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| The image above is a spread from Mr Kr Gr (Zedeck Siew, Centaur). Illustration by Munkao |
The people of the old world made these as prisons for their gods. They made them beautiful, so captivity would sting.
Wear your gold bells, o Lord of Dances, and leap for our pleasure! Cherish your ruby garlands, o Lady of Loves, chained to our bed!
The old world was drowned by the river. But its slaves could not be set free. So they wander buried hallways and vine-choked pavilions – maddened, hateful, plotting.
- Mr-Kr-Gr (Page 20) by Zedeck Siew
Pome
"I don't know art but I know what I like"
Indeed we do.
And we know that need to tell everyone about it:
across platforms and content providers
shouting
shouting across time and space
bouncing around and around the echo chamber—
everyone everyone else's yo-yo...
(a dumb Qabalah, Ted?)
...everyone everyone else's amplifier!
What you shout, I shout.
What I shout, you shout.
But sometimes
sometimes
someone sings
and my tired voice snaps and can't call back
I can't hit those notes
(neither high nor low)
and it hurts.
It hurts to listen:
a song, softly rising above the noise
sublimation
I sink
I think
is this art?
I know I like it,
but now I'm not sure
if I like
anything else.
~
This post is my small tribute to the best writer in TTRPGs.
Chris McDowall (Bastionland etc.) interviews Zedeck Siew:
https://anchor.fm/bastionland/episodes/Niche-Explorer-Episode-3---Zedeck-Siew--Worldbuilding-eivi5f
Pre-order Reach of the Roach God by Centaur Games
https://rotrg.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Other links for Centaur Games:
https://linktr.ee/centaurgames
This is really cool, nice to see more people in addition to Zedeck doing TTRPG poetry :). I can't explain why exactly, but I feel like poetry should have a bigger place in TTRPG writing, design, and philosophy.
ReplyDeleteI agree... but it's hard! I don't think I could do what Zedeck does. Correction: I know I cannot do what Zedeck does. It's not explicitly poetry, but it is certainly poetic!
DeleteThe partnership with Munkao is important I think (as is Patrick Stuart with Scrap Princess, though maybe in different ways), but I think the strength of his writing is evident when juxtaposed with a less familiar illustrator, in a more traditionally formatted RPG text (Spy in the House of Eth, for example)
At heart I think is this notion of presenting players (including the GM) with potent images. RPG design is obsessed with controlling and marshalling player behaviour, explicitly or tacitly (through procedures and mechanics).
Perhaps the opposite could be considered a poetic approach, without collapsing into the "non-game" territory of lyric games?
Using poetic writing, let alone the structure of poetry, as a way of efficiently encoding information, "painting a picture with words", is a powerful and underutilized (albeit difficult) tool for game design. This is something Screwhead (https://wasitlikely.blogspot.com/) has talked about quite a bit and I discussed with him in my interview. It's that structural part of poetry that I'm still trying to figure out if or why I think that has value for TTRPGs. But anyway, your point about it being like a way of marshalling GM behavior is also an interesting point. I might argue more broadly that the relationship between designer and GM is similar to that of GM and player in this way, except that the GM has real-time control whereas the designer does not.
DeleteZedeck's use of poetry, the poetic language efficiently used in even the prose, and the way the evocative mythologies immediately conjure a sense of place all are amazing at quickly allowing the GM to internalize the setting. This, I think, is an overlooked strength in the A Thousand Thousand Island settings. And it is why I tend to gravitate to them and repeatedly use them at the tables I GM, I can quickly ingest them and then really feel my version of them where I know the answer to something without having to repeatedly use the books.
ReplyDeleteConcur 100%: this is exactly what I'm trying (and failing) to elucidate. thanks for putting it so succinctly!
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