Alone in the Labyrinth: THE BEYOND: POLARIS REVISITED, via Carcosa and... The Imperium of Man?

Sunday 11 June 2023

THE BEYOND: POLARIS REVISITED, via Carcosa and... The Imperium of Man?

In this post I return to THE BEYOND in PARIAH, principally the realm of POLARIS. This idea's been stewing for several years now but two recent blog posts by others prompted me to revisit it.

CONTENT WARNING: The Absolute Worst Stuff Imaginable is alluded to.

Grimdark Grimness

The first was from Save vs. Total Party Kill, with Ramanan Sivaranjan sharing Tim Cowill's essay on the Warhammer franchise's descent into fascism (and/or corporatism). Acknowledging the depressing truth of Colwill's article (there is no longer any satire at the heart of 40K and wasn't really any to begin with), SaveVsTPK additionally suggests that there is a way for GW to escape "the corner into which they have painted themselves":

‘Tim points out that “everything is bad in 40K” is a weak defense of the setting, but I do think it’s a viable way forward if they fully commited. To paraphrase Rick Priestley, Warhammer 40,000 doesn’t need to be serious business. The setting exists so people can pretend to blow each other up with guns and tanks and monsters. They don’t need to dress that up, but they do need to make sure that in ‘not-dressing it up’ they don’t endorse the reprehensible.’

- SaveVsTPK

...which while I think is the beginning of an interesting discussion, I'm going to hijack and take on a detour....

Carcosa

Post number 2 was Luke Gearing's recent reflections on Supplement V: Carcosa by Geoffrey McKinney. In similar yet distinct ways the Carcosa created by McKinney in his original 2008 "supplement" (tacitly yet convincingly branded as a lost OD&D volume) is a game & setting just as fraught with problematic content as the world of Warhammer 40K. Even before the game shed its OD&D skin (this may have been due to WotC litigation, don't quote me on that) and migrated to the dark embrace of LOTFP Carcosa was controversial for inclusion of "magic rituals requiring sexual violence, sometimes against children".

This is understandably a hard line for most people, so to be clear at no point are these rituals detailed in this post, and are discussed only in the most general terms in Gearing's post. Indeeed, the descriptions themselves are mercifully short on specifics: The Alexandrian droned that these are less explicit than a typical "Clive Barker, Jacqueline Carey, or Stephen King novel" (in a contemporary review of Carcosa's 2012 re-release). Naturally, one might go further and invite comparison with the morbid depths plumbed by the crime-as-entertainment industry (both fictional and real-life) which enjoys a far broader audience... but that would be missing the point somewhat: the reader/viewer is not a participant in these crimes, as potentially a PC in a game of Carcosa might.

So yes, we're in dark waters now so I'm going to let Gearing's own words shine a light and lead us out, rather than my obfuscating paraphrase(s):

These rituals... directly tie the magic of the setting to the actual geography and inhabitants of Carcosa. That so many feature sexual violence... is not only an aesthetic choice (of dubious value) but a statement as to what power means in such a world [emphasis mine] Humanity, let alone human decency, must be discarded to wield the terrible powers of the alien gods sharing this living hell with you. I’ve seen defences of these rituals as “just for the bad guys” - I do not think this is the case as such. Presenting the path to power and leaving it up to the player to take those steps is far more interesting.It is worth noting that none of the rituals (on my reading) to defeat, banish or ward off the terrible creatures require such actions - only those who would summon and command the creatures need leave humanity behind like this.

- Gearing

A Spectre Haunting the OSR

Those who have read my post on Nightmare Fruit might be able to see where this is going: I ask that you keep quiet, for the benefit of the others, who are about to be taken on asomething of a detour...

Back in 2019 Allandaros/Humza Kazmi of The Hydra Cooperative made a post on his blog (Legacy of the Bieth) which continues to invite discussion to this day: A Spectre (7+3 HD) Is Haunting the Flaeness: Towards a Leftist OSR. Essentially. the PC experience track is decoupled from the acqusition of wealth (1 GP = 1 XP) and instead making XP gain dependent upon improving the community.

At that time—when preference for a particular play style led to automatic association (in some circles) with white supremacists, abusers and other reprehensible individuals—it came as a breath of fresh air. If nothing else, it was nice to see that the "community" (from the perspective of someone operating on its periphery who never really got to grips with G+) was not completely toxic. However, it was a twitter discussion around a (wait for it...) Luke Gearing blogpost that sent me back to this post with a more critical eye.

That it was a (tweet from Zedeck that set the wheels in motion is just the icing on the cake):

This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character's ethical choice is rendered mercenary.
"Being good for a reward isn’t being good - it’s just optimal play. "

- Zedeck Siew quoting Luke Gearing

POLARIS

The circle turns and I'm lying awake, listening to my baby daughter breathing and thinking about existence, and worrying that if I fall asleep I might wake up and find that this was all a dream...and that in reality I'm a cyclops grown in a vat about to be despatched to some bitterly cold front due to some perceived imperfections in my gene expression coupled with this society's reliance on a state of Total War.

It's quite a long way from the reality I'm experiencing at the moment, but is it further from the reality of a proto-neolithic outcast navigating an animist landscape? It's quite a silly question, given that the reality of the PARIAH is one that's already sprung from my own experinces and, consequently, is at the very least as limited as my own. I suppose I'm sharing this to illustrate mainly how plodding my thought processes in the early hours, but also in some way to justify my forced cleaving of these two very different game concepts.

One very pleasing thing that happened in 2020 was Tom McGrenery (of Fear of a Black Dragon podcast) mentioning PARIAH as one of his favourite games of that year. What stood out for me in the recording was the delight he took in the idea of switching games/systems mid-session. In the original PARIAH zine it is suggested that the reality-shifting nature of psychedelic entheogens can be partially captured by "changing codes". This was an idea I am almost 100% certain appeared in an earlier iteration of Stygian Library by Cavegirl but I have been unable to relocate it in the revised print edition (NB. this is something that drives me mildly insane- i would really love if anyone could confirm or deny that this was at one point a feature of a library lcoation!).

In a similar vein (and as described in the Nightmare Fruit post) Polaris witnesses the Pariahs awakening in a parallel world, whith which players interface through parallel (but different) mechanics. Crucially, a more traditional level-experience track, driven by the neutralisation (and assimilation) of threats (real or imagined) to the security of the culture of Polaris:

Granted this is not an original conceit (I'm not claiming to have done anything not already explored by Plato or Zhuangzi) but I think it's a fun possibility to present to your players: dropping into a parallel nightmare realm where their characters can lead different lives and chase different goals.
In fact, if you want to know the real Stewart Lee, clever sixth-former-type-conceit at work here it's this: given a choice between the two lives (one as pariah, one as cyclopean frontier guard in the nightmare city of Polaris), what will they choose? Will they spend their waking days in the Here and Now, dreaming of that cold place and its simple, brutal auhoritarianism?

- 2021's Nightmare Fruit post

I'm picturing a text-only zine with brief chargen, "monsters", magic/technology and a hexcrawl, all inspired by a piece of appendix N literature... in short, this could be construed as Carcosa all over again. Same milk, different cheese... though perhaps with the added layer of navifgation between the nightmare world (The Beyond) and the "real" (The Here and Now)... something missing from the aforementioned supplement but surely a key feature of both Carcosa and Polaris in the stories in which they appeared. One thought that occured during the writing of this post would be inclusion of some form of carry-over from actions in one world to the other, a more sophisticated version of this post previously selected for the Glatisant

Atop the Wailing Dunes

During my prolonged absence from blogging I've been very slowly working on the zine I put up for crowdfunding last August, Atop the Wailing Dunes. It's been beset by numerous minor issues, not least my inability to organise my time and a decision to re-write much of the content. I put this note at the bottom to re-assure those good people that backed me that my attention is very much upon delivery of this book (well, these books, for there are two)in spite of my two most recent posts being concerned with two new (ish) game concepts.

To maintain the confidence of those that backed this project I've been posting regular video updates, but I think the most recent one might be of interest to this blog's reader's, as I show how the GENIUS LOCI procedure is applied in Atop the Wailing Dunes