Patrick Stuart's Blog

 THE FINAL HOURS! THE COUNT-DOWN BEGINS!
The Kickstarter for Doom of the Dark, the nightland adventure from Patrick Stuart (me) and Amanda Lee, is nearly over. You have three days!


This may be your last chance to back DotD for the low low price of £8 (or £40 for the wholesale version).
I have been interviewed about the project at the 'Swan and Raven Studio' here;
https://tricks-tales.blogspot.com/2026/05/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html

The Dogge is the key to all this. Those familiar with hermetic readings of texts - I only need to mention Leo Strauss, will already understand the significance of this particular dogge in this particular 'wheel'. Rotatio, calcinatio, driving transformation while unchanged and unrewarded. The Philosopher's Stone's dark inverse. Pure process, no product.. But I have already said too much. The Kynicos will understand...

AND Amanda and I have been interviewed in video form by Max Cantor of 'Weird and Wonderful Worlds';
https://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2026/05/patrick-stuart-amanda-lee-franck.html





LAST MINUTE LIVESTREAM!
To celebrate the end of the Kickstarter for 'Doom of the Dark', the artist Amanda Franck https://amandalee.itch.io/ and the writer Patrick Stuart https://linktr.ee/pjamesstuart
We will be streaming LIVE for an hour or so (with 15 minutes added for assumed screwups).
Scheduled for;
- UK time - 31st May 10:45pm, ending  1:00am- Chicago time - 31st May 4:45pm, ending  6:00pm
These will be the last hours of the Kickstarter. We will be talking about the Adventure and asswering questions about Doom of the Dark, its art, and anything else (within reason) people want to talk about.
HERE IS THE LINK!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmAiei4uPx8

Praise be to Hekaton and the children of Old Night, the Doom of the Dark Kickstarter smashed its initial funding goal within a few minutes and made ten times that by the end of the day, smashing another goal, meaning we can crank up the print quality as high as possible for all backers.

Fifteen Days Remain!As well as increasing print quality I will likely also look into producing an interlinked PDF to make DotD more playable for those digitally bound.
The artist Amanda Lee Franck attempting to protect her living space
from the smears of that most primal of pigments; charcoal black, (attempt fails re; cat).

Posts and Interviews
However, other than that, I am not super well versed in publicity etc. For the period of the run of DotD, I, and Amanda when available, are open to interviews, articles, posts, links etc etc. If anyone wants us on their thing, or wants text, questions, answers, opinions, we (me mainly, Amanda has a lot to do), are available till the end of May, so drop a comment or email me at pjamesstuart at googlemail dot com.
May the Turne-Spytte Dogge forever tread…

Also look at this video if you haven’t already. It’s very good! (Animation by Amanda Lee Franck).

The Black Casket of Night has indeed been opened beneath our feet, soon, only days will remain!

I have been posting here and there about ‘Doom of the Dark’ for a while. Here is the full version;

After my encounter with Tunnels and Trolls, Amanda suggested that I publish the adventure I created for her and a few friends. This is that adventure, illustrated and layed out by Amanda Lee Franck.

Simple Zine

DOOM of the DARK is a 34 page zine containing a real-time adventure fit for an evenings entertainment. By the end of the night you will have either saved REALITY ITSELF, or doomed it to… the DARK.

The adventure is statted up for Tunnels and Trolls and designed for that playful vibe. Most of the working parts are built into the creatures and the location so anyone familiar with old school D&D should have little trouble running it in a BX-adjacent or Nu-OSR game.

Its not a super-difficult dungeon, though hopefully a fun one. Think somewhere between storybook and catastrophe.

U.S. and U.K. Print

False Machine is doing things a little differently with this one. We intend to print in both the U.K. and the U.S.A. One print will be sent to Spiral Galaxy in the United Kingdom and ship from there, the other will be sent to Flying Cloud in America and ship from there.

This means postage will hopefully be less of an insane nightmare for Americans and Canadians.

The Kickstarter will have options for the U.K. print and the U.S. print, so back for the print location most convenient for you! (& try not to screw it up!).

I am also putting in wholesale options for both prints, so if you run a shop and want ten copies you can back for one of those.

UnIdentical Twins

The two prints will not be exactly the same. The U.K. version will be an A5 zine and the U.S.A. version will be in ‘portrait’ (so a little longer and thinner). We (Amanda) designed the thing with this in mind so the difference in experience should be minimal.

If we make a lot on the Kickstarter we will crank up the print quality on both items, but the printers in the U.S. and U.K. don’t offer exactly the same paper weights etc. We will try to keep the quality of both zines as similar as possible.

50/50 profit split

Like almost all False Machine products, profits for Doom of the Dark will be split 50/50 between writer and artist, so if you are an Amandamaniac, or Franckophile, you will be supporting your artist by backing or buying.

A Real-Time Adventure

Vague concepts for single-night, Level-One, Real-Time adventures have been rolling around my head for a while. DOOM of the DARK is played in real-time; however much time the players take is how much the adventurers take, and there is a time-limit; you only have two to six hours to save the world!

There are also a bunch of diegetic elements included in the adventure to, bluntly, keep bumbling players doing what they are meant to be doing; SAVING THE WORLD IN UNDER SIX HOURS.

Hopefully this should be a fun time for two to six players running starting characters, and a relatively easy dungeon to run.

Quick Kickstarter

The Kickstarter opens on the 15th of May and runs for just over two weeks, ending on the 31st of May (U.K. time! So Mid-day for Americans).

If you want DOOM of the DARK at its initially low price of £8, or if you know someone who might, then you only have two weeks to back this thing or let them know!

The more backers we get the higher we will crank the print quality!

We hope for a print in mid-June and to start delivering towards the end of June.

CLICK HERE FOR THE KICKSTARTER 

 Previously I asked my audience for examples of large-scale cave generation and, essentially, no-one had what I was looking for; I meant Nation Sized, underground wilderness.
In fact only Douglas Niles in ‘The Dungeoneers Survival Guide’ and maybe Zedeck Siew in Reach of the Roach God came anywhere near to producing systems at this very grand scale, and only Niles addressed the problem of three-dimensionality, and he only partially, and via a complex but elegant method of isometric mapping.
Nevertheless, I feel like I did learn quite a lot from dragging myself through all these varied systems and the process did affect my plans and ideas for VotE;ReDux so I will go through my general sense of each method here, in alphabetical order, at least until I come up with a better method.

Carapace - by Goblins Henchmanhttps://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/261079/carapace-basic-version




An odd, complex little pamphlet I got, maybe directly from Goblins Henchman? Who knows how long ago? I found it in my box of Zines! This is an adventure built around some generation systems for having trouble in a giant ants nest (the nest is giant, and is the nest of giant ants, so I suppose for them it’s just a proportionate nest).
Three methods are proposed for the creation of the Nest; a Point Crawl, Labyrinth Move and an ‘Hex Flower’.
[I have photos but it feels wierd reproducing them here.]
Its interesting to me that two of these; the point crawl and the ‘Labyrinth Move’ both live neatly within broader methods of conceptualising and using underground spaces that we will run into later several times.
The Point-Crawl in this case is not a die-drop system and is based on a layered diagram, printed in the pamphlet, with semi-random ‘rooms’ and interactions.
The ‘Labyrinth Move’ uses a table and a progressive encounter roll, in concept, not that dissimilar to ‘Flux Space’, though I think this is more a case of convergent evolution than direct descent. (The text says this is an adaptation of Jason Cordova’s ‘Labyrinth Move’ for Dungeon World - something I know nothing about. I wonder what the background of intellectual connections is here? It also seems similar to Emmy Allens Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library methods, though its been a while since I read those.)
The ‘Hex Flower’ seems to use a similar interior logic to the ‘Labyrinth Move’ but has it built into a little printed Hex-Map with the decision logic based on spatial arrangement. So far as I know, only Goblins Henchman has ever used this. This one also has a Hunter/Prey mechanic built into it, which should liven things up. Perhaps this is something to think about when considering other underground mapping techniques at any scale.

Corpathiumhttps://lastgaspgrimoire.com/in-corpathium/
(Ten years have passed and it’s all still there. The page even has a G+ link (;_;) )
So far as I know, the grand city-building project of Corpathium, which seems notable and unique, only exist via (very pretty and well-designed) web-page. What, not even a PDF? Surely this should have been a book at some point?
Anyway, the only part I am interested in is the city-generation system which could be easily subverted into a cave generation system
Its DICE DROP, which, honestly, is not that bad an idea for intermediate spaces.
Is non-representational, more diagrammatical, so that’s good.
Uses a 7-dice set, so I assume d4, d6, d8, 2d10, d12, d20
Uses the points (i.e. the corners) of the dice! Have not seen that before. If dice point to another they are accessible to each other.
So then we compare the numbers against a list of potential city-quarters with their own sub-rules about what is going on.
Then you have some interesting rules related to the concept of Corpathium as a place
Dice drop honestly seems like a really solid method for ‘intermediate’ zones between the ‘world map’ and outright cave crawling wilderness. It’s immediate, fast, coherent. Probably better and simpler than the method I used in VotE for generating intermediate cave systems. Reading Corpathium persuaded me to the use of a system of this kind and played a meaningful part in causing me to re-order my whole hierarchy of systems.

Deep Rock Galactichttps://steamcommunity.com/games/DeepRockGalactic/announcements/detail/4593196713081471259
Someone recommended I take a look at this web-page where the designers of this Space Dwarf mining game, (which I have never played), talk about their process
Even though this uses systems and crunch impossible for a human, some of the logic of cave-creation, at least the sequencing, is broadly similar; a range of templates with some ‘randomizer’ elements, combined in new, strange ways.
As the designer here sees it, there are a few key considerations in making a good cave: traversal, natural wayfinding, and dramatic experience.




One way this did affect me was that it made me re-conceptualise the ordering, arrangement and importance of the different methods I intended to use, in particular the primary methods. It was partly here that I started to crystalise the idea of there being three ‘layers’ of resolution, with lots of optional little sub-systems which could be added on according to taste and usage, but essentially a sandwich with three layers; Wilderness Scale, built on an interlacing paths pointcrawl, a medium scale, built on a die-drop method, and the idea of the ‘Adventure Cave; a cave made specifically to have adventures in, with maybe a ‘close cluster’ of nearby caves to add options.
I will look into this, in particular; combining the encounter-design ideas from Silent Titans with the 100 caves from VotE (though all this will be much later, need to work on ‘large scale’ now).

The Dungeoneers Survival Guide by Douglas NilesThe most beautiful and interesting book of all I considered, mine has been rabbit-damaged for a long time (something I will never forgive)



Douglas Niles is one of the only creators to directly address exactly what I was looking for; not a big dungeon, or a large cave system but an underground world - something at least the size of a small nation.
He even provides one in this book! Sketching out, through a series of lovely, layered, isometric maps, the ‘Lands of Deepearth’, made up of complex riverine systems and caverns, filled with all the wonderful creatures of AD&D.
However, almost to my relief, as I have read way too many of these already, he never actually deals with how to generate such a territory. He spent a huge amount of energy communicating his wonderful and only somewhat complex maybe even ritualistic isometric mapping system, that I think once you get that system, you can just vibe on it? Honestly a very reasonable concept in that, through achieving a sufficiently complex and expressive physical skill, by the time you have it, you will either intuitively know what to do with it, or experimenting with it is so simple and joyous an experience that the matter simply no longer presents a meaningful problem and you can’ in the words of the winged goddess of victory ‘just do it’.
But, for reasons given in my comments to the last post about this, I am not going to adopt this beautiful and coherent isometric late-analogue culture mapping system. Still an inspiring book though.

Flux Spacehttps://www.paperspencils.com/flux-space/

“This simple conversational back-and-forth is a good engine for producing fun, but it falters when the characters are exploring spaces which are Large, Samey, and Confusing. ... Other examples of large, samey, and confusing environments would be a winding network of caves,”

This is something I had considered when thinking about cave systems but reading Flux Space convinced me that I had not been thinking about it deeply enough. There really is a fundamental tension between the concepts of natural or pseudo-natural caves, which are, as stated above, often ‘Large, Samey and Confusing’, and the forms, shapes, paths and locations necessary for adventure, which are (while seeming not to be so), actually the compete opposite of the above; Small, Distinct and Clearly Organised.

“Traversing through Flux Space can be regarded as a type of Point Crawl, with the distinction that moving between each point is especially arduous. Once a Flux is solved it can be peregrinated through more swiftly, but solving it will be taxing.”

What ‘Flux Space’ is, is a relatively solid and only slightly over-complicated and over-specific method of abstracting the exploration of spaces that are ‘large, samey and confusing’ without specific, local mapping in real life. Instead the simulation is of the company slowly crawling their way about, spending time and resources, gradually encountering important elements of the ‘Flux’.
The basic time signature is ‘Turns’, there are 6 turns per day, so a 4 hour turn. Every Turn of Charting depletes resources, hits some kind of encounter/event, (Flux Space uses the classic overloaded Encounter Die) and crucially, grabs you a Point of Interest. There are a limited number of points of interest per ‘Flux’
There are ‘Shallow’ and ‘Deep’ rooms. At first you randomly encounter ‘Shallow’ rooms, and as you do, cross them out, Then, if you roll a shallow room encounter after its crossed you, you get a ‘deep’ room, and the deep rooms go only in sequence, one after another, and after the last deep room you are done and ‘know’ the maze’. You can move in and out of it however you like.
Some points of interest;

· It assumes you are burning resources, which is standard already for VotE.
· You would need the time and stability to note or record things, though, VotE wise you could use knots or muttered chants
· The Event/Overloaded Encounter Die has some cute elements and some meta-currencies.

Altogether a very useful and excellent tool which I wish I had invented
NOT a good tool for VERY large wilderness/nation-sized spaces, but very good for cave systems and mazes built around central concepts, inhabitants, purposes etc, between small dungeons and wilderness, an excellent intermediate tool. NOT a rapid, easy immediate generator, you will need to think & plan ahead of time.
Though ‘Flux Space’ would not be one of my ‘Big Three’ core generation techniques, (Large Scale ‘Lands of Deepearth’, medium scale Dice Drop and small-scale ‘Adventure Cave’), I am committed to using it or something like it as an ancillary cave complex generation method. It fits too perfectly into something like a Deep Janeens maze or an Alkalions Salt Maze. Though these would be things you need to think ahead to plan.
There is some excellent advice on filling out this simple and useful concept at the web address, describing more would be excessive. (Someone please write an extensive blog post about how Flux Space related to Gardens of Ynn and that to Dungeons Worlds Labyrinth Roll or whatever it was.)

How to Host a DungeonThis is an entire sub-game and I am sorry I did not get round to reading or reviewing it. Just too big too complex. I will try to read it at some point.

In the Shadow of Mount RottenA 2012 PDF from Joel Sparks.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/100100/in-the-shadow-of-mount-rotten



This has a small, competent, naturalistic cave/lair generator.
It is fine and there seems to be nothing wrong with it but it has little utility for me as, first, we are talking about large scale generation, second, these are very much lairs, or naturalistic dungeon-like environments whose relation is primarily to an ‘outer world’, and last, their entirely reasonable naturalism, means they are largely wet, or drowned and either too small, too long and thin or too blocked off to be interesting.
A fine system. Not for me.

Inkvein by Murkdicehttps://murkdice.substack.com/archive (There seems to be no single central site for this.)
This is an actual Megadungeon for Mork Borg by Murkdice.
Basic notation system looks broadly similar to VotE (addressing identical problems).
No 3d notation in the caves that I can see.
Has a nice Caving diagram.
Is already a megadungeon so has no generation systems at any scale. (These may show up in the final product, I only got a look at the Quickstart rules). Also this is so similar in broad concept to VotE that I am leery of dealing directly with it.


Lowlife by Sam Sorensonhttps://lfosr.com/product/lowlife/


This little pamphlet has a LOT of stuff in it, very little directly related to the precise needs of my enquiry.
We got the basics of this are a die-drop method; where Corpathium used different kinds of dice and the angles of the ‘points’ on the dice to trace a network which produced, in abstract, the accessible paths of a cities layout, Low Life is explicitly aiming to create a tunnel network, uses D6’s and then uses the combinations of numbers to decide partially the connections between things but also the nature of the connections, it also engages the idea of just repeating the dice-drop method to produce a system of greater complexity and interconnection.
Low-Life also has a method for introducing three-dimensionality (!) though it conceptualises this as ‘dungeon layers’ rather than using the diagrammatic nature of the tunnel system to create ‘uppy downy’ not related to the concept of ‘dungeon layers’.
I will almost certainly be returning to ‘Low Life’ later on throughout the project as it covers a lot of very similar ground. A very solid product!


Reach of the Roach God by Zedeck and Mun Kao(rest in power kings)


Most of Reach of the Roach god is about the Roach God and his reach, but at the end we get a little cavern-generation system based on TOYS. This is very millennial as it assumes that people buying this arty D&D book will have toys to throw around and yes I have them, shut up.
This is meant to be simulating the hollowed out bodies of dead gods so the humanoid shapes coming through the process are deliberate. It breaks down the toys into three sizes, two big, four or more medium and some small, and a bunch of ribbon to connect them.
How do you turn this into a map? In the style of The Dungeoneers Survival Guide; just be a good artist, or maybe actually trace around them? That would work if you had a big enough paper.
This method is different to most of the methods so far which tend to work on a principal of “room & route” – this matters as one thing you will notice about natural caves is they don’t have neat divisions between ‘rooms’ and ‘routes’, though, to some extent, this is how humans have to think about them; here is the bit you move through, here is the more round bit where you can rest.
The RotRG method produces large irregular, but linked caverns, which is something you might need, it uses the typology of the toys used to decide the location of world-relevant locations, the god type also represents special rules affecting that space, there are rules for using the ribbon as a river and instantiating that in the cavern system.
A much less technical system than most others, this still does something notably different, and it uses the layered information of its figure types in a range of interesting ways - I am sure a use can be found for this!


My Grand ResultMy final analysis is, as stated above, to work on three ‘layers’ of map and location creation; the Large Scale Underground World, the Die-Drop cave system, and the ‘Adventure Cave’; the kind of place where its good/interesting to have an encounter.
The brutal truth of the modern reader is that, as well as being borderline illiterate (new), they sadly have very little interest in mapping or simulating complex three-dimensional spaces, especially using arguably counter-intuitive methods of paper-folding and cave diagram.
You have collectively, as a culture, let me down in this. You should have been more interested in three-dimensional space. Feel bad about this.
The ‘new’ version of ‘Underground World Generation’ will probably end up being broadly similar to the original VotE version, but without the paper-folding, and with relatively little three-dimensionality, (it’s hard and people do not understand it). It will be integrated much more with generators for Cities, Settlements, Rivers and Environments, but in core concept, still a bunch of scrawls on a page, just now with more interesting dots and names to the ‘wilderness’ reaches of hidden-swiss-cheese stone between routes.
It will be one of three main systems and all should be initiative, quick and not especially clever; the Underground World, the Dice-Drop System and the Adventure Cave.
As well as, and included around those concepts, will be some other optional systems, or at least references to them, in particular, something like Flux Space/Gardens of Ynn, and other perhaps more complex, or longer seeming methods for when you need variety and/or something special or specific. This might just end up with me saying ‘use Flux Space if you want to do this kind of thing’.
This was a useful experience, though perhaps the most useful thing about it, more than any particular method, was the global, or deep, view of how people arrange their generation and mapping methods for actual games, and the intuitions this feeds about what is most necessary and immediate.

 In my big re-work of ‘Veins of the Earth’, I have begun looking at the systems used for generating the geography of the Veins, the large main routes, smaller areas, etc.
My plan isn’t to fundamentally change the methods from the first VotE, but to re-make them, to make the new versions more of a comprehensive generator, with a sequence of tools to systematically generate a large area, routes, cities, villages, trade routes etc.
Something else I would like to do in this version is gesture to or recommend alternate methods or other ways different people have tried to deal with this non-trivial problem of generating and mapping complex, large three-dimensional spaces underground.

From the first VotE. We won’t be using this layout as it belongs to Raggi but the general concept will likely be similar.


My aim here isn’t to copy but to, in the spirit of a bibliography, directly point people towards alternative possibilities. (I am also planning on doing this with monsters so people can put together their own encounter charts).
So far the only other book I’m intimately familiar with which deals with this specific problem, is Douglas Niles Dungeoneers Survival Guide, which has a neat but somewhat challenging method for isometric mapping.




What other books or works, or even posts, are people familiar with that deal with, specifically; generating and mapping large pseudo-natural underground spaces?
(I know there are a million methods of dungeon and mega-dungeon design, that’s not what I am talking about here.)

 
In a late and desperate attempt to shore up my‘relevance’ I have been scouring the internet for evidence that I exist, andhave stumbled into the tragic gap left by the lost ‘Great Crystal Debate’ DOESANYONE EVEN HAVE A COPY? If you would like to find out more, scan down thefollowing chronological list of text, video and audio discussions, down to2018…

 

2015 – Podecast

 

Back in 2015 Scrap and I played around with a ‘Podecast’(i.e. each was at the antipode to the other), and ended up recording a briefrun of unedited ‘conversations’ about a rather wild range of subjects whichranged from 2015 into 2016

 

 

Podecast 1 - the Experiment

https://archive.org/details/PatrickAndScrap1a
I honestly have no idea what is even  in this. Its eleven years old!

 

Podecast 2 - MONSTERS

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick2a

Contents include; Rhiannas new video.Ghosts and why they hold candles. Skeletons and skeletor - egyptian theories ofthe dead. He-Man. Gas-Spores. Nazi Aurochs. “I’ve been around some prettysmelly subcultures.” Eating living things. Godzilla. Forbidden Planet.Imperialism and microbiology. Scrap fades in and out around this point formysterious reasons. Possible collaborations. Natasha Allegri. Stephen Pyne. Thestate of modern poetry. The Art of Not Being Governed.(He wasn’t a poet.)

 

Podecast 3 - BEAUTY
https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick3a
Contents; http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/... hates nature. Snails. “The child of love and war is sex”. A thick silkycoffee with cardamon. Crepuscular Rays. kelvin helmholtz.http://www.pncc.govt.nz/media/32138/c...

 

Podecast - 4 BEES 

https://archive.org/details/ScrapAndPatrick4a
Contents; 1.20 Scrap starts rambling aboutchromosomes. - (seriously, think about skipping this part). 4.26 Gives up onthat and starts again. Begins a very dark story about Bees. 8.00 King Arthurand Bees. 9.55 The Demiplane of British History. 13.25 Brief ramble here. 13.40Other Planes, verticality. 14.50 Hook Birds. 15.25 Dinosauroids -http://povorot.deviantart.com/gallery.... 15.35 The firstfew issues of Prophet. (I think these are in fact the same guy.) 16.35 “Bees,have to get this back to bees..” 17.20 Evolution of pollen, and therefore bees.17.45 Exploiting colony organisms. Pretending to be ants. 20.10 We are colonyorganisms. 21.20 The nihilism of not cleaning your room. 21.45 Emergency copingmechanisms. 23.09 Sudden change in conversation due to girlfriend interruption.The Death of Avril Lavigne. 24.24 Schizophrenia. The voices are probably real.Believing you are in the matrix. 26.13 “That’s kind-of like a hive..” 26.45 Instories no-one can ever be competent. 28.15 Destroying a city with super-speed.30.15 The delay between conception and creation. 31.00 Cut-Up

 

 

 

2016 - Doom of the Podecast
Podecast 5 -  relate-ablecontent -
https://archive.org/details/Podecast5

 

Contents; 1.30 - Dark gods. 5.00 - FotVH Images.8.30 - Please buy my fucking books. 9.30 - Making relate-able and insightfulpoints about a variety of role playing related conversation things. 10.30 -Alchemy. 15.15 - First impressions of the OSR. 19.30 - Motivations are monstersfrom inside you. 21.30 - Choices in char gen. 31.30 - Cognitive silence. 33.30- Traditional originality, fire, hirelings and dogs. 37.30 - Ten minutes ondark AI’s & nightmare futurism. 46.45 - Language, objects & babypsychology. 51.30 - Lard, the currency of agency. 55.00 - Stories, memory andexperience, the grand conflict. 58.30 - Fail states.

 

 

 

Podecast 6 TheWonderful Kererū  
https://archive.org/details/Podecast5RemasteredAudio
The Wonderful Kererū appears only once in this Podecastbut exemplifies the spirit of both participants, a fat, pompous, ridiculousanimal snatching a whole twig from the tree of thought, eating a single flowerand then throwing the rest away.

 

Contents; 0.07 - VotE. 2.38 - Weightlifters withno penises. 3.37 - Do you want to talk about pre-history? (We do not do this.)4.36 - I cut a huge amounts of blathering out here. 5.00 - Scraps game. 7.10 -Complexity and depth. 9.30 - Scrap has a moment of clarity about the nature ofComplexity. 11.10 - Where it actually starts to get interesting. 11.50 - Thecapacity of a post-apocalyptic world to create its own context. 13.10 - A newplace to put adventures. 13.45 - “What’s his face? The guy who does Udan-Adan?We’ll probably never know his real name.” 14.15 - Our regular obligatorymention of Zak. 15.50 - Who did invent ‘the dungeon as a living thing? 17.28 -A Ghost in my house. 18.30 - The ‘blank slate’ game world & identity. 20.43- Eve as the first D&D player, Adam as a Storygamer. 22.28 - RachelPollack’s ‘Unquenchable Fire’ I got the name wrong in the podcast. 24.26 - Ourother regular segment on colonialism. 26.16 - Mention of Potatoes causesinternet to drop out. 28.10 - It’s ‘Henry Moreton Stanely’ and I may well bewrong about Cortez. Have fun with Wikipedia. 31.45 - “You’re treating thosechildren like subhumans.” 33.41 - Scrap is confused by the moral exchangeinherent to Government. Sarah Horrocks would probably agree. 38.15 - “If onlyone culture has reliable deep-water navigation, that culture is effectivelyplaying D&D with the world.” 39.45 - Cowboys on Mars. 41.53 - We expand ourmentions of Zak to include his sister? Anyway, X-Men school-style CharacterGen. 47.39 - Communicating on a Meta-Level. Maybe our players are friends.49.15 - MY SPECIAL SETTING!! 51.00 - We cycle back to, or around, differentcontexts in which to place adventures.. 52.00 - The ancient civilization ofDan. 55.09 - The Halfmen of O by Maurice Gee. 56.55 - The Changeover byMargaret Mahy. 58.45 - Does the Conspiracy Theorist have a D&Dish world?No, not really. 60.01 - Pre-apocalyptic D&D. 60.03 - Stealing & fakingart throughout history. 60.05 - Dirtbag Greys. The Burke & Hare of space.60.07 - Changes in scale. Insect wars. 60.08 - The Author was ‘William Tenn’and the book is Of Men and Monsters. 70.45 - Giants would be very vulnerable,and likely peaceful. 72.55 - The wonderful Kererū or New Zeland Wood Pidgeon.(A bird that flies through the glass in your window is also playing D&D).76.00 - “Birds would be good D&D characters.” 81.00 - Evil Dolphins.

 

 

2017 - VotE!
The Secret DM — Veins of the Earth Interview with Patrick Stuart andScrap Princess

 

http://www.thesecretdm.com/2017/04/veins-of-earth-interview-patrick-stuart.html
A text interview about the original ‘Veins of the Earth’.

 

 

2018 - Crystals!
What Would the Smart Party Do? — Episode 80

 

I am not even sure what we talk about here but hopefullyDirks art for Silent Titans gets a mention!

 

Direct MP3: http://media.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/content.blubrry.com/thesmartparty/WhatWouldTheSmartPartyDo_80.mp3

 

Page: https://smartparty.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/patrick-stuart-interview/

 

 

The Great Crystal Debate!

The missing interview!!
Back in 2018 I was making my (negative) views on CRYSTALSwidely known, when who should step forth to challenge me but the fool andcreator of the BREAK! RPG, Reynaldo Mandarinian. To settle the matter for AllTime, we got into a SAVAGE hour long verbal dual which, since there seem to beno copies surviving online, I will assume I won.
If anyone out there has any records or copies of the GreatCrystal Debate, please let me know in the comments. The world deserves to hearmy (assumed) victory, and how crystals were defeated for All Time.

 

 

2019 - The Worm!
Ignite Liverpool — Talk on the WapentakeI am slightly embarrassed to see myself physicallyincarnated in maybe my only physical in-person talk.

 https://youtu.be/nr4KKZMpf6Q

 

Those of you familiar with ‘Silent Titans’ will knowabout the ‘Wapentake of Wirral’ from that book, based on a real historicalincident in which a corrupt lawyer got his hands on the medieval documentsgiving ownership of a dark age court and used them to form a criminal gang andextort the people of the Wirral.

 

 

The Worm Orouboros with Tom Fitzgerald
In this interview the beloved creator of ‘Middenmurk’, sits down to talk withme about the excellent and under-discovered ‘Worm Ouroboros’ by E.R. Eddison.(One day I will read the Zimiamvia trilogy).


https://archive.org/details/TheWormOuroborosWithTomFitzgerald

2020 - DCO ReMastered

Loco Ludus — "Interview with Patrick Stuart" I have no idea what we talked about, but its 55 minuteslong!

 

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/loco-ludus/episodes/Interview-with-Patrick-Stuart-ebgc3h

 

 

‘Udda Ting’ podcast

Henrik Möllers podcast is still going strong. Inthis one I think we talked mainly about Veins of the Earth.
https://soundcloud.com/henrik-moeller-180995804/100-veins-of-the-earth-patrick-stuart

 

The Magniloquent Moth

 

Part One show notes (full version at the link); Deep Carbon Observatory (Remastered!), Patrick's talk on the Wapentake at Ignite Liverpool, Silent Titans, The world is a spell, Fear of a Black Dragon (DCO episode), Arnold's "Goblin Punch" blog and time traveling dinosaurs, Veins of the Earth, Fire on the Velvet Horizon, A Night at the Golden Duck, The audio starts to overlap in the second half of the episode, Time travel in RPGs, Continuum RPG.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-first-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707137

 

Part Two show notes CGP Grey's video about why your timeline is infuriating, Is the loose collective of RPG fans online a "community"?, A Distant Mirror, The Gods Must Be Crazy, Patrick's letter writing game (a literal play by post), FLAILSNAILS, Chris McDowall's conversion advice, TROIKA!, Half-Life Alyx, Tom Francis' games, Heat Signature, Tactical Breach Wizards, Deadliest Warrior Yes, there really was an IRA vs the Taliban episode.

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-conversation-with-patrick-stuart-second-course/id1506689162?i=1000470707139

 

 

2021 - Groan!
Appendix N Book Club
I actually remember this one and it was fun! I finally gotto talk about something other than my own books! This is all about Gormenghast.

 

https://player.fm/series/appendix-n-book-club/episode-103-mervyn-peakes-titus-groan-with-special-guest-patrick-stuart

 

Zock Bock Radio-
Apparently I am, (or was?) the Townes van Zandt of the OSR. I don’t know what that means but I will assume its good! Show notes in the link!
https://pesa-nexus.de/2021/08/29/episode-25-he-is-the-village-green-innovation-society/

 

Monsters and Manuals (Noisms), Video Interview

 

 

I am horrified by the sight of my own face so will rushpast this one.

 

Blog post: https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2021/08/video-interview-with-patrick-stuart-of.html

 

Youtube; https://youtu.be/sPhfvkRDxvo

 

 

 2021 -Demon-Bone!

Weird & Wonderful Worlds

Ahh blessed text.

 

http://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2021/08/patrick-stuart-false-machine-interview.html

 

 

Her Christmas Knight


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yClMXIjlrM&t=244s

 

 

Archons March On

Thanks to the commenter below who managed to dig this one up!

https://archonsmarchon.blogspot.com/2021/08/interview-with-false-machine-for-his.html

Whose Measure God Could Not Take

This one covers the Demon-Bone Sarcophagus Kickstarter,Gawain and the OSR community.

 

https://whosemeasure.blogspot.com/2021/09/interview-patrick-stuart-of-false.html

 

2022 - The End!

 "

Art" with Her Christmas Knight


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOpKlStShCs

 

 

Then, Silence
Or at least, no interviews or appearances from 2022 to2025 where I popped up in the ‘Weird HopeEngines’ zine fair.

 

Looking back on it, some of these bursts of extroversionwere to help with Kickstarters, but it looks like the relative failure of‘Demon-Bone Sarcophagus’ and the hangover from Covid really fucked me up morethan I realised. I may have brought books out but I really didn’t leave thehouse for years. Damn.

 

Now, once again, I fitfully stumble into action, to proveto myself and the world that I exist.
(Seriously if anyone has a copy of the GreatCrystal Debate let me know.)

This is the story of an encounter with Tunnels and Trolls by a guy who did not know that much about Tunnels and Trolls and still doesn’t, so if you are a T&T maven and don’t want to hear some half-interested newb bang on, then stop reading now. (Also; they are bringing out a new version of this soon, and by god my post has nothing to do with it! I literally stapled together the rules that I used from ancient box-sets and a PDF, and I ignored most of them.)
7.5



Somehow, I have the boxed set for the 7.5 edition of Tunnels & Trolls on my shelf. I must have bought back around 2009-2011 when I was getting interested in RPG’s . Yet more curious; I have a vague sense impression that I actually read these rules. I remembered nothing of them, but if sitting un-played on a shelf for fifteen years makes an RPG guilty then I don’t want to be innocent.
More recently I was listening to Chris McDowalls ‘Rule of Three’ podcast, where he interviews game makers about three favourite works, and he brought up the story of encountering someone at an Old-School meetup who had only ever played Tunnels and Trolls, and in fact, had only ever been in one campaign of Tunnels and Trolls, and had been gaming for years, this one game, this one world.
Clearly there is something going on with Tunnels and Trolls, I thought, and, foolishly, brought this up in a conversation with the Artist; “maybe that’s the secret, maybe we all should have been playing Tunnels and Trolls all along.”
“Oh, you should run it for us.”
Thus came the curse. My smallest statements are literally engraved on Votans Spear, and I am a pussy, a clock was ticking; could I read and absorb the Tunnels and Trolls ruleset AND develop a dungeon for Tunnels and Trolls in time, and well enough to run an actually functional game? (Watch my reality TV series to find out.)
(tldr; I can. Comments from two of the players, the ‘Rogue’ and the ‘Leprechaun’ are scattered through this post.)
Long hours of digging through this ruleset, producing documents to make sense of it, and writing dungeon ideas on the back of till receipts at work, which provoked some consternation when colleagues looked down to discover that I had been scribbling about Moon Mice and “THERE IS A COUNTDOWN”.

Character Generation


T&T Char Gen begins in a space broadly adjacent to Dungeons and Dragons, with Seven stats (in 7.5 at least) rolled 3d6 and in my case, down the line. Add Gold, a ‘Height and Weight table and so-on. When complete you get essentially three Core classes; Warrior, Wizards and Rogues. (There are more but I won’t get into those). So far so D&D.
What’s different?

TARO“Remember, triples add and roll-over. This rule always applies in Tunnels and Trolls.” – Ken St Andre



It doesn’t always apply; one of a number of ways the 7.5 ruleset seems to be written by someone with an irregular supply of amphetamines. However, this fascinating and distorting rule probably should apply more fully across the ruleset.
If you roll a triple in Character Generation, you add everything together and roll again, adding the resulting value. If the second roll is also triples, you add and roll again. If the third roll is triples, you add, and roll again.
This means that while the general range of stats for an opening character is likely similar to D&D, it’s possible that one or more players may have one or more stats that are insanely ridiculously high, creating an utterly distorting effect on the game.
And in fact this did happen in the game we played, with one Rogue rolling an insanely massively high CHA score and very mid scores for everything else, resulting in one of the party being or a youngish Matthew McConaughey, roaming around the dungeon just charming the shit out of everyone.
This is important because, like a lot of things essential to T&T, it strongly effects the tone of the world in which you play, the nature of the challenges you face and a range of other things. The wilder the dice curve, the whackier the reality.

The Leprechaun – “T&T produces lawless, erratic game outcomes, but *appears to be* rigorously designed. There are a lot of rules but they don’t really work. The depthless complexity acts as a wax seal that legitimizes the game outcomes. In combat, you do a bunch of calculation and roll a big pile of dice, which is a ritual act that irreversibly moves the game timeframe forward one increment.”

Liz Darnforth


KindredKindred is ‘Race’ in old D&D terms, and while it looks like earlier editions had a relatively narrow range of ‘normal’ Kindred you could be, the 7.5 edition has gone utterly loopy and included stat tables for a gigantic (literally, you can be a Giant), range of possible races, from Skeleton to Vampire to Dragon.
Almost all of these Kindred are measurably better than standard humans. Even Skeletons are a bit better. There are no gates or limits on what Kindred you can be. This means, if you are playing 7.5 as written, you can be literally almost anything and that almost all of these are better than standard human stats.
If you include one or two of these ‘hackable’ or ‘optimisable’ elements in a game ostensibly dedicated to a balanced experience then they are flaws, but if you flood the game with them, then you fundamentally alter the expectations for what kind of game it’s going to be. This is one of a wide range of ways in which Tunnels & Trolls is protected from the negative effects of being Tunnels and Trolls by the fact of it being Tunnels and Trolls, the games own anarchic spirit keeps it… stable?; if you are the kind of person who wants to min-max and powergame, (which you could theoretically do easily in T&T), why on earth would you be playing this loosy-goosey game?
I set bounds that no-one could play a Kindred too large to actually fit in the dungeon. We ended up with one very charismatic human rogue, one Leprechaun (size and weight reduction tables are included) and one Star-Obsessed and (below average for his people) strong dwarf with a BIG AXE.
TalentsEvery PC gets one ‘talent’; a particular thing that they do, and this could also conceivably be power-gamed but generally is not. They roll a d6 for their talent value and add this to the stat being used when rolling for this particular thing.
LevelYour Level in T&T provides a number of benefits, and is based explicitly upon your highest essential stat. This means you can start play at Level Zero, Level One, Two, or even possibly Three, and that as your stats fluctuate through play, you can possibly change Level, back and forth, within the range of even one adventure. (NONE of the specifically-designed character sheets I saw online were built with the essential changeability of the PC stats in mind. You are better of just using notepaper.)




Loony Tunes Adventure GangIt’s clear that through the 7.5 editions it took to reach me, T&T had been through a lot of rules changes and additions. As I will describe later, I think many of these are errors, or at least, non-optimal.
Two things I agree with fundamentally are TARO and the more-recent extended-Kindred chart. I actively want a Loony Tunes Adventure Party with a bunch of whacked-out and distorted stats and a range of weird presences in the game. (How would a Leprechaun react to hanging out with a Vampire?). I think it’s generally fine if someone with crap stats inflates themselves with a Kindred, so long as they actually play that role (remembering they are still a below-average member of their own Kindred). I didn’t set it as a hard rule but I would probably state next time that anyone who gets a TARO roll and a massive single stat, should stay human, but everyone else can pick a Kindred.
In its simplicity, adaptability, broadness of concept, lightness and gonzo-feel, T&T feels well-adapted to the ‘Island of Misfit Toys’ style of play. It also seems to suit well a ‘play whatever/whoever you want’ ethos. So long as you stick with it, and take it seriously (coherent and sustained), though not seriously (with tragic gravity). [The two forms of seriousness will prove a vitally important distinction going forward.]
(I also made the PC’s buy clothes out of their initial gold store, which kept them all relatively poor. Though gold doesn’t matter that much in T&T. (Also, TARO applies to your Gold Roll in Char Gen too, so one PC may just have ‘being loaded’ as their core trait.))

The Rogue - “I liked having to buy my own clothes using the gold generated by character creation, it was like starting out in Oregon Trail or something. I appreciate that the clothes list was long and carefully priced out and if I was in charge I would add even more carefully described clothing choices which could be used to define the character you are playing. What if you sunk it all into one really great jacket, no mechanical effects. Could you describe a jacket in such a way that it is really tempting even if you are gonna have to put that arbalest back on the shelf?”

Liz Darnforth

The Combat SequenceFarewell happy fields, where joy forever dwells. Hail, horrors, Hail! The Tunnels and Trolls combat sequence makes no sense. Attempts to fix have made it worse.
Conceptually it is brilliant. Once it was simple, intuitive, somewhat baggy and clean to play. I think years of people asking questions (filthy nerds) has ruined it. I tried to boil it back to what I thought was the core; a battle is on, both sides roll all their dice; whoever gets the biggest number wins.
Adventurers and Monsters calculate these differently; Adventurers have Combat Adds derived from their physical stats, and whatever weapon they are using. Monsters have a Monster Rating, which breaks down to their dice rolled (The Monster Rating divided by 10), and their own Combat Adds (Half their Monster Rating). Confusingly, some posh and special Monsters can also have stats like Adventurers, but let’s not even get into that.
Everyone has a big pile of dice. Everyone rolls. Bigger is better.
Over time additions have been made, (as a result of questions). Some wise, most I think not.
One positive addition is ‘spite dice’; every roll of 6 on either side, always counts as damage. I think this was made to amend the horribly brutal attritional effect of these massive dice pools contending over multiple rounds, and it works ok.
Other additions are complex arrangements of specific damage set aside and re-integrated during the round to account for people sniping ranged targets or similar, and specific arrangements of spellcasting where damage from certain spells is accounted like a weapon and the effects of others are placed before-this-and-that etc.

I Ignored Almost All of ThisI ran combat description-first, rules-light, quick and high consequence. It ended up not unlike a storygame or a Dowlain modern ruleset.
Surprise Rounds are a slightly weird thing in T&T, (if rounds are truly meant to be around 2 minutes long), and thankfully I was able to ignore them. Likewise I ignored sniping in or out of combat.
How I conceptualised it was like this;
First; describe fully where everyone is and what is going on as combat breaks out, be above all vivid, quick and physically exact. Go round the table asking, quickly, what each character wants to do, or “what do you want to achieve in the next two minutes”. PCs can combine actions, do tricks stunts, etc or anything they like, but they can’t take too long thinking about it Tunnels and Trolls does not respond well to planning.
Second; everyone rolls their dice and we add them all up.
Third; whichever side won inflicts damage, and I describe the events of these two minutes turn out largely as they intended. However, the T&T ruleset does say that the losing side of this can decide who on their own side takes what damage. This infers, and I applied it as such, that the losing side gets some vote in how exactly things turned out in these two minutes. They don’t achieve their aims but they do get to choose events relating to damage to their own side (though not whether they take damage at all).
Last; I tried to go for big, consequential swings in the description of events that would rapidly lead one side or the other to be disadvantaged, to flee, surrender, negotiate, be trapped etc, I did not want this shit going on too long.

Liz Darnforth

Why Ignore the Details?The game does not seem to want to be played that way.
I think the inclusion of Ranged and Magic attacks being, at some points, their own special thing, is ultimately fucking stupid, as you are rolling to make these special pre-attacks (each of which requires their own segment of the round to work in) and then counting them towards the total value of the HPT? And then at the end, you focus special damage on the specific targets of the magic or Ranged attack? At this stage why are you not just going person-by-person?
Even the rules seem confused about this as the details seem to change from edition to edition.
It looks like the simple, basic concept of the opposed, simultaneous, dice rolls, has been subjected to so many tactical questions and faffing about that over time, it has developed so many exceptions, set-asides, layered sequences and so on that it has, in effect, become exactly as, or even more complex than an equivalent D&D combat turn.
But D&D has the saving grace of being sequential-by-person, so at least while you are faffing with big numbers you are doing them one after another. T&T has the elegant conception of simultaneous action, but that then divided, excepted, specified and detailed so much that now the DM deals with an equivalent cognitive weight to D&D and the initially non-intuitive simultaneous action of T&T at the same time. It seems to me the worst of both worlds.
I forwarded description, and tried to keep it forward. Everything that happens can only be allowed to make sense in terms of what has already been visually and spatially described in natural language. The results of dice rolls feed into this and are fed back out as more description. The vivid description of events fills the need for specificity that the rules either ignore or don’t do well. Most of all its meant to happen light and fast.

The Rogue - “I remember way back starting a D&D game with some friends who had never played before, and at first when we got into fights they would say all these wild ideas of what they were gonna do (’I’m gonna put my bow over his head and grab the string and shoot the arrow in his neck that way”) and then get discouraged as the rules generally would at best penalize for you for trying something different than: hit with sword, watch hp go down. Doing the combat as narrative first, even if that did not have very much to to do with the dice rolls, and then narrative again after all the rolls (deciding how the damage gets doled out) was kinda nice. I am surprised at feeling this way as I do not usually like story game rules.
Everyone goes at once feels more nervewracking & unpredictable as a player: instead of things slowing way down you are all making immediate guesses about what would be best to do, which feels more real than if you have to wait your turn & can adjust your actions based on what happened to the person who went first. On the other hand, every time we got into combat seemed to end after a single dice roll: either we got crushed & ran away or the opposite happened- which on the one hand is hugely superior to sitting around waiting for your turn to hit guy with sword, but sometimes made things seem anticlimactic: players all do one thing each, roll dice, cool that’s it evil is defeated. I guess one has to lean heavily on narrating what’s happened (either on the DM or player side) to make things properly impactful? It’s possible this was just on account of lucky rolls & combats could have taken longer? It seemed like our characters were appropriately balanced to the dungeon though (the leprechaun died)”

Rob Carver

The Leprechaun – “T&T combat as written is almost pathologically bad. We generally want things to be useable and simple; if a ruleset has complexity, each complication should justify itself in producing a better play experience. Instead, the rules work together to produce an appalling result. Rolling a large pool of dice that’s the same every “round” makes it likely that there’s a consistent result, so that combat is guaranteed to feel samey and yield similar outcomes from round to round. But there’s also a disastrous feedback effect: damage reduces your Strength, which gives you lower combat adds and less weapon access, so you roll fewer dice, so you lose faster and faster, and you have to do a bunch of paperwork to figure out how much worse you’re going to do each round.”

Running the Dungeon
it all began to go wrong when they re-named Ralph


Play TimeI came up with a relatively simple 12-room dungeon with a lot if diegetic ‘safety rails’ and potential in-world guidance. The Rogue told me that a normal group will only handle about four rooms an hour, if that, so I planned for two possible sessions of up to four hours each. In fact they cleared the thing in just over two hours. Apparently I run games ‘quickly’(?)

The Rogue - “Patrick DMs like he is driving a bus with a bomb on it.”

Rob Carver“Take That You Fiend!”People seemed to like the principal of ‘Saying the Spell Names Out Loud’. I felt like it kept the tone right.

The Leprechaun – “I agree that saying the spell names as though you’re casting them yourself is a splendid idea. You can’t cast a spell without literally saying the magic words.”

Post-Adventure System IssuesI only had to make a single, one-shot adventure so I was saved any of the scaling complexities of ‘how much gold is there’ or ‘what do you do with the gold’? Or any worries about ‘what happens after this adventure? T&T (at least in 7.5) bases advancement on ‘Adventure Points’ which you hand out regularly, mid-adventure, and which can be used, mid-adventure, to improve PC’s stats, which effects what level they are. Gold or treasure is mainly used for buying spells or equipment.

The Leprechaun – “The one idea I was interested in was gaining lots of XP and spending it incrementally whenever you wanted. It really changes the texture of the game to be getting these drips of XP and feel like you could realistically, in one session, change something meaningful about your character. This is also a place where narrative and ruleset dovetail nicely: players can spend their XP to level up a given stat *right before they need it*, which feels like the character rising to meet a challenge.”

Rapid Monster ImprovisationT&T’s Monster Rating is a raw, single number from which are derived both the number of d6’s rolled and the ‘adds’. The ‘adds’ are reduced as the Monster suffers damage while the dice are not. This is perhaps even simpler than the Hit Dice concept and makes inventing, moving and shifting around monsters for change and improvisation relatively easy. It does result in some big dumb dice pools though.
Big Dumb Dice PoolsEverything is based on the d6 and everything is Dice Pools, rolled in big piles, simultaneously. The PC’s add up theirs and the DM adds up the monsters. It’s a lot of adding up. I am not sure how this will actually work once you get into the Monsters with really big numbers or the really big amounts of monsters. I think I recall in some Ken St’Andre ruleset, seeing his rules of thumb for managing huge dice pool numbers, which was essentially multiplying smaller pools, which is fine, but also; it’s your ruleset dude.

The Leprechaun – “3d6 * 6 is a *dramatically* different roll from 18d6 and would totally change the texture of the game. I kept finding things like this in the T&T ruleset. Most early TTRPGs seem “game design naive”, even most modern TTRPGs do. This can make them characterful, or introduce some loveable features by accident, but can also lead to miserable gameplay patterns.”

Liz Darnforth


Growing and ShrinkingProbably inspired by the ‘small’ and ‘large’ tables for character generation in 7.5, I included a shrinking rules in the dungeon. While I may have intended to use some complex coherent system based on alterations to the core stats, in fact I just eyeballed it, using patched together rule-ideas that were systemically inelegant but procedurally quick and functional; I made it up. T&T’s super-simple core stats make it easy to adapt things relatively quickly.

‘Lightness’ and Speed They re-named the Dragon Continent :-(

It seems to me that the speed of T&T combat, combined with the relative lightness and light comedy of its setting, are key to how this is supposed to work.
The description of events plays a huge shaping part in deciding what seems reasonable to happen in a fight, i.e; is it reasonable that one guy might hide out in a corner and try to snipe with arrows? Is everyone going to end up in a big melee or are they spread out or separated? Is the environment going to do something odd?
The enormous potentiality of this simultaneous-resolution roll is only moderated by a mutual, vivid, lively and quick description of events.
Put simply, this shit falls apart rapidly if you are autistic or power-gamy about it, and gamers do tend to be autistic about everything. There should never be arguments over numbers or spazzy autistic D&D arguments over precisely what the rules should allow – if it seems like it makes sense then it can be done, or tried with a Saving Roll, or if not just a flat ‘no’. If this decision or roll didn’t go well, there will be another along soon! Very soon! And another and another and another.
Conversely, if you are lively engaged, largely trusting, and more committed to acting out an adventure than managing risk though careful play, then you may get a great boon; of a rapid, complex unfolding and multifarious range of combat events which might never happen in another game.
There must be a rapid, and easy exchange of description and descriptive power between the Players and DM, especially in combat. It’s like dancing. It only works if you go in moving and go forward. If you hold back and try to plan and limit risk, or hyper-plan, you fail.

The Leprechaun – “Despite working on TTRPG systems myself, I think the ruleset barely factors into how good a given game session is. I had a wonderful experience playing Mausritter a few years ago and that game is rancid. My actual play experience with T&T was excellent, because you’re a great DM, and [The Rogue], [The Dwarf], and I are good players. I still think I would have preferred a system where every single outcome was decided by coin flip. But then my choice to be a leprechaun wouldn’t have been legitimized by doing a bunch of arithmetic with tables!”

The slight silliness of the setting, along with the ridiculous range of possible ‘Kindreds’ (I can play a Leprechaun with a Bardiche), and the slightly light tone, all help to control and manage the kinds of personality drawn to the game and the way that they play. (A meta-game effect like a Gonzo X-Card).
I feel like getting rid of this (slight) silliness and trying to make the setting and the game answer more ‘normie’ Fantasy questions actually ruins it. The absence of tangles and argument is just an effect I can describe of a cause it’s hard to define; it is the spirit of the game. It’s why the Dragon continent is shaped like a Dragon and (should still be) called ‘Ralph’. If you don’t like the idea of running, or playing on, a ‘Dragon Continent’ shaped like a Dragon, and called ‘Ralph’, or of a Skeleton teaming up with a Dwarf, a Vampire and an Elf, then the game has done its job.

The Rogue - “Maybe it is not so important that a game system have any particular level of seriousness as that it have like, any discernable character at all? While there’s a utility in basic fantasy tropes ( everyone knows what a dwarf is like so it is easy in your personal character to subvert or exemplify it) most world building in game systems ends up just being like the collecting of influences listed on such as a Kickstarter page as a reassurance that you won’t find anything too surprising or new here.
Anything in the games rules/setting that is discernably created by a real idiosyncratic human ( whether that is being unfashionably comic or having edges that are not sanded off entirely) is a chance to have an actual experience of art that’s your own interaction with another real person not with a corporation or like sales goals and it’s worth forgiving a lot of shakiness of rules and so on to get that.”

This is also built into the nutty world-creation of ‘Tunnels and Trolls; Trollworld is literally built on wizards. Or at least, huge numbers of whacky wizards have inhabited it over time, burrowed into its crust and disappeared under the earth, building their own strange ‘magical realms’, which form the nuclei of, one would assume, huge tunnel complexes. In in-world history is literally ‘a wizard did it’. Gonzo dungeon design is the actual geology of Trollworld. Gonzo, or a Toybox, or very ‘Dungeony’ gamified non-naturalistic dungeons work well with this ruleset and play experience. It’s not a ‘flat’ game, either in its aesthetic, or the probability curves that underlie it. I am not sure if its modern re-creators have grasped this.

Man this took a long time. My earliest development notes date back to July 2020. This was originally meant to be an adventure.
The idea came in at almost the same time that the Covid 19 Pandemic began.



2020- Covid and GenesisThe earliest file I have is “Queen Mab Base File 15072020”
I used to live in Birkenhead and take the train into Liverpool to work in the Library there. Slowly I began to notice less and less people working in the Library, and odd people wearing masks on the train. Eventually I was the only one left, masked up, working alone on an empty floor, then the library closed, then my gym closed, then oh boy my life got a lot worse.
PhobosActually, the ‘real’ earliest file I have on Queen Mab is from a project I conceived of around March 2020 called ‘Phobos’. One element behind this was doing a different or new version of ‘Maze of the Blue Medusa’. I only have two files left relating to this and one of them is just a blank Notepad document called ‘THE PHOBOS’. Here are the entire contents of the other file, and the total development done on that idea;

“A space ship
Inderdimensional Fey Techno-Vessel
3 Transhumanist Techno Angel Fey chicks
From a post singularity post apocalyptic futurepast
Titan-Children, or architects
psathyrella - th Infinite
(Weird space angels)
Some new arrangement
re-write of the opening area
factions and moving parts
Where am I to get names?
Science Fictional
Poetic
Memorable
Decks of a ship?
How to Introduce Concepts
Lizardmen are Zombie Engram Humans
A cylender ship?
a spiral, like a helix of DNA?
like a curl of smoke
sections - but they intertwine
but like a ship also, a tendril of sails
>> reflection of a cosmic solar-sail vessel on a midnight sea
seen through a dimensional mirror thing
Maybe you can enter through any painting in the ship?
or through many of them
More complex desires/actions for the factions
Lizardmen
Aurum Spectre
Critics
A repository of culture
like an ark
the ark of fear
holding humanities hopes, and its end
evolved past the need for
and you enter it maybe from a fantasy setting
like its a normal ship
but then you work out - or the player works out
its a space ship
or an interdimensional thing
or the PCs would think its an Elf prison
even though its supertechnical”

What remains from that concept into the final ‘Queen Mab’ seems to be; transhumanism, fey babes in space and the idea of a space ship entered from a fantasy setting.
We cut ahead a few months. By this point I must certainly have encountered August because she is mentioned here and our first formal agreement dates from a month before this. So we must have been discussing it. Here we are definitely reading a proposal for an Adventure;

“Concept
The idea for this adventure is that, depending on how you orient the page as you read it, it is both a fantasy and a science-fiction adventure.”
HOW THIS IS MEANT TO WORK IN THE PRINTED BOOK?
When you flip the book one way - with the spine on the right, as in western books, then its a science fiction adventure.

When you turn the book upside down and read it “backwards”, like a manga, then its a fantasy adventure.

BUT - the truth is that these are the same people and places but just seen from different cultural perspectives
the portrait-images of the main characters are flipped like those of playing cards, one half facing one, direction the other facing the other direction.
The Science Fiction adventurers will see it as a dimensionally-warped ship of perverted biomechanical transhumans.
In terms of adventure design, the context of the information they can get and are given will lead them to see it as a technical and material problem, and the very nature of their inquiry and the way they seen the people in it
will make the *mission* darker and more dangerous for them. Their technical abilities and the power of destruction and opposition that their guns etc give them means they are more likely to start conflicts.
BUT
If PCs enter this realm from a Fantasy Land, they will see it as a strange Eld Palace (Spenserian & Shakesperian elves rather than Tolkien) and will react to the beings there very much as if they were elves. They will (probably) not believe they have much of a chance of direct opposition so will fall back on the traditional weapons of the weak: courtesy, deceit, flattery, cunning and thinking ahead.
AND - most importantly, they will treat the beings in The Queen Mab *the way they wish & expect to be treated*.
So for fantasy characters it will be more of a dangerous social/investigation adventure, whereas for SCi Fi characters it might become more of a ‘run and gun’ shooty and/or running-away horror adventure. Either Alien, or Aliens, depending on how competent your PCs are
Wonder, or Horror. (Or both).
Format Of This Product?
I’m basing it roughly on Sean McCoys ‘Mothership’ and associated adventures. So I would say;
Size - US half-letter size, or A5.
Pages – estimate 42 pages, say 21 spreads inside.
Stapled booklet on decent quality paper.
Should be relatively easy to print and simple to send about.
‘Mothership’ is very dense and really a masterwork of layout. I doubt I can match that density but hopefully I can get close.
Aesthetic Concepts
My initial Aesthetic prompts are Alcopopstars “Ship of Theseus” and “Chernobyl Fairy Pool”.
So based on that - everyone is blue and female and there is lots of biomechanical porn/horror/beauty.
Which I am cool with - actually I am not cool with it - I really really like it and the strangeness, intensity and beauty of those images was a prime driver behind the concept.

HOWEVER - I am open to alternative approaches and the aesthetic is far from set atm.

ShellyAnother aspect of this ‘design doc’ is the huge number of quotes from Shelly’s Queen Mab;

“Unalterable will, quenchless desire
Of universal happiness, the heart
That beats with it in unison, the brain,
Whose ever wakeful wisdom toils to change
Reasons rich stores for its eternal weal.”

Which I must have read about this time. Shelly’s Mab is an extremely, almost hyper-progressive poem about human development, and while relatively little of the scenes and figures end up in the final ‘QMP’, this verse of helter-skelter revolutionary human potentiality does seem to affect the soul and background of what becomes a somewhat nightmarish Post-Human ‘Paradise’

“The restless wheels of being on their way,
Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life,
Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal:”

“Sean McCoy Built this in a cave with a box of scraps”Thusly, work begins! A SIMPLE (directionally flipped duo-adventure) SHOT (42 pages and 21 spreads!) product. Surely, this won’t take long!

“Logistically, how does this work? in terms of timeframe and revenue split?”
Timeframe - this is the hardest one to answer. The longest I’ve ever had, a huge project that got delayed a lot, was about 5 years.
For this I would guess at about a year, the majority of which for you would be waiting around while I did stuff.

Yes…. about a year
By the time we get to the end of 2020 the basic idea of what this place is going to be, has become a lot more clear, the High Ladies exist, and their courts are set; The Queen of Air and Darkness in Autumns Halls, the Pythian Three in the Court of Dreams, Elpozoi in her Grove of Joy, Nights Iron Chariot, the Parliament of Beasts (largely cut from the final text), the Nome Queen in the Symphony of Forms, Her Grace of Wyrms in the Wyrms Roost, ‘The Halls of Melinoe’ (a little different now), and Matterjack and Antijack.
And we have a little bit of (very sketchy, I hope August won’t mind me posting this), art for ‘Queen Mab’;





2021 – Peak Patrick HoursIts 2021 people! Good news for Patrick; DCO Remastered comes out and is very popular. This is by far and away the most popular and successful thing I have ever produced since I started self-publishing, I think it nearly matches the sales volume of the rest of my catalogue put together.
I still remember the delivery of the final book to my flat; I had it sent to what I thought would be a more accessible location and ended up having to take an Uber to some industrial estate in the middle of summer, masked up, sweating and confused, and wandering around the place looking for my boxes of books. Can’t remember if I walked back or got another cab.
While I must have been pretty busy doing other things, 2021 shows regular, at least weekly, and often daily, growth in the regular drafts of ‘Queen Mab’. There are a bunch of things here which end up ‘on the cutting room floor’ and don’t appear in the final book, for instance, the Exo-Petitioners;

Exo-Petitioners
You Hear
Barks in an unknown language. A devil-box eats this tongue and spits it out in comprehensible metal words.
“Put your hands up! Who are you? Who do you serve?”
You See
Sun-Spears blind you. Lances of burning white light, carried by hunters who seem no more than black shadows behind the sun-bright lamps.
An older, calmer voice calls out, ordering the hunters, who drop the lances of their lamps.
As sight returns you, you see a strange conclave; an old hunter and his strange followers, circled and guarded by a league of blind men. All wear masks of glass strapped around their heads, attached to tubes which lead to flasks of imprisoned beneficent wind.
These are men, of a sort. Not quite as you know them.
The Petitioners
The Old Hunter
A grave gentleman with a lined, heavy face and hair like snow. He wears something like a hunting jacket with a slim silk scarf hanging in a straight line down the centre of his pure white shirt. His clothes are finely made, though in simple cut and sombre colours which match his strong and certain manner. Clearly he is leader of this group. Though he is dressed to hunt, he carries nothing in his hands.
[For August – the references to ‘hunters clothes’ or being ‘dressed like a hunter’ are meant to be someone with a middle-ages aesthetic looking at a modern suit, for which the trousers, short jacket and tie might seem like a strange version of the clothes worn by nobles when hunting.]
The Scrivener
A young woman in a fitted hunting jacket and skirt. she carries a case at her side and holds a tablet. She treads closely upon the old hunters heels, attending to his words
replying only with agreement, and scribing in her tablet.
The Priest
An old man with a long grey beard, wearing a fine robe embroidered with strange symbols, he walks with a tall ivory staff, topped with gold. He is deeply troubled by everything he sees.
The Mage
A woman, her hair tied and face unadorned but for glass lenses upon her nose. She wears a knee-length coat of purest white over a mans grey hunting suit. She glances about herself, like a bird, talking overmuch, though largely to herself. She carries a bulky case and holds the devil box which speaks the transformed metal words.
The Warrior
A warrior in a peaked cap, his face lined and serious, his chest bestrewn with medals and ribbons of many colours. His gaze roves about, dauntless and impetuous. He has a miniature cannon at his side and he shouts orders at the blind guardians.
The Blind Guardians
Strong and vital men wearing the black glass shades of the blind. Yet they look about themselves, glancing here and there, listening to the orders of the great warrior. Their sombre hunting clothes are like that of the Old Hunter, yet not as perfectly made. They hold small cannons and sun-spears which they shine about at any noise or movement.
The Plea Of The Old Hunter
In metal words passed through his mages devil box the Hunter tells his tale;
“I rule a far land.
One fall-time, strange things came. Flyers in the sky. Beasts, Satryrs and Dancers stepped from shadows and from water, like reflections.
Our tools turned on us. Our fighters fell sick, or were lost to dreams.
They took much. Winter came. They left.
Since then, many dream without sleep. More and more each day. Soon the dreamers will outnumber those who wake.
We can find no cure.
Autumn came. The leaves turned. A white Satyr came, and said; Come, King, beg Queen Mab, and she will heal your harm.
The White Satyr showed us a door in the shadow of falling leaves.
So I have come to find this Queen Mab. To beg her to lift her curse of dreams.
We are lost here. No food and water. Please help us.”

 

2022 - ‘HA HA HA I AM A GENIUS’Bad news everybody! Demon-Bone Sarcophagus comes out and it is not well liked to put it mildly. (It actually sells not-too terribly, about half the rate of DCO, but unfortunately I had, lets say, a LOT of confidence in this project and its collapse was demoralising.)
This far in, the art for ‘Queen Mab’ is starting to look a lot more like the final version and the file is starting look a lot like an actual book. We have tables like this;


One or two characters from which do actually show up in the final text.
By the end of the year I have… massively overwritten the idea. 2022 ends with 306 pages and nearly 79,000 words. Any idea of a ‘short adventure’ is clearly left long behind, but where am I actually going with this? While continuing to detail the people and places of ‘The Queen Mab’, I am also bringing in hyper complex concepts like the time-looped ‘Knights of Grief’, strange extra-causal ‘Messengers of Time’ and aspects of the adventure that include messages from your future selves and the idea of multiple plays as an intrinsic diegetic part of the setting.
This is all very innovative but this idea is huge, and growing ever more complex, and every form of complexity interacts with every other form, requiring more and more prodigies of explanation and contingency.


2023 – a Crowhurst MomentSpeak, False Machine comes out this year and does ok. A massive book at a high-ish price, and all little more than a testament to my own self-importance. The robots won’t be able to re-write me now!
But with Mab, clearly I have begun to recognise that I have fucked up severely. There are only eight updates for this whole year.


2024 – Wait, I Can Still Fix ThisThe year of Gackling Moon, another book whose publication history is… complex, and long.
With Mab, a sea-change has taken place. Clearly I have given up on writing an actual adventure module. Instead my drafts have been re-named ‘Queen Mab – a Guide’ and everything starts to be re-written in a very different manner.

“I find I must speak a little more to tell you first of the manners of the palace for its courtesies are so curious that, should I embark to tell you of this or that realm or court and you have not the way of it first, what might be held strange shall seem beyond understanding.
While it is said that the Palace is a Free Kingdom where one might rise or fall by ones own efforts, aye even beasts and the doors given voice, the dead walk and dreams made real, in truth the High Ladies rule all, and Mab rules the High Ladies.
The creatures and courtiers may be somewhat predatory, cannibalistic, homicidal and mad, but they are rarely impolite. Even the lowest; the Kroo and the Dwellers of the Crypt will make some attempt at forms of politeness. Courtesy does not preclude predation. The Palace hovers often on the edge of famine. In the Crypt one may eat freely of whomever one may take, save those blessed by Melinoe, or in a Night Market during a Saints day. In the Courts there is a different law; one should not predate, save by the will of whatever court one is in.”

This is the first existence of the voice of ‘The Scribe’; the narrator of a ‘Gackling Moon’ style Gazeteer, written in an Epistolary style, a visitor from a pseudo-medieval culture describing ‘The Queen Mab’ for… who exactly?
The first ‘Scribe’ is bodiless, nameless, even genderless, I never knew even what sex they were or what they looked like. But this will slowly change..
Around April, the drafts of ‘Queen Mab – a Guide’ transmute into ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’, and then into ‘QMP’, I am on a roll here and its during this grand re-write of 2024 that the descriptive ‘place’ sections are broken up, moved around and absorbed into particular recollections by in-world characters. The ‘Guide Book’ slowly changes into a ‘Story Book’. The ‘Scribe’ gains a gender, a form, and a strange and particular history. They even get their own drawing!
Most people who have read the final text of ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’ say something like; “It’s not bad, the first part reads kind of like a game and the end more like a novel” and I think I am ok with this. I could have re-written more, made it more and more and more like a novel, but I am fine with the presence of time and the development of the writer in a text, and I like the book the way it is, and of course, remember the “42 Pages” and “About a year”. By this point the phrase “and then Queen Mab” and “still working on Queen Mab” have bedded themselves so deep into my vocabulary that they are like automatic speech.
By August (the month) 2024, I have completed a ‘Draft Zero’ which is pretty much the text for the finished book
And in October 2024, we run a successful..


KICKSTARTER!

Yes everything is going ok and we will certainly have a finished book for you by….
Oh my god….



2025 - Did I really publish nothing this year?Look, things just take a while.
Layout, discussions, firm and frank exchanges of views, art, more art. I know it seemed like not much was happening but in fact a fair amount was and I can prove this because we did indeed produce a finished book! It just took just over a year to get everything laid out and finished and the book actually printed.

But it does exist!



2026 – No-One Killed Me

Donald Crowhurst is a semi-famous figure in British modern mythology; an attempted amateur round-the-world solo yachtsman, his self-designed yacht started to fall apart mid-Atlantic.
In a world with global radio coverage, but without, yet, a universal Global Positioning System, the only way for the race observers to confirm the yachts locations across the globe was via self-report. Each contestant would radio in, every day, with a latitude and longitude, to tell everyone how they were doing.
As Crowhursts actual position began to fall behind the other contestants, he began, only a little at first, to bend details, to place his reported position just a little ahead of where he actually was. Then the next day, having lied a little, he lied some more, all the while desperately dealing with a leaking, floundering ship, alone in the ocean. Thinking, perhaps; “I can make it up, I can get back on track.”
Eventually he seems to have come up with a desperate concept to rescue his dream; he would float around in the Atlantic, going nowhere, living out this fantasy of a round the world race, with fake reported positions and fake events, until the actual race did finally go circumvent the earth, and returned to the Atlantic, at which point he would join in, for real, and float into port, ahead of the rest, having gone ‘round the world’.
Either he fell into the sea or took his own life. His body was never found, just the empty, leaky yacht, with no Crowhurst, but two well-kept logbooks; one showing every position of his ‘round the world race’, the other, his actual, mad empty circles in the Atlantic.
Who knows, perhaps he is still out there somewhere, living under another name. We can hope.
(Shelly, who wrote the ‘Queen Mab’ quoted above, also died mysteriously in a boat.)


What does this have to do with ‘Queen Mab’s Palace’? Absolutely nothing.
Anyway, thanks to August for not actively murdering me. The book is now done and is available for sale. I think its pretty good.

A curious wonder has taken place. Some of you may remember my extensive reviews of near-forgotten 90’s Author Hugh Cooks ‘Chronicle of an Age of Darkness’
You can read Part One (probably the best) here; https://pjamesstuart.substack.com/p/let-him-cook
And Part Two here; https://pjamesstuart.substack.com/p/he-cooked-zaan-olo-malan


Well, these reviews garnered me a smidgeon of attention for the crazed radicals at https://zenphospress.com/ a micro publisher set up by a small group of obsessive Hugh Cook fans with the sole aim of bringing the world of Olo Malan back into print. Something they have actually accomplished! The whole series is back, and available on Amazon!

Even more amazingly, I have been allowed to do a small introduction for one of the books; Book Seven ‘The Wazir and the Witch’, the second part of the ‘Injiltaprajuna Duology’.



Because of this, I have been gifted a Full Set of the new versions for ‘Chronicle of World of Darkness’; the new large size editions give a new vividness to the cover illustrations which, (while they still tend to have almost nothing to do with the contents of each book), look wonderful.




(I might be one of the only people on earth to own multiple full sets of ‘Chronicles of an Age of Darkness)
Even stranger, the only other person I could see doing introductions for this series (he introduces two of the books), is noted author Adrian Tchaikovsky, who was behind ‘Starseers Ruin’ which I mentioned in my end-of-year roundup here; https://pjamesstuart.substack.com/p/15-in-2025
Now my name stands on amazon; “by Hugh Cook (Author) , Adrian Tchaikovsky (Foreword) , Patrick Stuart (Foreword)”
Cook died young, leaving behind his wife and daughter, I have been assured by Zenphos Press that "Hugh's family will receive a substantial portion of the profits", so, if you would like to try them, (at a reasonable price), you can buy the whole series here. Or just try the first one ‘Wizards &Warriors’, to see what they are like the feminist grown-up one ‘Women &Warlords’, to see what tanked the series or the two set on Injiltaprajuna ‘Wishstone &Wonder-Workers and ‘Wazir & Witch’, one of which is introduced by me!

 “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
Remember that Plato quote? Well it WASN’T Plato, it was George Santayana! In one of the better parts of one of his better essays; ‘Tipperary’, in which he observes a group of British soldiers singing in a coffee shop after the Armistice is signed and they realise they don’t have to die.
A grim riposte but, in responding directly to his living circumstances, these singing soldiers manage to focus his mind, at least for a while and thus produce an unusually coherent, analytic and downbeat sequence of thoughts.



(All quotes severely broken up. GS does not use paragraphs much.)
From ‘Tipperary’

“They are hardly out of the fog of war when they are lost in the fog of peace.
If experience could teach mankind anything, how different our morals and out politics would be, how clear, how tolerant, how steady! If we knew ourselves, our conduct at all times would be absolutely decided and consistent; and a pervasive sense of vanity and humour would disinfect our passions, if we knew the world.
As it is, we live experimentally, moodily, in the dark, each generation breaks its egg shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impressions and rushes down any untrodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or becomes wise too late and too no purpose.”

GS goes on to (correctly, but surprisingly ruthlessly) say that there is no reprieve in this armistice. The other nations may be at peace, but the Germans definitely are not. Nothing is over.

“Be sad if you will, there is always reason for sadness, since the good which the world brings is so fugitive and bought at so great a price; but be brave. If you think happiness worth enjoying, think it worth defending.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility, life would not be worth having without the freedom of soul and the friendship with nature which that readiness brings.
The things we know and love on earth are, and should be, transitory; they are, as were the things celebrated by Homer, at best the song or oracle by which heaven is revealed in our time. We must pass with them into eternity, not in the end only, but continually, as the phrase passes into its meaning; and since they are part of us, and we of them, we should accompany them with good grace: it would be desolation to survive.”

This might be true but such words count for more with me if the speaker themselves is visibly willing to claim ‘man’s charter of nobility’ (i.e. get shot). Coming from a man behind an orchard wall, it strikes a little different.
I have no exact recollection of why I first got my hands on this book. I think it may have been Georges Essay ‘Queen Mab’, about fiction and the British character, (I was working on Queen Mab’s Palace’ about this time). But my interest was redoubled, initially, by the largely warm viewpoint of this exquisitely civilised man going though a spate of pre-War Anglophilia.
From ‘Grisielle’

“England is pre-eminently a land of atmospheres. A luminous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfiguring familiar objects, harmonizing the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque. Road and pavements become wet mirrors, in which the fragments of this gross world are shattered, inverted, and transmuted into jewels, more appealing than precious stones to the poet, because they are insubstantial and must be loved without being possessed.”

...

“In England the classic spectacle of thunderbolts and rainbows appears but seldom; such contrasts are too violent and definite for these tender skies. here the conflict between light and darkness, like all other conflicts, ends in a compromise; cataclysms are rare, but revolution is perpetual. Everything lingers on and is modified; all is luminous and all is grey.”

…
Its always slightly pleasant to see one’s home through the eyes of an admiring foreigner, though in this case, sad, because Santayana is describing the last flower of pre-war Europe and England, a culture which, culturally, and largely environmentally, is now overwritten and essentially gone. (Though the sky does still act like that.)
From ‘The British Character’

“What is it that governs the Englishman? Certainly not intelligence; seldom passion; hardly self-interest, since what we call self-interest is nothing but some dull passion served by a brisk intelligence. The Englishman’s heart is perhaps capricious or silent; it is seldom designing or mean.
There are nations where people are always innocently explaining how they have been lying and cheating in small matters, to get out of some predicament, or secure some advantage, that seems to them a part of the art of living. Such is not the Englishman’s way: it is easier for him to face or break opposition than to circumvent it. If we tried to say that what governs him is convention, we should have to ask ourselves how it comes about that England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.
Nowhere do we come oftener upon those two social abortions - they affected and the disaffected. Where else would a man inform you, with a sort of proud challenge, that he lived on nuts, or was in correspondence through a medium with Sir Joshua Reynolds, or had been disgustingly housed when last in prison?
Where else would a young woman, in dress and manners the close copy of a man, tell you that her parents were odious, and that she desired a husband, but no children, or children without a husband? It is true that these novelties soon become conventions of some narrower circle, or may even have been adopted en bloc in emotional desperation, as when people are dissident and supercilious by temperament, they manage to wear their uniforms with a difference, turning them by some lordly adaptation into a part of their own person.”

…
As with almost everything Geroge says, he layers positive and negative, the one implying the other, or counter-informing the other, layer upon layer, till one receives, never a judgment, (George would make a terrible Judge, his cases would never end and no final opinion would be reached), but more a rich, deep, painting of whatever he apprehends, in this case a culture, mixed with and informed by its environment, and its good-bad qualities mixed among its bad-good errors.
This is also the opinion of a very much a slightly anglicised, but still very Spanish Latin Man, (from a culture that knows how to feel and how to live) dealing with a horde of strange Anglos (who live and feel mysteriously, if at all, but sometimes know how to do.)
From ‘Death-Bed Manners’

“That a desire to ignore everything unpleasant is at the bottom of this convention seems to be confirmed by an opposite attitude towards death which I have observed among English people during this war. Some of them speak of death quite glibly, quite cheerfully, as if it were a sort of trip to Brighton. “Oh yes our two sons went down in the Black Prince. They were such nice boys. Never heard a word about them of course; but probably the magazine blew up and they were all killed quite instantly, so that we don’t mind half so much as if they had had any of those bad lingering wounds. They wouldn’t have liked it at all being crippled you know; and we all think it is probably much better as it is. Just blown to atoms! It is such a blessing!”

..
The precise, living, vivid yet ironic voice of the past springing briefly from this quote, highlights what, (for me, if definitely not for him), if part of the tragedy of George Santayana; that he spent a huge amount of time thinking deeply, but mysteriously, and elliptically, though beautifully, about those wise and high generalities in which the limits of philosophy and cognition are defined.
Head in the clouds, where nothing is accomplished. With a mind as precise, sensitive, knowledgeable and tolerant as his, and a pen as brilliant and expressive, the world lost an incredible reporter and probably a great novelist (he wrote one but I fear it is a novel of ‘ideas’), while GS dedicated himself to the sky-castles.
Eventually, George seems to have had enough of England. Perhaps, in part of the long cyclic back and forth of admiration and alienation which any traveller feels when dealing with a foreign culture for a sustained period, he, after dealing with what I call ‘England England’ (home counties, oxford, misty fields, hidden wealth), he gets a view of what I would consider (to me), the ‘real’ England (mad councils, housing estates, public transport, mediocrity and depression). Here he writes an essay about how terrible the Hegelians are and how wrong, bad and inappropriate it is that England is filled with them, (who should not be there). I am not really fully familiar with what exactly an Hegalian is, but based on Georges writing I am willing to accept that they are very bad.
From ‘The real England’

“In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much mixed, and over balanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English character had been general, England could never have become Puritan, not bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, not sent such shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for the prevention and promotion of everything.
In the real England there is a strong, if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world, and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the end, or to what purpose.”

They have not changed, but this leads us into GS’s alienation from whatever modernity is becoming in England during and after the war, and while his ‘final opinions’ on anything are as misty and negotiable as always, he does have a lot of interesting things to say…
From ‘Liberalism and Culture’

“... Fortunately, liberal ages have been secondary ages, inheriting the monuments, the feelings and the social hierarchy of previous times, when men had lived in compulsory unison, having only one unquestioned religion, one style of art, one political order, one common spring of laughter and tears. Liberalism has come to remove the strain and the trammels of these traditions without as yet uprooting the traditions themselves. Most people remember their preliberal heritage and hardly remember that they are legally free to abandon it and to sample any and other form of life.
Liberalism does not go very deep, it is an adventitious principle, a mere loosening of an older structure. For that reason it brings to all who felt cramped and ill-suited such comfort and relief. It offers them an escape from all sorts of accidental tyrannies. It opens to them that sweet, scholarly, tenderly moral, critically superior attitude of mind to which Matthew Arnold called culture.”

....

“Culture requires liberalism for its foundation, and liberalism requires culture for its crown. It is culture that integrates in imagination the activities which liberalism so dangerously disperses in practice.”

Reading this from the far end, in a sense, from the other end, of a great age of Liberalism, where the Liberalism still exists, but the culture has run out, feels a little spooky.
From ‘The Irony of Liberalism’

“... the transcendental principal of progress is pantheistic. It requires everything to be ill at ease in its own house; no-one can be really free or happy but all must be tossed, like herded emigrants, on the same compulsory voyage, to the same destination.
The world came from a nebula, and to a nebula it returns.”

....

“It admonished the dogs not to bark and bite, even if, in the words of the sacred poet, “it is their nature to.” Dogs, according to the transcendental philosophy, ought to improve their nature and behave better.
A chief part of the liberal inspiration was the love of peace, safety, comfort and general information; it aimed at stable wealth, it insisted on education, it venerated culture. It was wholly out of sympathy with the wilder instincts of man, with the love of foraging, of hunting, of fighting, of plotting, of carousing, or of doing penance. It had an acute, a sickening horror of suffering; to be cruel was devilish and to be hardened to pain was brutal.
I am afraid liberalism was hopelessly pre-Nietzschean; it was Victorian; it was tame. In inviting every man to be free an autonomous it assumed that, once free, he would wish to be rich, to be educated, and to be demure. How could he possibly fail to covet a way of life in which, in the eyes of liberals, was so obviously the best? It must have been a painful surprise to them, and most inexplicable, that hardly anybody who has had a taste of the liberal system has ever liked it.”

When GS is not talking about England, Politics or, really.. who can say truly what precisely a lot of his essays are essentially about? He does not think in categories. But at least some of them are lean more into what we would call cognition, thought, the experience of the world and what it is to be, think, sense and exist.
From ‘Cross-Lights’

“... Things, when seen, seem to come and go with our visions; and visions, when we do not know why they visit us, seem to be things. But this is not the end of the story. Opacity is a great discoverer. It teaches the souls of animals the existence of what is not themselves. Their souls in fact live and spread their roots in the darkness, which em-bosoms and creates the light, though the light does not comprehend it.
If sensuous evidence flooded the whole sphere with which souls are conversant, they would have no reason for suspecting that there was anything they did not see, and they would live in a fool’s paradise of lucidity.
Fortunately, for their wisdom, if not their comfort, they come upon mysteries and surprises, earthquakes and rumblings in their hidden selves and in their undeciphered environment; they live in time, which is a double abyss of darkness; and the primary and urgent object of their curiosity is that unfathomable engine of nature which from its ambush governs their fortunes.
The proud, who shine by their own light, do not perceive matter, the fuel that feeds and will some day fail them; but the knowledge of it comes to extinct stars in their borrowed light and almost mortal coldness, because they need to warm themselves at a distant fire and to adapt their seasons to its favourable shining.”

In his views on the embedding of the mind in reality, and what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ knowledge and ignorance, the known and unknown truly mean, GS is brilliant, Heraclitean, perhaps wrong, but holy shit can he write. Even if his arguments are wrong, his prose is correct.
From ‘Psyche’

“Long before sunrise she is at work in her subterranean kitchen over her pots of stewing herbs, her looms, and her spindles; and with the first dawn, when the first ray of intuition falls through some aperture into those dusky spaces, what does it light up? The secret springs of her life? The aims she is so faithfully but blindly pursuing?
Far from it. intuition, floods of intuition, have been playing for ages upon human life: poets, painters, men of prayer, scrupulous naturalists innumerable, have been intent on their several visions, yet of the origin and of the end of life we know as little as ever.
And the reason for this; that intuition is not a material organ of the Psyche, like a hand or antenna; it is a miraculous child, far more alive than herself, whose only instinct is play, laughter, and brooding meditation. This strange child - who could have been his father? - is a poet; absolutely useless and incomprehensible to his poor mother, and only a new burden on her shoulders, because she can’t help feeding and loving him. He sees, which to her is a mystery, because, although she has always acted as if, in some measure, she felt things at a distance, she has never seen and never can see anything.”

From ‘The Tragic Mask’

“Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings.
Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation.
I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, of the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phrases and products are involved equally in the round of existence, and it would be sheer wilfulness to praise the germinal phase on the ground that it is vital, and to denounce the explicit phase on the ground that it is dead and sterile.”

....

“Under our published principles and plighted language we must assiduously hide all the inequalities of our moods and conduct, and this without hypocrisy, since our deliberate character is more truly ourself than is the flux of our involuntary dreams.”

..

“Our animal habits are transmuted by conscience into loyalties and duties, and we become “persons” or masks. Art, truth, and death turn everything to marble.”

From ‘The Comic Mask’

“Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.”

....

“Where there is no habitual art and no moral liberty, the instinct for direct expression is atrophied for want of exercise; and then slang and a humorous perversity of phrase or manner act as safety-valves to sanity, and you manage to express yourself in spite of the censor by saying something grotesquely different from what you mean. That is long way round to sincerity, and an ugly one.”

This ‘long way round to sincerity’ seems utterly appropriate to the current poisoned moment of relentless mutual surveillance and censorship combined with reactionary, resentful and permanently ironic ‘freedom’.
From ‘Carnival’

“This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate, the oddest of possibilities masquerading momentarily as a fact.
Custom blinds persons who are not naturally speculative to the egregious character of the actual, because custom assimilates their expectations to the march of existing things and deadens their power to imagine anything different.”

Santayana’s ‘job description’ is ‘philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist’ – I am not sure how he actually got paid. The man writes like an angel, thinks like a cloud and rambles like a lost dog. There are no short, accurate Santayana quotes, because every single idea is lengthily toyed with, and even if you excise that, each idea is lodged or woven in with, sometimes an elegant tapestry, sometimes a foul slum, of other ideas, many of which contradict or cast shade on anything stated or suggested by the one you are looking at now. No-one can criticise Santayana’s conclusions because we do not know what they are.

“I notice that the men of the world, when they dip into my books, find them consistent, almost oppressively consistent, and to the ladies everything is crystal-clear, yet the philosophers say that it is lazy and self-indulgent of me not to tell them plainly what I think, if I know myself what it is.
Because I describe madness sympathetically, because I lose myself in the dreaming mind, and see the world from the transcendental point of vantage, while at the same time interpreting that dream by its presumable motives and by its moral tendencies, these quick and intense reasoners suppose that I am vacillating in my own opinions.”

You are vacillating in your own opinions! You are not getting to the point! You should have gotten a proper job where people would have made you do things! Being bound to some actual functional purpose would have sorted you right out, instead we get this.