State of the Blog Year 7

 Well, this is a bit awkward.

Content

I only published one (1) singular post this year, Brief Thoughts on Fantasy Monotheism. It was a short, mostly stream-of-consciousness pondering of a model of fantasy divinity that better merges Standard Fantasy Polytheism with Big Centralized Church in a way that allows a lot of the broad tropes, stories, and dynamics people want out of both of those, while at the same time opening new and more detailed possibilities by making this model explicit and visible to the players.

There were some aspects of this idea, as I noted in a comment, that I forgot to even mention in the post itself, so I regard it as somewhat incomplete, and I may return to the topic at some point to flesh it out further, possibly revamping my old Shrines and Saints system (the more I think about it, this remains one of my best ideas that I've never fully executed on. I might need to port this to PF2e).

Since this is rather thin on the ground, I might as well list some of the blog posts I started drafting, but never finished:

Some Early Thoughts on PF2e and the Old School and Fleeing in Pathfinder: A pair of posts I've been writing and rewriting periodically since I started playing PF2e: there's a lot I love about the system, but there are holes in it, especially around parts of exploration and fleeing from combat, that cry out to be filled: with that, I could see myself running a somewhat trimmed-down version of the system for an old-school style game.

Worldbuilding: The Transmigration of Souls: A fragmentary exploration of what exactly an angel, devil, demon etc *is* in terms of fantasy metaphysics. Not quite sure what direction I was going with for this one.

What is a Goblin, Anyway? Monsters as Statblocks vs Play Patterns: Following a disagreement with JB from B/X Blackrazor (though I have no idea where to find that argument now) a reflection on AD&D monsters and how we can interact with them as statblocks or as play-patterns+flavor, and what these different approaches imply for your game.

The Warlock: Mercenary, Company Man, Vassal: Inspired by a Pointy Hat video, an exploration of different ways to imagine the 5e Warlock as a fantasy archetype, tracing source inspirations from the medieval witch to Dr. Faustus, to Daniel Webster and The Devil, to Elric of Melniboné and Harry Dresden, showing how the notion of what a 'pact with dark powers' even means and implies, metaphysically, changes a lot with cultural assumptions, and we can play with these possibilities in fantasy RPGs. 

Whence the Bandit?: A draft I've been coming back to repeatedly for over a year now, but which I can never get right: intended to be an exploration of historical banditry as a social phenomenon and significant literary portrayals, from Water Margin to The Count of Monte Cristo. The poverty of the fantasy bandit as a trope or archetype is, in my opinion, rooted in the cultural distance to this phenomenon, such that it's been totally flanderized and nearly worthless, but we can recover it with some reading and re-energizing of the concept.

Diagnostics

In spite of posting almost nothing this year, the one post I did write is... one of my most popular posts to date? I haven't been checking my stats lately so I didn't notice until I sat down to check, but I haven't gotten a post this widely-read since Ship of the Damned, which was published four years earlier. 

My stats also show that the blog received 103,000 reads in the last 12 months, making this by far my most-read year. The vast majority of these views are concentrated in my old, top posts, with Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse continuing to be my most popular post by a country mile.

I'm inclined to think most of these views are bots of some variety, particularly since one of my views from the last 24 hours supposedly originated from 'perplexity.ai'. In all likelihood, a lot of undisciplined web scrapers are crawling the blog and providing phantom views to posts.

That said, there are hopefully some new, actual human readers in the crowd and I do invite you to introduce yourselves in the comments!

Away From the Blog

I know I said this last year, but good goddamn this has been an eventful and busy year for me. I don't even know where to begin, so let's start at the end. 

As of a couple weeks ago, I finally finished my MS degree and have now moved out of Chicago to Manhattan, and will soon begin a job search in earnest, along with searching for a new, in-person tabletop group. Earlier in the year, I became a great deal more involved with my local software meetups and open-source communities, and have now spoken several times at meetups and small conferences. I spend a good bit of my time these days contributing to an open-source black hole simulation codebase (I'm not an physicist, just a code monkey helping them optimize it). I also got involved with a group of academic sleuths, helping them to detect and publicize scientific frauds and developing software to help them do it. 

In all the commotion, role-playing fell by the wayside: I did complete my PF2e game this spring as expected, though I had to rush it with less time than expected and it ended up being quite railroady, which I regret. I ran a couple pick-up sessions this summer for colleagues at my internship, and for my little cousins, all in PF2e. I had intended to at least run a couple small sessions this fall, but the final quarter of my MS proved to be far too busy.

Hopefully, I'll be back to regular play at some point in the coming year, which will get the blog juices flowing again. 

One other obstacle to the blog is that I'm increasingly writing elsewhere on other topics, mainly on software on my personal site and on scientific topics on a substack (though I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the platform and may move that somewhere else in time). I started this blog and a lot of my internet presence kinda-pseudonymously, but I'm no longer bothering to keep these separate, so have at the links. The software stuff is a lot of inside baseball, much of it talk transcriptions, tutorials, and reference material rather than more accessible introductory stuff (though I am currently writing an introduction to scientific Python and high-performance computing patterns that I will publish on my personal site, if that's the kind of things that tickles your fancy).

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So ends another year of blogging and gaming! Special thanks to regular readers and commenters gyrovague and D-Skelector, and to new commenter Dave Bloodaxe! I hope all of you have an excellent holiday and a wonderful new year!

Brief Thoughts on Fantasy Monotheism

It had not been my intention to leave the blog fallow for almost six months after its five year anniversary. However, heading into my graduate degree, job search, and preparing to move house, it's fallen by the wayside. 

Actual gaming, however, has not. A week and change ago I finished my Pharos campaign in Pathfinder 2e, all fourteen sessions of it (yes, scheduling students continues to be a challenge). I come out of it still very much liking PF2e as a system, and wanting to use it a good deal more in the future. It fits the 'modern, character-centric action-fantasy OC-style game' niche very well, far better than my past forays into D&D 5e, and I trust that it will continue to be my accessible, mainstream game of choice through which I can seduce new players into other systems. 

I have other thoughts on PF2e and the effects of not having solid rules for fleeing combat on player choice and exploration, but I'm going to let those simmer a little longer. 

Today, a brief worldbuilding consideration: how do we square fantasy pantheons with monotheistic churches?

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When it comes to depictions of organized religion in fantasy, I find myself pulled in a couple directions. 

First, modern d20 fantasy games tend to assume a large, non-exhaustive pantheon of gods with varying domains, which players don't necessarily need to have any particular attitude towards, though they can choose to focus on one, and generally need to if they're a cleric (but generally not if they're a paladin, in modern games). This trope descends primarily from depictions of the Greek and Roman pantheons, as well as treatments of pagan religions in pulps like Conan and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. 

On the other hand, the large, monolithic capital-C Church, primarily related to the real-world Catholic church, especially through depictions in literature and film from Dracula (via Abraham van Helsing and through him the OD&D Cleric) to anything set in the Spanish Inquisition. Depictions of this church in a given fantasy campaign can range from central to distant, staunch allies or corrupt villains, but there's just the one, with schisms and factional differences generally pushed to the side. 

It's not very easy to square these two tropes, but by the gods people have spent ages trying. 

I tried to do it in my Pharos campaign with the Concordance Church (not to be confused with that other thing from Pathfinder lore I know nothing about), a unified institution on the small, isolated island of Pharos wherein each of the Gods of the Inner Sea have their own shrine and priesthood, sharing a big tent and working intermittently towards shared goals. It was a rather hacky solution, which didn't fit neatly into the campaign and generally caused confusion more than it simplified things. 

These thoughts were kicked off by re-reading Monte Cook's Ptolus, which also tries to square this circle. In that case, the eponymous city is the center of a powerful regional church of the totally-not-Catholic variety (instead of a cross, it's an ankh!) dedicated to Lothian, while also featuring an entire district dedicated to the patchwork worship of gods large and small, from the tavern-church of the god of drink to the squalid, unmaintained temple of the rat god. 

It's a valiant and effortful attempt, but ultimately not one that really resonates with me, and since I may be trying my hand at running another Ptolus campaign in the future, it's something I wanted to figure out early. 

I haven't seen this particular depiction of a fantasy mono-church before, so here goes the idea:

The church/temple as a unified intermediary between the gods and mortals.

To fall into the hands of even a good god is a terrible thing. Even the best and most compassionate are distant. They fight battles on fronts that mortals can scarcely imagine, work toward ends hundreds or thousands of years in the future, and see the efforts of a single mortal as parts of a whole tapestry, not their individual struggle. For a mortal to dedicate their life in the service of such a being requires selflessness and faith very few can mach, and many are broken in the attempt. 

And of the gods which are not actively good, or are actively evil, let us not speak. 

Nevertheless, the gods in ancient times made great demands of the people who would ask them for safekeeping, aid, or power. They would demand children for lifelong service, warriors for their holy wars, and sacrifices to appease them, perhaps all in one. The aid of the gods was essential, but the price was high. 

And then, one day, there arose a new church, created by some founder-saint of your choosing. It was not dedicated to any single god, but neither was it some expertise in comparative religion. It was an institution built to shelter mortals and intercede with the gods, not one person or one family or one tribe or one nation at a time, but for all mortals, even those who were not aware of its existence. 

It was a radical, revolutionary thing. One of the more rash gods probably smote this founder-saint in a very dramatic fashion. But with time and effort, it worked. It gained enough lay adherents and wise priests, and it was able to bring many gods, not all of them but a great many, to the table, and spoke to them with one voice. 

It sought to standardize, collate, and order the workings of religion. It brought together the many rites and rituals and doctrines of the gods in one place, translated and discussed them, and made use of that knowledge. It made legible and transparent what a god could offer to members of the church, and what could be demanded in return. It even brought suit against some of the gods, before the eyes of their divine peers, for wrath wrought upon the innocent, for covenants broken, and excessive cost demanded in service and sacrifice.

This was dangerous work. High priests in those early days served for life, and had shockingly short tenures. But over time, it became normal. The gods adapted, and so did mortals. The church did not stretch to every part of the world, and not every god was a member in good standing (far from it!), but it was large enough and had enough sway that even those who were not members had to pay attention. 

This leads to all the interesting complications you would expect. When all the complaints and demands of vast and varied peoples need to be boiled down into a single proposal for the year or season, how do you prioritize things? Who can you possibly trust to perform that work, and to bring it to the table? What kind of corruption can fester when there is a near-monopoly on the production of miracles? What new errors and disasters can come when the gods act through intermediaries?

Interest groups form. Committees for and against the flooding of a great river, cults championing the gods of winter and twilight against day and summer. A county whose repeated demands for the eradication of a plague have gone unheeded starts causing trouble at the conclave and threatens to secede from the church. Was this the fault of a bureaucratic mixup? A petition dropped in favor of other interests? Or perhaps were the gods just not listening? What would be worse? 

There are evil gods at the table too, and not everyone knows how to feel about that. Platitudes about the devil you know are a lot less convincing when the Tongue of Asmodeus is in the room playing literal devil's advocate while everyone else is trying to stop a war. 

Then there's all the other gods. The ones who aren't members in good standing, yet still very much possess divine power and can demand sacrifices and service in exchange for their favor. Some regions where they hold sway and the local population is too scared or proud to join with the church. Influential clerics within the church striking out on their own and taking a small cult with them. Every so often, a god will join or leave, and it's always a big event. That's how you get isolated cults out in the mountains or hidden in cities. Not all of them are evil or even harmful, but they're all trying to deal with the divine on their own terms, for their own needs, and are willing to dedicate themselves far more intensely in order to ensure someone listens. They just need to do this out of common sight, or else face censure. 

And there's no denying that there are big benefits for the gods who join as well. Yes, they must submit to the will of their 'peers' and descent to barter with mortals, but they find great stability in exchange. All of a sudden, sacrifices and songs and rituals are being conducted in their name, in strict accordance with their desired doctrine, in regions where they might have never performed a single miracle, by people who a few generations ago did not know they existed. It flows in like clockwork, and the demands upon them in exchange are predictable and stable from year to year. 

It's extremely messy, and I love that. I think this manages to simultaneously:

•     have the big, monolithic church which can be the source of crusades and inquisitions and corruption as well as organized faith and charity,
•     involve many fantasy gods of varying domains and morality,
•     invite interesting human elements instead of flattening them, and make room for a wide variety of possible adventure hooks

It also evokes, at least as far as my knowledge of ancient religions go, more of the spirit of how actual ancient pagan religious systems worked. The Greek and Roman pantheons are the core inspiration for these fantasy pantheons, but they worked rather differently than imagined. You don't become a priest of Jupiter just by devoting yourself at some point and staying there, it was a whole career progression, and you'd be just as likely to spend time with responsibilities over a general sector, such as the declaration of peace and war, as to spend your days organizing the temple of a particular god. 

I think I'm going to use this concept for my next d20-style fantasy game, whether it's Ptolus or something else. I think it's got great potential!

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