. In this Dark Souls world of painful victories and data theft, I was the one lobbing firebombs at the Capra Demon from outside its fog wall. I was the one using the stump next to the Giant Seed tree to jump up onto the Pickle-Pee roof to grab a Covetous Silver Serpent Ring before I even hit the High Wall of Lothric. My monthly participation bonuses were in the teens, and at the height of my success I was earning over a thousand dollars a year.

Yes, I know, that's a hell of a lot of work to put into not working.

Eventually the limit was applied to all three of my accounts, and then from there my options for surveys and offers dwindled to stark nothingness as the site went through another months-long contraction, at which point I finally had the sense to rein it in a little. I continued to use the site after that point, but not with the same wasteful hyper-focus as before. I tried my hand at freelance around that time, and while I definitely made less money overall, I opted for the fresh hell instead of the old, stale one.

Last month (at the time of this recording), I finally quit Swagbucks entirely. I used the last of my SBs to purchase a few more Visa digital cards, and then I deleted all of my remaining accounts. I was in such a hurry to be free of it that I didn't even check my profile page to see how many bucks I'd accrued over the years- though whatever number it was would have been a dubious honor to know, in hindsight.

I wish I could say that I did this just as I made some sort of personal breakthrough and got a minimum wage job in fast food customer service or some other prestigious American institution, but no such luck yet. My writing is still... serviceable, kind of? So I'll see where that takes me for the time being.

Goblin Brain: Veterinarians Can Send Your Pets to Valhalla

I... don't know why I insist on starting every one of these audio posts with such a pained, drawn-out "I".

Hello, dear Burrowers, if there are any of you out there still. My apologies for vanishing again.

I'm still alive! Fortunately my Narblesnard went as well as can be hoped, and my acorns were enough to sate the squirrels this year.

I had myself another bit of a spiral over here, which coupled with the cold weather to ensure that I wrote nothing and wanted to write even less than that. But I'm still breathing, and doing things like making phone calls and reorganizing my bedroom to maintain the illusion of having meaningful control.

You can rest easy, or alternatively become annoyed to know, that I will be returning to periodic posting again soon, and that they will be far more relevant to my blog than these Goblin Brain episodes. I'm just tacking this onto one because it is a very overdue draft that was sitting on my dashboard... among thirty or forty others.

So, stay warm out there, depending on your hemisphere and particular climate, and thank you for listening.





I've never technically owned a pet.

Of course I've lived in a house with pets whom I interacted with, past and present.

And on at least a few occasions I've been mistaken for a pet, though that's a story for another time.

Or, probably not, actually...

Anyway!

I've never technically owned a pet. They've always belonged to my parents, and they've always been the ones chiefly responsible for all of the duties that pet-having entails. Not from a lack of willingness to participate on my part, but because my parents always found it easier or at least simpler to just do the things by themselves rather than teach me and set me up to do them properly after that period. Like they had a unique, noncommunicable technique for cleaning out the litter boxes, or for changing the water in the fishbowl, or what have you.

I think they did a lot of similar sunk-cost calculations with regards to my upbringing, come to think of it...

Lacking any real responsibility for the pets we've shared our home with over the years, I probably had a markedly different relationship with them than normal, er... goblin children do. Coupled with the fact that all of our cats, or a full two-thirds of the pets we've owned, were strays we took in and fixed up, it's always been the norm for me to have an awkward, distant coexistence with pets.

Like having a roommate who's always twitchy and nervous and might scratch you, and vomits a little too frequently on the carpet.

Even so, I came to befriend our last batch of cats a good deal.

We currently have a psychotic female tuxedo cat, but a year-and-a-half ago we also had an overweight female longhair, and a gingery, neurotic male tabby. They came to us at different times and ages and had vastly different personalities that lent themselves well to inventing bizarre voices for, as pet people are wont to do. Some of the most amusing conversations to ever go on in our house were done through the cats.

(People do that, right?)

I had an affinity for the tabby in particular. He would claw his way into my bedroom to demand obnoxious amounts of pets from me. We would bunt by headbutting at the dinner table often. I was usually the one to voice his persona. For the record, he was a clueless, blustering, but well-meaning old man from NYC's Lower-East Side who had a tendency to barge into the room to incorrectly correct someone's pronunciation of a word, make a lousy pun, or beg for ham.

My mother jokingly said he was my little brother.

He was the first one to be euthanized, in autumn of the year before last, if my memory still serves me. Conjunctivitis from scratching himself in the eye, and necrosis of the jaw tissue from us being poverty-stricken fools who didn't know enough about cat dental health to take him to the vet we couldn't afford often enough.

I wept like a family member had died. I suppose one did.

Our big, tubby, stupid sweetheart of a longhair went a few months later in the winter, due to a combination of the condition apparently known as megacolon, and--you guessed it--poor dental care.

It hurt just as much, but my eyes were drier that time. It felt like I didn't have the right to mourn, not while my mother and father were despondent and angry with guilt.

We'd made a friend in the vet who looked at both of them, though. A young, tall man, fabulously flamboyant man, who'd done everything in his impressive ability to fix our mistakes for both cats. He was saddened, but also consoled my parents for making the right choice in putting each of them down when those days came.

It was likely at his urging that the vet staff all got together to sign a card specifically designed for the occasion of dead pets. I didn't know those were a thing.

I also didn't know anything about those apparently well-known poems from the '80s and '90s about pets entering into heaven by crossing a rainbow.

The poem we got for our tabby was like any of the others, well-meaning and stomach-achingly saccharine. Our cat had apparently entered an idyllic meadow fully restored to health and happiness, among many other former pets, all waiting at the foot of the rainbow that bridges the gap between earth and the afterlife. When the owner finally dies, they're reunited for good, and make the crossing together.

Of course, being the mythology nerd that I am, I had a very different context for a poem involving a "rainbow bridge".

I immediately pictured him stepping onto the Bifröst, schmoozing his way past a bemused Heimdallr, getting lost in his wanderings through Asgard, and eventually winding up at the feet of Freyja in Fólkvangr. Sure he'd be too small to help pull her chariot, but he could tag along anyway, and the skogkatts could show him the ropes before long.

It was a comforting thing to pretend, even if it was only that.

Goblin Brain: Normalized Trauma

I had a dream last night.

Which is somewhat unusual- I very rarely remember my dreams. I'm sure I have them like most other living things do when they sleep, but memory of it hardly ever reaches me when I wake up.

This was different, though.

I had a dream that I had a friend (so you already know that it's completely insane and fanciful) who was a painter. And they invited me (out of my home) to their art gallery. And so I went.

I have no recollection of the space that the gallery was located in, or even the friend themselves- just that I had a friend, and that I was there looking at their things. And the gallery was peculiar. It was strangely appropriate for me, starting with the fact that everything was more-or-less goblin-sized, and the paintings were hung almost down by the floor for my convenience.

I can't remember much about most of them, but as I was traveling along the right-hand wall, I stopped in my tracks in front of one enormous landscape piece.

It called to me, I suppose?

And what it was, was this alien place. This world that was obviously meant to be something out of science fantasy, but very relatable on some level.

It was some sort of desert. There were satellites--natural satellites, that is--visible in the sky which was tinged a sort of purple color. There may have been some planet with rings around it far in the distance, I'm not sure. The sand and the rocks on the ground were kind of a bluish-grey color with yellowish streaks and highlights across them from the setting sun- one of the setting suns, at least. I remember the rocks had a metallic, almost greasy sheen to them like graphite.

There was a procession of beings walking through the desert. I got the impression that they were very tall, even though there was nothing to compare their scale to. Not outlandishly tall, but relative to humans--and certainly relative to me--they were pretty tall. They were fairly thin, too. They were humanoid, and sort of blue-skinned, I think. But not the same kind of blue as the land around them. They popped out from their surroundings quite visibly, somehow. They didn't have anything resembling hair, or horns, or any other sort of head protrusions. There was actually very little in the way of distinguishing characteristics between them. If they had anything like gender, I wasn't able to differentiate them.

But they all seemed to be walking in groups of three- two of approximately the same height, and one much shorter than the other two. Eventually I realized that they seemed to be family units. Parents and children. And there were dozens--hundreds?--of these units stretching all the way back into the sunset horizon. They were moving toward the foreground, until eventually the line twisted to the side where they entered some sort of large stone building which conveniently had the front of it cut off for the sake of my perspective.

I was able to look inside, where there was a sort of waiting room, and a much smaller chamber next to it. There was a much tighter congregation of people in the second room. There were several tall beings here who didn't appear to be parents, or at least they didn't have their own children with them. But they did have a group of other children with them.

It was at this point that I realized that another defining characteristic of these people was that each of them had a little socket in their forehead. The tall ones only had an empty space that was rectangular or diamond-shaped, with raised edges of thick and scarified flesh around them. Meanwhile the young ones had what looked like jewels- Brilliant little multicolored, multifaceted things poking ever so slightly out of their foreheads.

But when they reached this back room, they took out what I can only describe as a pair of pliers, and held the children down, and... removed them.

And it was obviously not a pleasant or willing procedure- the children had to be held down after all.

There was kicking, and screaming, and bleeding of a very dark, ichorous purple.

And when it was done, the children were bandaged up and moved over to the other side of the chamber, where there was a door leading out of the back of the building. At this point the parents, who had witnessed the removal and were looking far more exhausted than when they had come in, carried their children out. Or at the very least they shouldered their weight as they staggered on limply.

All of them had this expression of regret and sadness, tempered with this feeling of inevitability.

Like they dearly did not want to do this to their own children--to any children--but it was... required?

Expected?

I don't know how I was able to perceive all of this in a single painting. Either I imagined much of it, or my subconscious is was very, very good at ekphrasis.

(Is that how you say that word? I realize I never vocalized it when I learned about the concept in my class on Greek and Roman mythology.)

In any event, I believe I glanced down at the name of the painting before I left or moved on or the dream ended.

And it was titled "Normalized Trauma".

Appropriate.

I just wish I hadn't seen the mound of discarded jewels leaned up against the side of the building. I can't get it out of my head. Some of the jewels were very new and lustrous-looking, save for the encrusted blood. Others were old and faded. The pile was almost as tall as one of the adults.

It was also at the edge of the field. The field was filled with hundreds of mounds just like it.

Goblin Brain: Free Range, Dorito-Fed, Organic Gaming Experiences

As some of you may know from my Crypt Cities posts, I am a mild fan of Dark Souls.

I wasn't always one, though. I used to dislike the concept of them quite a bit.

I still might, actually.

Years ago when it was first released, Demons' Souls sailed right past me without my having a clue. A few years later, I heard or saw the name Dark Souls pop up here and there, mostly in relation to this fanboy flame war that I still can't wrap my head around, eight years later.

(Seriously, the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Dark Souls are such fundamentally different beasts that it seems like the only common ground on which to pit them against one another was that they were both some form of RPG and they both happened to come out in the year 2011. What was the beef?)

Anyway, I grew dimly aware that Dark Souls was some sort of brutally punishing game with a form of progress loss that was by no means as bad as roguelike permadeath, but still unforgiving. It seemed like the antithesis of fun to me at the time, and I gently avoided it.

A couple of conversations with a peer in community college on the eve of Dark Souls II's release in 2014 got my mildly curious as to what the big deal was since the game had done well enough to earn a sequel. I think I also saw a Game Grumps Steam Train series on DS2 at some point that involved a bunch of commenters getting angry at some ironic "MLG Pro" video thumbnails with swag-hats and Mountain Dew...

But again, it didn't go anywhere.

It wasn't until late in 2015 that I took a more active interest in figuring out what this series was, because the YouTube channel Extra Credits had just started up its new LP project called Side Quest, partly to look at animation and game design, and partly to die a whole bunch. I was familiar with and fond of at least one of the Dans of Extra Credits, and that was my means of bridging the gap now, even if it sounded weird not to hear him pitch-shifted- I thought we just had similar voices.

So I tagged along and witnessed the ruined land of Lordran for the first time. As I watched I grew more interested and wanted to find out what would happen next. But I grew impatient in waiting for episodes to release according to schedule, so I began to peer beyond that playthrough. I started to browse the game's wikis and click on the other DS-related videos I saw on my front page. I had no means to play the game and experiencing it first-hand, so I did so vicariously through others.

Eventually I found ways around my usual lack of resources and gave the first game a shot, first playing to keep up with the progress of the videos I watched using a similar character, but soon overtaking them and forging on ahead. Except I wasn't really forging anything. I was stuck in my newly formed habits, still consulting the wikis and going into each new zone or encounter with as much knowledge as I could reasonably obtain beforehand.

This trend continued into Dark Souls 2 when I tried out Scholar of the First Sin, and repeated again in Dark Souls 3 some years later. The number of hours that I played while unaided and in the dark could probably be counted on both hands. I was also entirely offline for all three experiences.

And in doing so, I think many fans of Dark Souls might feel that I ruined the essence of the game for myself.

A core part of the game to many fans, at least according to the impression I've gotten, is blundering through those experiences naturally, by yourself. To fall for the ambushes until you learn to anticipate them, and then falling for the second one in a row once you've felt an instant of hubris. To not find every treasure chest or hidden room until your second or third playthrough of the game. To either carefully piece together the lore, ignore it entirely, or give up and go watch a VaatiVidya playlist so that you can act like a know-it-all to your friends. Phantoms are free to come and go, but you need to experience the game without the middleman of guides or LPers.

But if I did that, I would die. And dying is an embarrassment to be avoided, at least according to the myriad of "git gud" memes out there. My logic was--still is--if I won't be able to do it perfectly the first time, mastering every challenge while still learning it, in order to impress or at least not coax boos out of a (completely imaginary) crowd of expert spectators, then there was no point to really trying at all. The games stopped being proper games for me, and became more like interactive checklists that I needed to satisfy in order to feel like I had done not-wrong.

When I encountered NPC quest lines in particular, I was faced with the same shattering feeling that I'd get when was faced with morality choices with consequences or quests with multiple endings in more traditional RPGs like Dragon Age- If I didn't get the 100% golden ending for everyone at once, I as a player, as a person, was failing them. I grew physically sick when I thought I had missed a Lucatiel or Siegward of Catarina encounter. It became a reflection of my real-life fears that by not doing perfectly, I was actively damaging the life experiences of everyone around me.

I couldn't just "hold that L" when I was already over max equip load with a Havel's suit of armor made out of other Ls.

But I still wanted to do the video game thing because the areas, spells, and gear were interesting and there were still some forms of positive feedback that I could enjoy and want to return to. So my every strategy was based around the idea of trivializing the challenge the game was designed for. I was shielded up with an over-leveled health bar whenever I wasn't spamming sorceries or using outright exploits to get past non-mundane enemies. I shot Manus almost to death with a longbow from outside his boss arena, and juked the Dragon Rider into falling off of his platform.

I dreaded ever boss battle, which I thought of as nothing but a roadblock, and a check on my enjoyment of the 'fun' parts of the game, which I can't even define adequately. Ornstein & Smough, the high point of Dark Souls I for countless fans, was an annoying and tedious mess that I quickly forgot all details and emotions of after I got past them on the 11th or 12th try. Meanwhile the almost universally panned Prowling Magus and his Congregation in DS2 was a-okay in my book because of how brief and inoffensive it was.

I never finished a Dark Souls game, not all the way through at least.

My armored lady-knight in DS1 was eventually abandoned after I had burned out on grinding tens of millions of souls from the Phalanx Hollows in the Painted World- I really wanted to have my Elite Knight set on while doing Dark Wood Grain Ring backflips, and that needed a lot of Endurance.

I technically killed the final boss of vanilla DS2 with my greying old lightning cleric, but that was only after I gave up on the DLC zones, so I never saw Aldia and the like. Also I was feeling guilty for enjoying DS2 because at the time the feeling that it was not as good as DS1 was in full swing on the internet.

In DS3 I got to the isolated walkway where I could literally see the room where the Soul of Cinder shows up, and I even circumvented it to enter the arguably harder Dreg Heap and have a shot at getting the fiery scimitar pyromancy catalyst thing that I wanted for my pyromancer. But it just never happened. I never reached any of the endings.

And yet, when I switched to other games in order to get a breather, the feelings carried over with me.

The Banner Saga, one of the first games I ever wanted to back the development of (but lacked the money to), had to be played with a walkthrough handy. I even tried to no avail for hours to get a glitch to work where you could recruit Ekkil while also saving Egil so that no party members had to die in this grim, icy world where people are expected to die.

Multiplayer games of any sort always gave me performance anxiety, but after seeing the way your shame can be immortalized in Dark Souls invasion fail compilations, I just can't. It's impossible to imagine co-op anything, let alone PvP where the options are to lose or ruin another person's fun.

I've been staring at an installed copy of Ashen on my desktop for a few weeks now, after hearing that it was a somewhat less intensive "Dark Souls for people who don't really like Dark Souls".

Maybe I'll get around to it without reading too far ahead? It's hard to say.

Goblin Brain: An Internet Diary for Me to Whine Into

It's strange, being the only goblin in town.

The most obvious oddity is that I'm sized all wrong for everything around me- though sometimes that can turn around in my favor. Sure, I need a couple of old world atlases to boost me up onto my "standing" desk, but half a standard granola bar is practically a meal for me. Squirrels and small dogs are a daily threat to my existence, but the storage closet under most stairways is like a loft apartment to me. Finding clothing in my size that doesn't have an OshKosh B'gosh tag somewhere on it is a nightmare, but as far as beds are concerned, every one's a king-size. Moderately tall grass is enough for me to get lost in, but sometimes it's good to be able to hide.

The strangeness goes deeper than that, though.

I've never been part of a community of other goblins or our cousins, to the point that I'm not entirely sure what subtype I am. I wasn't orphaned or adopted, though. As near as I can tell, I was born to my (thoroughly human) parents with zero pre- or post-natal changeling shenanigans. People even say I bear a bit of a resemblance to my father- it's the nose, mostly. By all rights I shouldn't be what I am, but I am.

I've made attempts to integrate myself into goblin life, albeit weak ones. I still invite Goody Mooncup's mail delivery marsh goblins over for coffee every once in a while, even if  they've been... unambiguous in saying how much they dislike my decaff. I realize that they are technically magical constructs of mud and sweet grass, but trying to define who is and isn't sufficiently "goblinoid" is a steep and slippery slope toward an ugliness that I will not abide here.

Where am I going with all of this...

Perspective, right. Perspective.

I'm only approaching all of this as strange--rather than my ordinary life--because the wonders of the internet have, over the years, allowed me to piece together a broad understanding of the human condition, or at least a couple of forms of it. As an added bonus and/or penalty, I've been able to do it all from the isolation of my burrow, or my old room back in my parents' place. It's genuinely fun and inspiring to read about you people, as horribly patronizing as that must sound. But sometimes, despite my best intentions, I really do not understand what brings big folk to do certain things. Like sprinkling gold on food, or attaching testicles to your pickup truck. But there are many more things that I find compelling, even if I've always been apprehensive to study them in person or in practice.

Something I've always heard references to, suggestions for, and parodies of, is the journal.

Now I'm sure I've left a record of past stages of my life lying around for me to peruse, if I knew where to look. Everything we do is imprinted with who and what we are at the time, and the changes in those seemingly unrelated records can be subtle hints to the changes in us. For example, my favorite color has over the years steadily shifted toward a tannish beige hue, ever since I realized in my teenage years how terribly narcissistic it seem for me to like the color green.

But the deliberate, conscious act of writing a record of yourself, for yourself has always been a weird but fascinating concept to me.

... So I guess I'll give one a shot?

That's the only way I know how to tie together the sloppy beginning and end of this post.

I will write a more personal, introspective series about anything in daily life that strikes me, and maybe it will be enjoyable to read.

I don't have a schedule to begin with, so in a weird way you don't have to worry about journal posts taking up a slot for more of my other projects. This will just be another occasional bit of word-blerf I throw out here, sometimes voiced and possessing the suggestion of production value, but usually not. That is a distinction that I want to keep associated with my episodes of Goblin Watch.

Speaking of which, I really should get to work on the next episode... Those Welsh coblyns aren't going to cwtch themselves.

Still alive, but hibernating.

Hello, dear Burrowers.

I haven't been treating you very dearly lately, have I? Falling behind on any kind of schedule I set as soon as I can, avoiding transparency, and doing nothing with the money a charitable few of you have given me through ko-fi or Patreon. I'm going to attempt to explain myself, as much for my own sake as for anyone's curiosity.

I don't think I especially enjoy writing.

I like the idea of writing, and the ideas I write about, but the act of writing itself has become as arduous as any of my other remaining pass-times. The shift from fun to work happened right around the time I started the blog, and it grew steadily worse from there. At the time of this writing, I've posted nothing in over a month, and I've dropped out of all of the play-by-post games I was a part of. A couple times I sat here trying to delete my blog and associated pages, but (un)fortunately I've chickened out of that so far.

I've done these things, or come close to doing them, because I hate the things I make. Evidently I've had this problem ever since I was a child and it's a little less normal for people to feel than I previously believed. I feel a deep, sometimes painful need to destroy the things I create, because the fact that I was the one who made them means that they are inadequate and inferior to the creative things that other people have made or will make. This is doubly frustrating when a part of me also wants my things to be seen and enjoyed by others. That's why I started up the Burrow to begin with, after all. Had I been able to satisfy myself with just a folder of stories in my desk or on my desktop, I would have quietly continued to add to them, or burned or deleted them months ago by now.

Another reason why I started the Burrow was because I wanted some money.

Being unemployed all my life and afraid to leave my house on most occasions, let alone find a job or real social life with humans, I felt the need to save my change for years but only recently got into the habit of mindlessly completing surveys for PayPal payments and Visa gift cards. Owning a successful and monetized site was my pipe-dream, and after I rightly destroyed an abortive YouTube gaming channel attempt years ago, I eventually came to wishfully thinking that my writing could accomplish what choppy, low-fi videos could not.

Since my dislike for my own material sort of forbids me from advertising it anywhere for any reason, you can see how my blog has remained obscure outside of the posts which a fan aggressively promoted for my sake. I can't even share posts with my significant other for fear of seeming silly, desperate, improperly distracted, or whorish. And when I saw the new blogs of recent acquaintances reaching 1,000 or 10,000 page views in a fraction of the time it had taken me to hit the same milestones, I began to seriously think "why bother?" With hopelessness about my blog's future mounting on one side and resentment about its content on the other, I finally petered out last month.

I don't particularly want to get back into writing at the moment, though it would be useful to keep the empty hours a little less so. I want something to be done with the ideas that I have, especially since (in my ignorant little bubble where I read virtually nothing that other people are working on) they seem to be unique. But I don't think I'm in the head space to be able to do it comfortably. Maybe I'll come back for the new year, especially if some kind of job finds me and takes the unrealistic financial pressure off of this hobby. And, maybe once Google+ is shut down for good in April, I'll have the incentive to start sharing on places like reddit communities, since there will be literally no other option for me but to try different avenues.

So, consider this a hiatus of sorts, and forgive me if you were looking forward to new updates on Litte's road trip, or explanations of what the hell the aurikhs and Fokari are.

Patreon Is Go!

I guess even with baby steps, you cross a threshold eventually...

After months and months of deliberation over whether it was worthwhile, merited, or sleazy to do, I've finally decided to just go ahead and launch a Patreon page.

You can view it here or on the main page of my blog once I figure out the widget.

This is also an appropriate time to mention that I am not dead! Another long apathy hiatus is ended, and I will be publishing my overdue Episode 2 on Goblin Watch within the next few days- not to mention the half-dozen empty drafts which have been sitting around on my post list.

It all starts with a title, sometimes.

Anyway, I am going to use Patreon to fund any future ideas I have for the Burrow, as well as open it up as another source of CuPosts, if you prefer that site over Ko-fi. My Ko-fi will be staying up too, however. And I am always eager to write about any sort of prompts you can think of.

My goals aren't concrete at the moment, other than commissioning a higher definition image for the page. But rest assured, I will find a way to give back to all of you for reading my stuff for this long, dear Burrowers.

Have a good end of the summer, and to my fellow East Coasters, stay dry and out of the storm!

Yeah, that was all a terrible mistake and I canceled the whole thing a few months after it started. All I was doing was sapping five bucks a month from a handful of people who like or wanted to help me. It did nothing for my ability to produce content, and I am embarrassed I ever tried.

Maybe someday when I have something resembling quality and consistency here, I might try again, but it's unlikely. You can still buy posts from me on Ko-fi, at least.

Furt Partakes in RPG Blog Carnival, July 2018: Tabletop Tales.

The Carnival is underway!

Hello, dear Burrowers.

I learned something the other day. Apparently, instead of being a once-a-year event, the RPG Blog Carnival is a monthly topic! Last year, when my blog had been much more nascent, I wrote something on the prompt of how magic works in one's game world. But this time, it's something quite different that they're asking for.

For July's entries, the Carnival is being hosted by Pitfalls and Pixies of the RPG Blog Alliance. From the nebulous topic of "Tabletop Tales" I've decided to pull the idea of telling a story about my first (and so far, only) attempt at playing a tabletop RPG in person with other living, thinking beings.

As you shall see, it was a bit of a bizarre experience. Fair warning: there is as much early aughts teenager angst in this post as there is genuine tabletop encounters.

First, let's turn the clock back to the '09-'10 school year, back when I was in my junior year of high school and I left my house more than once a week without fearing the sounds of chattering teeth. In our podunk mountain valley town's adjoining middle and high school buildings, there wasn't a whole lot to do other than keep your head down and do your own time. There were a few sport teams, and at least a theater and debate club, but there wasn't much that appeared on my radar while I existed in that weird, liminal state of being part of no groups or circles, but being auxiliary to several. One of those groups was the lunch table I sat at, fairly close to the center of the cafeteria.

I ended up mostly sitting with seniors who had such busy extracurricular schedules that my lunch period was pretty much the only time they could eat. They were very welcoming of me though, and it seemed genuinely not to bother them that I was a three-feet-tall lime-green embodiment of anxiety who still thought the band Manowar was cool.

I guess it helped that YouTube music videos rarely showed their album covers.

The lunchfellows I most clearly remember were a big, boistrous member of the aforementioned debate team, a reedy redheaded guy with a laughter-inducing laugh who was trying to get a school Quiddich team going, a libertarian firebrand who always brought this really great jam back home with her from family visits to Switzerland, and a member of the theater group who was so uncompromisingly pleasant and milquetoast that people found her equally endearing and infuriating. This story will be about the debate team member.

In my usual way of quietly complaining about things without wanting to entirely fix the issue, I one day lamented to the table that I couldn't play D&D. As it happened, the debater also had an interest in D&D, as well as a friend who was an experienced DM. After a few more talks and deciding to go with 3E (hating on 4E was in vogue at the time, even in a town where so few people played anything), we decided to form a group. I proceeded to jump the gun (and the shark) by printing out several copies of those really heavy-duty three-page character sheets for 3rd edition and handing them out to anyone else in the hallways I thought might be interested, probably driving a few people away with my uncharacteristic earnestness in the process. But we managed to get a group together in the end, comprised of us, his two younger siblings, and another senior. Because three out of five members lived in the same house, we decided the sessions would happen over there for the most part.

The cold evening of the first game night came around finally, and after a half hour of failing to find the entrance to their house surrounded on all sides by foreboding woods, one of my parents graciously dropped me off. I knocked on the door, was welcomed inside, crushed underneath the family's very friendly and very big dog that I think may have been part yellow retriever, part horse, and then finally made my way down into the basement where the group was meeting.

There, I finally saw a glimpse of our DM.

A small, crimson red flip-phone placed in the center of the old table.

For you see, our DM was native to an even more rural town several miles away from ours, and lacking transportation or internet, the only way he was able to participate was through a phone call set to loud speaker.

Of course I'd been told about this beforehand, but it wasn't until I actually saw it in practice that I realized just how weird this was going to be. The days of Roll20 and other virtual tabletop software hadn't yet come, and for it to be only one member of the group, especially one who needed to be able to illustrate and explain so many details, we wouldn't be able to play very normally. But play we did.

The first night was entirely dedicated to actually making our characters. I wanted to play a follower of the Planescape deity Meriadar, but the DM was too unfamiliar with that material to want to allow it. Most of us ended up picking from the Book of Exalted Deeds as far as deities were concerned, and that was going to be an important part of the campaign.

When all was said and done and the Level Adjustment was balanced for, I had rolled up an orphaned, reformed, and morningstar-wielding bugbear cleric named Muldar Strongpaw.

Somehow, he was still the most mundane member of the entire party.

My friend rolled up a half-celestial fighter/wizard, his younger brother a half-dragon paladin, and his sister a half-drow vampire ranger. The other classmate made a half-elf bard, but vanished within one session because her owner probably realized how botched this was all going to be and decided to politely bow out.

By the end of the first proper gaming night, personalities were developing (and clashing). The gish styled himself as a theatrical gentleman hero, the dragon paladin was highly aggressive and on the verge of breaking his code and falling on several occasions, the ranger was withdrawn and secretive about her condition to the point of appearing flat from a distance, and my cleric was a begrudging grumbler who felt like it was his job to chaperone this class field trip of an adventure.

The world which the game was set in was entirely custom-made by the DM and several friends. It combined elements of high medieval fantasy with shonen anime and the occasional splash of steampunk. One week we were fighting back an orc invasion of a Great Wall protected by lung dragons, and the next we were rescuing civilians from a guerilla warfare-blasted cityscape in the shade of a giant magical tree. It was sprawling, varied, and totally confusing to a beginner who had no primer manual. But we managed to get by, focusing on things one step at a time. An overarching plot of demons coordinating with a dark elf queen eventually formed in broad strokes, but there was no telling how much plot we missed due to our own choices or ineptitude. More than one deus ex machina occurred, either as the plot called for it or when the DM felt he needed to go easier on us. And since our practical knowledge of 3.5E was on the level where Toughness seemed like a decent choice for a feat, I kind of have to admit he was right.

One fond memory I do have is of when our trip through a forest ended in us surrounded by a pack of wolves. They outnumbered us significantly, and we had no means of escaping easily, so we tried to turn to our oft-overlooked skill checks and utility spells for an answer.When the paladin's player jokingly suggested that my cleric try to communicate with the wolves "because he's part bear" and I responded to that idea with in-character derision, the gravelly grumble that I made his voice came across as actual growling on the other end of the phone call, leading our DM to believe that I was trying to communicate with wolves.

He had me roll some kind of Charisma check- might have been Handle Animal, might even have been Diplomacy.

In either case, I rolled a Nat 1.

The alpha male was so unbelievably dumbfounded by whatever the hell came out of my character's mouth that it and several of the other wolves just sort of sat back on their haunches, tilted their heads, and stared at my bugbear in disbelief. Inadvertently, this ended up giving us the edge we needed to fight our way through and out of the forest.

The last hurrah of the game as far as most of us were concerned was the night several months in when the DM actually came to town. He came alongside his other group whom he DM'd in person, and whose player characters had appeared in our campaign a few times as NPCs. Of course they'd mopped the floor with us during a gladiatorial arena bout and taken a considerable amount of our money. They were all nice people though, and the night concluded with me winning back (or at least denying for the other party) the same amount of gold as we'd lost. This was done through a few rounds of a fantasy blackjack game with the other party while I was playing a minor NPC in a tavern- Old Seamus even managed to carry his winnings back home that night without alerting his wife to the fact that he hadn't been asleep on the couch that whole time.

There were less than fond memories made, though. The perpetually poor quality of the phone call meant that we'd sometimes get hung up having to repeat or ask for the same thing over and over again, and on nights when the phone wasn't all-the-way charged we had to play pressed up against a corner outlet in that poorly heated basement in the dead of winter. Having to get driven out there and back every week was also an inconvenience that I knew my parents weren't exactly thrilled of, even if they didn't voice it much. We spiced the location up once or twice by going to the new gaming shop that opened up around the corner from my house, but that place closed up in a matter of weeks after the owner and his father won two million dollars in lottery money, split it, and relocated to a prime spot downtown.

I also began to realize that the other members of the group didn't seem like they were enjoying playing much. I was the only one who was really comfortable with role-playing, and I think that endeared me to a bit of favoritism from the DM which I felt guilty for. Sibling arguments were frequent, occasionally leaving us down one member for that night's session. I got the impression that my friend was the stubborn glue keeping everything together, and that he was oblivious to the problems which we all had, but which we refused to express for whatever unreasonable reasons. For me it was my meekness and not wanting to disappoint anyone. So the game dragged on. My bugbear's monotone sarcasm started to take on more and more of a targeted edge toward the other party members, fueled by my resentment. I once did my best to make a windstorm during an airship ride into a "puke on the half-angel from motion sickness" minigame.

I can't believe an image as apropos as this even exists.

Eventually I tried to get out of the game, but at first I only succeeded at skipping a game now and then while getting lunchtime updates on what I'd missed in the interim. My commitments to other friends online suffered as I tried to pretend that I wasn't dividing my attention between groups, and my weekends started to feel draining all by themselves, even as they were sandwiched between weeks of testing in one of my rockiest semesters. Even when my parents realized that I was a nervous wreck that wasn't having any fun, I couldn't easily articulate that to the guy. And, since he was in the debate club after all, he was damn good at convincing me otherwise. Finally I snapped at him, and he gave up trying to convince me. He left the door open for me, but I didn't take it, and last I heard my cleric-turned-NPC was acting as the castellan of a small fortress the party had reclaimed, while also caring for a silver dragon egg that would eventually have plot significance. The siblings also quit, and eventually the campaign went back to the solo phone game between two friends that it had started off as, and maybe should have stayed limited to.

I gave a great sigh of relief finally, and wondered how I'd let it go on for that long. The desire to play D&D had been burned out in my veins, and it would take until I was in community college several years later to think of getting back into it. When I did though, I made damn sure that it was in the environment of a nice, evenly paced play-by-post game on a forum.

I'm glad that I've managed to stay or get back on good terms with everyone from the group, though it took the passing of our DM a year after I left to finally bring us back together on a common cause.

Now, as far more of a shut-in than I used to be, I wonder if I shouldn't try to make the magic happen again- that relocated gaming store is still in town, bigger and way better than it had ever been in our day. I could use the socialization, as well as the exercise of walking there and back, since real cars still terrify me (and I don't think a more appropriately-sized clown car would be street legal). But it's up to me whether to use this story as motivation, or as a precaution.

If there is any sort of moral in this story, I would say it has to be that clear communication--in all of its different forms and meanings--is key to making any tabletop game, or any kind of storytelling endeavor, enjoyable for all.

Goblin Watch, Episode 01.

((Welp. I tried to start a YouTube series. I tried to create a simple but practical and charming visual aesthetic to go along with my (hopefully) edutaining solo rambling. I tried to develop long-term designs to get in on that sweet AdSense gravy-train in a way that wouldn't pepper my blog with awkward, unrelated advertisements for low home refinancing rates or highly specific dating websites.

Operative word being "tried".

In the end, I just don't have the skill, patience, or computer processing power to be able to build a video series from scratch.

So instead, I've decided to throw the audio up onto Soundcloud!

Come listen to the first episode of Goblin Watch here.

In this new format, I'll be approaching the history of the "goblin" in a rambling solo-cast style, but also providing each episode's script as a textual post of its very own, in case anxious, high-pitched voices aren't quite your cup of tea. So feel free to click above or scroll down, or both if you're feeling generous, and enjoy.

Let me know if you have any suggestions for how I can improve this (besides getting a better mic, of course. I am a bit limited on funds for now), and let me know if you would prefer future episodes to be shortish like this (5-15 minutes total), or if they should be beefier (20-30 minutes or more).

Additionally, if you would like me to dedicate a Ko-Fi post to audio, let me know in advance! I am still eagerly awaiting CuPost material.))





Goblin Watch, Episode 01.

Hello, and welcome to Goblin Watch! The mini-series dedicated to the origins and iterations of everyone's favorite folkloric critters and adventurer fodder.

Have you ever wondered where goblins come from? Well, when a mother goblin and a father goblin love each other...

Wait, wrong episode.

Ahem!

But seriously, have you ever wondered where the idea of a goblin comes from? Who invented it, and in how many different parts of the world? What makes a goblin different from or similar to other mythical creatures like elves, or dwarves? In what state was the idea of the goblin when that Tolkien git came along and got his hands on the word, and what has it been like ever since he left his indelible mark on it and in part wedded it to the revolutionary new idea of orcs?

These and many other questions will be raised, and hopefully we'll be able to find some good answers to them.

I am, appropriately enough, the Furtive Goblin, and I will help lead the way.

Over the next few weeks, or months, or however long this lasts, we will be delving into the history of the concept of the goblin, and how people have used that idea over the centuries.

This exploration will take us through vast stretches of mythology, literature, cinema, video gaming, and even pop culture, though not in any particular order.

It will also be a journey of self-discovery for me, as I come to grips with my identity.

Without any further ado, let's begin with the first step taken in any ambitious series: A soul-crushing lesson in etymology and dead languages!

Just a head's up, I am not a linguist, and my ability to pronounce words in other languages, even Romance languages, is pretty abysmal, so my apologies for getting many things wrong.

The Modern English word g-o-b-l-i-n “goblin” is the current most common version of the word, with several other spellings having been around and attested to for a while before most writers decided on the simplest one. So, the vast majority of goblins we'll come across from here on out will be just goblins. Goblyn with a 'y' is something we are going to come back to in a couple of chapters once we hit tabletop role-playing games, however.

English goblin first appeared in the 14th century CE, deriving from the earlier Anglo-Norman word gobelin, which itself derives from an Old French word of the same spelling.

(Little known fact, a contingent of 200 goblin cavalrygobs was instrumental in the victory at the Battle of Hastings. They rode on William the Conqueror's hunting dogs.)

This French word in turn deviated in around the 12th century CE from the Medieval Latin word cabalus or possible gobalus. We aren't quite sure which, because of the different ways Latin handled /g/, /c/, and /k/ sounds in written script.

Finally, our old Latin friends seemed to have ripped the idea from the Greeks, who used the word kobalos, plural kobaloi. In addition to being a rude name you'd call someone you might deem a rogue, knave, or thieving jerk, the kobalos is a class of spirits or other minor divinities in Greek Mythology- again, material we'll be sure to touch upon in a later episode.

And that's pretty much all there is. I was somewhat disappointed to find that there isn't a strong suggestion anywhere of what the Greek word might come from, or if there was a single Proto-Indo-European word from which all of this descends.

But that's only the more popular etymology for goblin in modern discourse.

Another theory which I'm personally more skeptical of is that goblin is ultimately a diminutive sort of pet-version of the proper name Gobel/Gobeau, possibly of Germanic or French origin.

A third theory is that goblin derives from the name for the continental Germanic kobold, but given that kobold shares Greek kobalos as the same etymological root, this theory sort of turns around into the first etymology.

(Side note, this also gives an etymological precedent for kobolds being so similar in behavior and physical appearance to goblins in the first few iterations of Dungeons & Dragons, despite my personal preference for those of a more recent, scalier persuasion.)

Goblin itself is the origin for the Welsh creature called a coblyn, showing that we are not dealing with a linguistic dead-end, and giving an inkling of where the word might go in the coming centuries as language changes and interacts. The coblyn is classified as a type of Knocker- a more brownie- or leperchaun-esque being which I've only heard about for the first time in researching this video. It's an interesting point for later exploration, but for now we've got to stay on topic.

Now that we've got an idea of the word, let's take a look at its earliest uses. Tune in next [insert time frame here] for a look at the nature and actions of goblins and their ancestors in myths, as well as folklore- that last great bastion for all half-discarded things which have fallen out of the favor of dominant mythologies and belief systems.

Ko-fi Update: Fuel my creativity in more ways than one!

Hello once again, dear Burrowers. Sorry for the slow month. The leaping year and the daylight spending always come as a surprise to me, and leave little goblin a little dazzled for a while.

And, while I've been delighting in the weirdness which a certain hedge-mage has brought to the surgical table of my recent and most long-running series of posts, I am currently trying to work out where exactly the travelogue will be heading... other than Southward and/or Backward, of course.

I do have an end point in mind, as well as several dots along the trail in-between, but it's the in between in-betweens that are challenging me at the moment.

I come to you with good tidings, though.

Never again will I want for writing topics, so long as you lot remain interested!

A few weeks ago I made a post referring to my recently opened Ko-fi page, and since opening it I've had the pleasure of getting two cups for virtually nothing in return. It felt pretty sweet at the time, and I am still very appreciative. But I've come to realize that I want to feel like I'm earning something when one of you is nice enough to donate. And that is why from now on, any and all donations will come with near-instantaneous* rewards for the donor and all other readers!

I call it CuPosting. Yes, it's a terrible name. And I love it.

1 Cup = 1 Post. Simply include in your private message accompanying a donation one writing prompt of a few sentences or less. It can be related to the Ivory Tower University Setting, or anything fantasy-orient, or even fiction in general, so long as my writing in response to it would not flag my blog as adult-oriented... because I can go on and on about the hideous experiments of Mersind & Hital all I want, but a single descriptive instance of consensual boinking would be a no-no.

You can also mention your name or one of your aliases in the prompt message, and I'll be happy to give you or content of your own a shout-out in the associated post.

As stated, I do have general plans for my own posts and will be continuing with those, so have no fear about my content suddenly being overtaken by the will of the masses. I have loads of free time this time of year, anyway.

At least until the squirrels start to come back out in great enough numbers and ferocity...



* Instantaneous, up to my capacity to write in a timely fashion, given how hectic life can be. As well as assuming I don't all of a sudden receive a massive influx of donations and requests. Of course if that did happen, I would be so incredibly delighted that rest assured, I would put aside a big chunk of time to get around to each and every prompt.

Why I am Anxious about OSR Gaming.

The observant Burrower might notice that out of the several blogs listed on the side of the page here, more than a few of them deal heavily in Old School Renaissance/Revival content. This is not because I am particularly interested in OSR, though. It just sort of happened that I found them and happen to like a few ideas from each. And I still encourage any of you to go and check them out.

But this post is more about my weird feelings toward OSR than any writers of it. To be honest, nothing has prompted this post, either. I am not responding to any reader comments (though I would be happy to find some sort of question box feature for Blogger). This is just Furt trying to work self-therapy via text, because as it happens to be, the OSR is a source of a lot of uncertainty and anxiety for me.

First I should probably properly define the OSR- more for myself than for the reader, since you folks might very well be more into it than me, and in any case you have the Google at your fingertips. It's a loose term still, but it usually refers to modern tabletop role-playing games and their communities which go back into the history of tabletop RPGs, particularly D&D, and draw influences and mechanics from their earliest incarnations. A retro-clone of AD&D 1E, or of "Original" D&D, would be included in the Old School Renaissance. Often, rules bloat is consciously avoided and a much smaller body of rules is preferred, with individual DM or group rulings filling in the gaps on a case-by-case basis.

More than mechanics however, OSR games try to recapture the "feeling" of old RPGs. Feeling is hugely subjective, but a common agreement I've read is that the feeling includes a greater potential for danger, an emphasis on player skill, developing characters over time, and embracing various different approaches/deconstructions/reconstructions/love-letters to the classic act of dungeon crawling.

An excellent resource for helping to understand this "feeling" and getting started on your own old school experience is this primer from Mythmere Games. A lot of these "zen moments", or what I've for some reason come to call "pillars of OSR" will be guiding my haphazard rambling from this point onward. I guess I'll get right to it then.

Pillar #1

The first moment of zen is, as alluded to before, the use of "Rulings, not Rules". The players are not expected to have access to the whole ruleset of the game, and may even be discouraged to. They describe what their actions are, because there are no predefined rolls and checks with modifiers for them to use for those given actions. Rolls come in when there is something unexpected or variable, and it might just as easily be a d6 as a d20 roll. The DM or Referee has access to the rules, but they are meant to be used as a reference, not to define or even guide their actions.

The example given for this difference in approach by Modern vs. Old Style gaming is the disarming of a pit trap. In the modern style, the back-and-forth between player and DM is fairly brief, with checks made to detect and then disarm the trap in question. In the old style, the DM asks the player how they try to disarm the trap, and the player describes the exact feelings and actions of their character, as well as asks what they see. No die is rolled in the given exchange, and it ends without the pit trap being disarmed at all- just sidestepped by the rogue and party.

I had a vague understanding of what D&D was before 2000, but I didn't get into it until I got the boxed orange 3E set for either Yulesmas or my birthday, I forget which. As such, a d20+mod roll was the only way I knew how to solve a problem for the longest time. Unfortunately, my parents eventually took my orange d20 away when I started using it to determine my own hunger levels. More recently, when I broke my ~10 year streak of not actually getting to play the game and only dwelling in the theoretical elements of the game all by my lonesome, I approached it with a strong emphasis on character-building. It's a hobby of mine. Some people garden, or collect stamps, or consume massive quantities of recreational drugs. I boot up PCGen and fiddle with the math of a 20 point-buy and Wealth By Level in order to get the most satisfying, mechanical approximation of a neat character concept I can think of. I think of character ability in terms of feats and skill points, even when that can be limiting on approaches to a problem. And while the idea of stepping outside of that well-ordered box is enticing in theory, it also distresses me.

Another important bit of context is that, aside from one haphazard and charmingly abysmal attempt in my Junior year of high school, I have only ever played D&D or any other tabletop RPG over the internet. And the vast majority of those experiences have been PbP (Play-by-Post) games on message boards. In classic D&D, you get together with your buddies whom you know outside of the game, and hopefully you all have a sense of one another and your interests or ways of thinking about things. On the internet, where you send in character sheets and descriptions or biographies as part of a literal application process to the DM, things are a lot more anonymous. And that is where I think a strong body of rules is way more useful than fast and loose rulings. Rules become a means of communicating ideas to other people who have different starting points or wildly conflicting notions of common sense, and in many ways the ruleset becomes a specialized language used to facilitate the conversation of playing the game. Also, trying to play out that entire thief-referee conversation of what is seen and done in single-line posts over the course of several real-life days can severely hamper the progress of a game where people's availability is always shifting.

I suppose that feeling could be different, or would have the possibility of changing, if I ever play a face-to-face or at least real-time game with mutually-known people (I have yet to give something like Roll20 a real shot). But as it stands, "crunch" is a grounding, comforting thing which I can nonetheless use to my advantage, and I meet rules bloat and mountains of splat-books with delight rather than disdain because it comfortably widens the "box" I find myself within.

Pillar #2

"Player Skill, not Character Abilities" is a phrase that makes me quake with fear, and my insides tremble in such a way that I have to be careful how I stand up. In my mind, it strips away almost all of the role that luck has to play in the failure of my character, and it instead becomes a failure of me, the player. And I hate that feeling. I hate knowing that somehow, in a flexible game of options and possibilities where there is no intended "right way" to play, I have managed to play the wrongest way. It makes me feel useless to my (hypothetical) group of friends, and perhaps bad enough that it erases any gratification I might get from playing well. I don't trust myself to be skilled enough, or to ever gain the level of skill to be able to play. Even the possibility of a learning experience and the hope of doing better the next time around makes me feel stupid.

Don't ask me how the hell I managed to get through college with that attitude- I have no idea.

"Just play smart(er)" sounds like an obvious response to the problem, and that would in fact fix it. But then, in attempting to play smarter, the game becomes an exercise in suspicion, fear, and anxiety, and all of my creative energy goes toward imagining ways that things can or will go wrong. The simple act of sorting out the inventory of a relatively fragile shaman and their horse once became a grueling, months-long process where I (literally) weighed every single pound of encumbrance against its value and utility.

I agonized over how much space I had left below the Medium Load threshold for 11 Strength, and how any particularly valuable items were divided up between backpack and saddlebags. It became obvious (in my fevered mind) that the first monster we faced would immediately try to kill the character's horse and throw all of its items into a river or ravine, or disable the encumbered shaman to the point they'd be defenseless and dead. Every single possibility, even the ones with mutually exclusive possible solutions, became an inevitable scenario where It Was All My Fault™. And this was all for the relatively bloodless beginner levels of a Pathfinder Adventure Path!

This paranoia raised the question then of what I could reasonably expect a Dungeon Master to do. I don't think that many DMs are automatically sadistic, high-and-mighty, and out to get their players. But I do think that ORS games make it a lot easier for them to be. Again, maybe this would be changed by a face-to-face game where I do not imagine the DM as a shadowy figure behind a fortress of expensive referee screens decorated in images of Total Party Kills.

Another, smaller concern I have with this is the issue of effectively role-playing your character when you're relying on yourself, rather than them. A wizard with 18 Intelligence, for example, is objectively vastly more intelligent than most real-life humans are likely to be, and possessed of a greater ability to memorize details or absorb complex information. Yes, everyone has their dumb moments, but playing like you possess that high mental stat, especially if it's magically aided, sounds borderline impossible for an average player, or at least for me. So this character that should be able to handily meet a challenge has an even lower rate of success than what fickle dice would allow for in a modern style gaming context. And despite my reliance upon crunch, I value RP a good deal as well. This isn't so much of an issue with physical ability scores, since it's easier to imagine and describe feats of strength or speed, unless you have to show your work with body mechanics and physics homework.

Pillar #3

You ever stare at a word long enough that it looks misspelled, or just plain weird? I'm starting to get that way with "pillar" right now. Like the "ll" should be pronounced with the Spanish digraphic "y" sound. Or something entirely different, like pie-LAR... Anyway, on to the actual substance.

I actually have no problem with "Heroic, not Superhero". I like humble origins for characters, and just sort of stumbling into adventuring rather than starting off better than everyone else has its appeal to me. If they should be more powerful, for whatever reason, just raising the starting level and giving them a modest career history is perfectly fine. E6 is something that strives for that lower-magic,  grittier feel, and it's been around since the fairly early days of 3rd Edition. Pathfinder has a similar homebrewed meta-game, and a few 3rd-party publishers have even written gems about playing literal peasants.

But I also like high-powered games, even if I am terrible at managing magic items and spell slots. Both types of games seem equally enjoyable to me, subject to my flip-flopping weekly preferences of course. Combined with some of the above arguments, this power-level of game might make me more worried that common house cats will succeed in disemboweling my characters if they get pet the wrong way, but my anxiety doesn't reach a peak the same way. Eberron, one of my favorite settings, actually gives me an inkling of this same feeling because of how rare truly high-level characters are in the world. Sure, magic is everywhere, but it's mundane enough that you aren't a Superman among Batmans (Batmen?) for it.

Related to that note, does it make sense that I so closely associate the level of magic in a setting with the level of heroism vs. superheroism? I'm still mulling over what makes something "gritty" or "low" or "epic".

Pillar #4

Being told to "Forget Game Balance" is something I would be very tolerant of in a different medium. In a console RPG or MMORPG where a low-level player might make a wrong turn and get faced with a Hellobear, the penalty for dying is reverting to the last save, or respawning with some equipment damage, experience debt, whatever have you. Even in a roguelike game where death is permanent, a bewildering encounter with a nasty monster way higher up than its normal depth probably doesn't lose you a huge amount of time invested in a beloved creation.

But in a tabletop game where you can put in months of forum correspondence or hundreds of real-time hours, and using a system where resurrection magic is a pipe dream for many up until a certain level, I can't help but feel that that sucks for the players. The paragraph for this Moment of Zen claims that the old style campaign is in a fantasy world as opposed to a game setting, but it's still a game that is being played, and I think some degree of balancing should be implemented as such. I see the criticism of hand-holding in newer games a lot, but is it necessary to remove the handrails as well? What causes greater risks for smaller rewards inherently more fun?

I realize that some people can have fun while losing, and that a valid point in this is that if you can't have fun losing, then OSR possibly isn't the best choice for you. And in theory, I think I'd be fine with that if I could completely avoid attachment with my character in the event of their death by comical fluke. But I can't. In all of my years spent playing or thinking about playing D&D and its associated camp of RPGs, I have never had a character die on me. Granted, this is because all of the games I've been in have died before the PCs themselves. But I still fear the possibility (or maybe eventuality) of character death. It goes beyond the hours of investment or the list of gear on their person for me, since so many connections and story lines, as well as a part of myself, would also be dying with them. I guess I'm one of those people for whom a bad ending kinda spoils the good stuff leading up to it.

There's another sort of game balance I take a bit of issue with, and that's actually something that exists in many d20 games past and present, with the possible exception of games like D&D 4th Edition which emphasized power systems and things so heavily. This issue is party balance, and the ability of one character to contribute compared to another. I realize that prior to 3rd Edition, things like the God-Wizard and CoDzilla didn't really exist, but there were still areas of the game where one class outshined another. That is fine and expected with regards to party roles, but in my opinion it's kind of bizarre when it's applied to the progression of time.

I refer to the idea of Linear Fighters and Quadratic Wizards, and how characters will gradually transfer mechanical importance from one to the other as they level up, with a relatively narrow period of equality between them before mundane characters become redundant around formerly too fragile or specialized magic-users. The importance of player skill in OSR (and modern style games as well) can help mitigate this, sure, but it can also exacerbate it and make it even worse. I think this is the only point where I have a legitimate disagreement rather than a subjective anxiety attack, because a game works best when everyone feels like they can offer something at least seemingly equal, and aren't being overshadowed or overshadowing others. Both experiences can be unfun and guilt-inducing.

Miscellaneous Considerations

Not fitting into any of these major points are some of the specific bits which OSR games seem to lift from older games with confusing regularity. It might be nostalgia, or the grandfather clause at work, but they just vex me to no end.

Race-as-Class and Class Level Limits have gotten a lot of criticism and a lot of support in the past, and I don't mean to dredge up the played-out depths of the argument here. I can see how they would be useful for effectively marrying together mechanics and story, but only ever in a specific setting which they have been designed for, to reflect the unique conditions which characters in that world or universe experience. Beyond that, if they are the assumed way of things in any given setting in which the system is being used, that seems to me like a limitation of role-play and gameplay caused by overbearing mechanics, which is the exact opposite of what a lot of the OSR strives for. I think it would be better for the basic game rules to make no baked-in judgements on who can do what, and then leave that up to the specific DM, because barring existing but inappropriate material is a lot easier than but just as effective as making it from scratch to fill in gaps left behind by the authors' ideas of how the game should be played. 3.5E and Pathfinder DMs do that all the time when navigating the thousands of pages of printed materials to find what fits their campaign.

(This is also the part where I whine about so few deliberately old school games having playable, non-villainous orcs/goblins/what have you in the base rules, but that is because I am a one-trick pony with weird aesthetics, and I understand that faceless minions of darkness are an important facet of the feeling of the old days.)

Alignment is just... weird and difficult, and I don't get why so many (but not all) D&D retro-clones  embrace it like it isn't a source of needless out-of-game conflict. I admit I'm biased against objective morality in stories in general, but I feel like a big quality of life change could be to make it an optional rule boxed off from the rest of the game somewhere in the middle of the book. Unless of course the book is about Planescape, or another game where Outer Plane shenanigans are so integral to the plot. Then it gets a pass from me.



All of this said, I still like some of the ideas presented by OSR gamers. The blogs I follow have some bizarre ideas totally unlike what classic fantasy throws at you, and they remind me of how the Old School Renaissance, regardless of certain trends, is currently an absolute powerhouse of creativity and DIY-style world-building that allows for many cool and ironically new things to flourish. And that alone is good enough for me.

I do not know where I was going with any of this, if I even had a goal in mind. But it feels good to get this off of my chest and out into the ether. Thanks for bearing with me.