TTRPGs as folklore

Last year, I wrote two posts reframing the role-playing game system as a theory - as a way of comparing subsequent play sessions. The first introduced the idea, while the second responded to criticism, and developed the framework a bit further. In this post, I'd like to take a lateral step, and incorporate my recent delving into folklore to examine play sessions in aggregate as a folk activity. I'll start by motivating this viewpoint.

Imagine the following: a small group of people, usually 3 to 6, gather together on a regular basis, somewhere between every week to a few times a month. They sit down at a table. They talk, read, write, roll dice, move figurines around, sketch for each other. They imagine a world together, and fictional characters living and interacting within it. There are rules for how this is done. Often, one of the participants is tasked with describing the world and most of the characters within it, while each of the others describes what an individual character attempts to do there, although that's not required. Whether or not a character succeeds or fails in what its player wants it to do is determined by these rules, with or without the use of dice, potentially combined with numbers and figures, whose interpretation the participants agree upon. After each session, and especially as sessions accumulate, the participants build up a set of experiences, and a collective story about those experiences, that they helped create, and for which they are, if not the only audience, then the most important one.

This is a folk activity. Folklore is notoriously hard to define, but it usually requires a set group, with creative practices that are performed by members of that group for members of that same group. Most commonly people think of folktales, but the items of folklore can be dances, pieces of pottery, jokes, barns, parables, as well as, importantly, storytelling and games. In addition, the practices are passed on traditionally, informally, rather than taught through formalized training.

And, indeed, despite repeated attempts, through the use of the tools of pedagogy, the creation of starter sets, sometimes even professional associations and after-school activities for children and young adults, I think that the vast majority of tabletop role-playing is learned and conducted through this kind of traditional, informal process. In particular, most play groups, or tables, in which one or more campaigns are played, are formed this way.

I'd go further and say that the TTRPG started as a folk activity, bridging and combining the folk activities of science fiction and fantasy fan communities on the one hand, and miniature wargamers on the other, to form a new folk genre. This was further developed by informal communities, who communicated through play and through the zine and APA scene. Due to his focus on contemporary and often informal self-documentation by participants, Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, which covers the former, and The Elusive Shift, which covers the latter, provide important material for the TTRPG folklorist. This despite giving short shrift to folk history in the sense of accepting people's recollections today of what they thought and did in the past.

Even Peterson's more business-minded The Game Wizards has something to offer. Coupled with the interviews in the indie documentary Secrets of Blackmoor, it sheds a better light on Dave Arneson's seemingly self-defeating attempt to lay claim to a portion of Dungeons & Dragons, while simultaneously arguing against the very publishable and formalizable aspects of the product that are actually respected by modern American intellectual property law. I think that he was trying to capture, using legal tools not up to the task, the fact that his practice of running Blackmoor as an informal creative process, inherently hard to document, and therefore market as a product, was foundational to the subsequently written product, D&D, as mostly formalized by Gary Gygax and other writers and designers at TSR. 

I have to wonder what a folklorist's version of The First Fantasy Campaign would look like. Not a collection of Arneson's notes, but a combination of transcripts of sessions, interviews with participants, perhaps records and insights from participation. Something that would do for Blackmoor what Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles did for Appalachian ballads.

We do know that Blackmoor and the Braunstein games that immediately precede it had enough informal cachet that they proliferated to other participants in person, as a folk activity, to the point where others were independently creating formalizations before D&D started spreading. Unfortunately, at the time, and perhaps to this day, the only form of widespread legitimacy a gaming practice like this could have was through a ruleset.

There's a conversation to be had of how the very attempt at reproduction, and the expansion in audience it entails, might change the activity, as well as the relationship between reproduction and commercialization - I hope to return to that in a future post.

Until then, I would suggest that this point of view is already illuminating about the hobby, both its history and its contemporary practice.

We no longer live in a pre-COVID19 world

I have tried keeping politics and current events away from this blog, but since Twitter is no longer an outlet for me, I find myself wanting to express certain things here.

Let's start with a film. Late December I watched a political thriller, The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty. I strongly recommend it, although the reason I watched it then was that it was leaving Amazon Prime, so you'll have to find it elsewhere.

I won't spoil the film for you, but I have been repeating one episode in it to people when I try to explain my exasperation at the discourse about COVID19 and "going back to normal". In the film, Beatty's character chases someone onto an airplane. He runs from a cab, through the terminal, up the stairs, into the airplane, and only then, after takeoff, does a flight attendant come over to ask him for his name and whether he'd be doing a round-trip or taking them one way. See, back then you didn't need to have pre-paid for a ticket, checked your luggage with your ticket, gone through security, then have your boarding pass checked before you were let on a plane. Planes were a lot more like buses.

Now imagine the following pitch for a new airport design: once we're done with terrorism and airborne smuggling, surely we'll go back to those good old days as expressed in the film above, so let's use the latest in soundproofing technology to allow the gates to be a dozen feet away from departure drop-off, so people can very easily get on the plane. TSA is just a temporary measure, right? Airliner hijackings are a thing of the past, right? We'll go back to normal, and then we can just make things so much smoother.

This may sound ridiculous, but that's exactly how policymakers and business leaders sound when they discuss COVID19. It's all about "going back to normal", "getting people back in the office", dozens of op eds concern trolling about the ills of working from home, the psychological effect of physical separation of children from their classmates - all potentially legitimate concerns, but not comparable to the horrors of suffering from a serious disease or watching classmates, siblings, parents, colleagues, teachers, suffer or perish.

We can't just pretend things are going back to normal. Nothing says that we won't still be dealing with it five years from now. And we'll still only have solutions designed for a world that pretends that this plague doesn't exist.

Imagine a different path. Imagine if, six months into the pandemic, world and local leaders had actually sat down and thought how a functioning society could work while taking this disease into account. We have all these tools that allow us to work and study remotely. We have the constraints that are very acute for parents with children. What could we do with this? Maybe the government could incentivize households to pair up so that work and childcare can be shared. Maybe the office buildings which will no longer consistently hold in-person businesses can instead be used to significantly reduce class counts to make in-person schooling actually safe. Maybe some effort could've gone into modernizing ventilation systems and adding air filtering to classrooms and businesses, and training more healthcare workers to deal with expected surges. Maybe there are better solutions for these and other problems that have come up that I can't even imagine, because I'm a software engineer and RPG crank whose highest academic training was in theoretical physics. But we'll never get there if we keep pretending that this is just a temporary speedbump.

We are beginning Year 3 of the Plague. Let's not pretend it's going to just dissipate. It'll even be economically more sensible long-term to actually adapt instead of constantly pushing off the inevitable by insisting on normalcy and then disrupting this normalcy as case counts make it untenable again.

2021 in review - folklore

Another thing I spent quite a bit of time on in 2021 was folklore. It started with an exasperation at repeatedly running into Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey as a blueprint for all compelling stories - and how this affects writing and the expectations from role-playing game plots - but became something more.

I started with Stith Thompson's classic, The Folktale. It is an extensive study of folktales from around the world, using what's now called the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folktales, and the Thompson motif index of folk literature, including descriptions of the folktales and their variations, as well as the methodology of collecting and cataloguing them. While a bit outdated, and occasionally offensive - to give an example, it separates the world into "civilized" and "primitive" cultures, and when presenting folktale collection methodologies, has no problem having members of the former do their own collecting, while the latter's work is to be collected by more civilized folklorists working with local agents - it made it clear that there are a variety of story types, most of which have nothing resembling a hero's journey, that have been so engaging to various cultures, that they have been continually reproduced and adapted, often without the use of mechanical reproduction or even writing. It also presented evidence of an extent of inter-cultural permeability that isn't often taken into consideration when people discuss culture. It was also interesting to read the various categories of supernatural elements that appear in folktales, and that now live in modern fantasy in a much more restricted manner, due to their appearance in Dungeons & Dragons and in Disney movies. Jon Peterson's treatment of the medieval fantasy genre in his Playing at the World goes into the former in detail. The latter you can reflect on when you consider what first comes to mind when you hear of Snow White or The Little Mermaid.

Having finished with Thompson for now, I went on to read Barre Toelken's The Dynamics of Folklore, which tries to provide a starting point for analyzing folk life and folk creation as something living, as opposed to a pervasive attitude of relegating it to a less educated past. Toelken makes it quite clear that folklore is happening all the time, and that the actual performance of the piece of folklore is paramount - which, to me, connects very closely to how I'm starting to view role-playing games, an activity whose focus is in its performance to and for its participants, rather than something that should be compared to fiction, or cinema, or other forms of culture that involve separate stages of generation, reproduction, and consumption. There's something bigger to discuss here about the relation of canon to fan works and vice versa, and the attempts to control folklore, a creative, autonomous process, when it develops around reproducible media, with all the intellectual property consequences that entails. I will hopefully find more learned studies of this topic.

In Dynamics, Toelken pointed several times to the works of Edward T. Hall, specifically to his The Hidden Dimension, where he introduced the concept of proxemics, the study of personal and cultural perceptions of space. I took a detour to read that work, which is why I will probably only be done with Dynamics next year. While it is also a bit outdated, and has an unfortunate tendency to present animal models for human behavior uncritically, as well as to indulge in cultural stereotyping, the very fact that human perception of space is multi-sensory, can be broken up into reasonable ranges, and that people's comfort and interest in what happens when thus separated from each other can depend on their cultural context, context, as well as personal preference, was pretty insightful. Specifically, for tabletop role-playing games, this is something I will be keeping in mind as I am trying to communicate position and its emotional effect, and will contribute to my thoughts about combat systems, exploration, and other spatially-significant aspects of an imagined world. I have some more reading material in that direction - here's hoping it can bear fruit sometime next year.

2021 in review - role-playing games

We're getting towards the end of 2021, so it's a good time for me to look back on this year, also the first full year of my blog. Since role-playing games have always been my focus, this post is dedicated to them. I only intend to mention games I have played - reading is all well and good, actual plays can be useful, but the play's the thing.

After winding down my own first role-playing campaign, I decided that I will no longer run Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Instead, I've continued to learn and play other games, although remain a player in a 5E campaign with my existing local group.

After attempting to playtest it a bit last year, this year is when I had the most experience in Blades in the Dark. You can find an index to the posts I wrote about my experience here. To summarize: very interesting, intense experience, but lacking in constraints in places, and would require me to do a bit of thinking and some constraining of my own before I ran it again. Mostly good as my first real attempt to run a modern fiction-first game. I should try and see how it runs as a player, too. Maybe next year.

I also ran a Sorcerer one-shot. I still struggle to summarize the experience - I think at this point I just feel that it was premature as it stood - but thinking about it, combined with the seasonal connection to my main inspiration for the scenario, A Night in the Lonesome October, led me to my most prolific project of this year, constituting the majority of my posts: Through Sorcerer's Eyes. In some ways it connects to my speculation about system as theory, except applied to literature rather than role-playing.

In terms of games played, this year was a success. I'm surprised that I didn't write a post about Session Zero Online, a convention centered in Manila, the Philippines. In my defense, it was very intense, and came along just as I was starting a new job. I played three games there: a playtest for Basheer Ghouse's upcoming Ahadi, a narrative role-playing wargame focusing on high-ranking officers in the Mughal Empire, which I am really looking forward to seeing in a more complete stage, as even this early draft was delightful; Rajit Kalita's Ramayana Run (now published as Ramayana Tales: Search for the Sanjivni), a 5E adventure and supplement set in the world of the Indian epic, the Ramayana - fascinating, but the experience clarified to me just how much 5E's character sheet game overshadows any attempts at doing something different with the system; and Curious Chimeras` Mere Gods, a contemplative narrative game inspired by traditional Southeast Asian cultures, about people returning to their home-town after a long absence, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.

After this, I helped playtest Bounty Hunter TTRPG, which I had backed on Kickstarter. It was my first experience with a diceless TTRPG - this, in turn, led me to the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game-focused community, with which I participated in TirCon 2021. There I played two games using ADRPG itself, as well as the award winning Alice Is Missing, which is unfortunately not for me, and an ADRPG-Everway concoction called Amberway, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Other games I played were Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, Troika!, MÖRK BORG, and Ultraviolet Grasslands (now situated as part of the Vastlands).

Aside from the platforms provided by the conventions I mentioned, I want to thank the CoC-focused Pinkerton One-Shots Agency Discord, especially for allowing me to run my Blades and Sorcerer games, as well as The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, a blog and podcast that I support on Patreon, which is also focused on CoC, but discusses horror and general gaming, and in whose Discord I have played and expect to play many games.

Short social media update

You may or may not have noticed that I've not posted on Twitter since last Friday, December 17. The reason is that I have been locked out, pending an appeal of their demand that I remove a tweet in which I implied that the US Constitution is a suicide pact. They claim that this constitutes promotion of suicide or self-harm, which is against their rules. I say "they claim", but the tweet was flagged mere minutes after it was posted, and my original appeal was rejected moments after I raised it, so I'm not sure whether any human was meaningfully involved in the decision. This has given me some time to reflect on my social media use.

Early this year I raised concerns about using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc, to hold thoughts and conversations about RPGs, or any topic, really, although I was being much less self-serving there. I figured that if I keep my long-form thoughts here, on this blog, which I am backing up so that I can preserve it, even if Blogspot decides to shut down or decides it no longer wants me here, that this information, at least, will remain less ephemeral.

However, I have to wonder whether letting Twitter guide my attention is a good idea at all. I do like the accounts I follow there, but I also find myself spending more and more time engaging in interactions that I'm not sure are healthy for me. Not to mention how many accounts I report as potentially fake, and how many tweets I genuinely think are harmful remain there despite my reports. For example, I reported an antisemitic "joke" a month ago, and it's still there at time of writing. I know I wasn't the only one outraged by it, either.

I am leaning towards deleting my "offending" tweet so that I can use my account again, then letting my followers know that I'm either leaving the platform or otherwise no longer going to engage with it, and urging them to follow me here or to email me. Facebook I keep mostly for friends and family overseas, and a few interest groups, so it's a bit more useful to me, although I've lowered my engagement with it, as well, in that I don't think I post there more than once every few weeks.

In case it hasn't been clear before, I do welcome feedback and comments on my posts. Unless I've made a very silly configuration mistake, you should be able to comment under the posts themselves, and there's a form for getting in touch if that's too public for you.

I have a few ideas for posts for the rest of the year during my break, but I also have to pack for my move, so I can't guarantee anything. If you've added me to your RSS reader, you'll know soon enough.

Through Sorcerer's eyes - Lonesome October revisited

During the month of October, I posted once a day for my "Through Sorcerer's eyes" project (now indexed!), where I used Ron Edwards' game, Sorcerer, about people undermining the laws of nature by trafficking with demons, to analyze Roger Zelazny's book, A Night in the Lonesome October, as I read it. I now want to reflect on that analysis in a more centralized and focused way. As always, this will be extremely spoiler-filled, so reader beware!

Throughout the project I kept a certain façade of someone encountering the book chapter by chapter for the first time, by not specifically identifying the tropes and characters brought up, outside of when they seemed relevant to sorcery. I was somewhat inconsistent in this. I did name the Cthulhu Mythos, but mostly failed to identify the protagonist's master as Jack the Ripper, Rastov as Rasputin (or someone close enough), the Count as Dracula, Larry Talbot as the Wolf Man, the Great Detective and his companion as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, or the Good Doctor as Dr. Frankenstein. This put them on equal footing with other main characters, such as Morris and MacCab, "Crazy" Jill, or Vicar Roberts, who did not stand for particular genre characters, although they did seem to stand for tropes: Jill as a classic witch from British folklore and its modern bowdlerization, Vicar Roberts as a clergyman turned Satanist, and Morris and MacCab as generic Victorian occultists.

So the book is a pastiche of Victorian detective, mystery, and horror fiction, combined with Lovecraftian horror. To this, we must add another genre that doesn't quite make the jacket: children's (and adults`) sentient animal literature, such as White Fang and Watership Down. This shows itself in the main living characters in the book being the animal companions. They are the ones with whom the point-of-view character, Jack's dog Snuff, is most able to communicate, and who seem to undergo the most growth. Even supposedly mundane animals, who are not the companions of anyone magical, are capable of verbal communications of some sort, at least with other animals. Notably, humans are not normally capable of speaking to animals, except for Larry Talbot, who, due to his lycanthropy, is able to converse in human form, but only with wolves and dogs. Companion animals are able to converse with their masters, but only during the hour after midnight.

This mixing of genres is challenging to address with a Sorcerer model, because the default premise of the game is to take a naturalistic setting, and add the supernatural to it exclusively through the actions of demons, who are controllable to some level by sorcerers, and whose existence and actions are kept secret from the general populace. But here, there seem to be several separate aspects that seem supernatural, or at least fantastical, and definitely secret. The naturalistic setting in the original game is recommended to be the "here and now", some stylized version of a part of the world we live in, so let's start our journey from there and see where it leads.

We start by being transported back to the late 19th or early 20th Century, near London. Sherlock Holmes, or a stand-in, is well known for his keen ways of observation, so this is not sorcery, but rather skill. Vivisectionists are well-established, although possibly detested. Ritual killings, assaults, and grave-robbing are investigated, but not necessarily understood. Animals are capable of talking to each other, even without any specific summoning of demons, although humans are not aware of this, with each species or family having its own language. Rumors of vampires, werewolves, and other such gothic horrors might abound, but they're not really understood.

Into this stylized, somewhat fanciful Victorian setting are plunged practitioners of many varieties of forbidden magic, which nevertheless feature in common animal companions with which said practitioners can communicate only between midnight and one in the morning, the use of dead body parts, interference with the weather, and concern with an event which happens a few times a century, in which the moon rises full on All Hallows` Eve, and the Lovecraftian Elder Gods can be brought back. The practitioners are drawn to a certain area, and subconsciously position themselves to form a pattern from which one can calculate or divine the specific location of the event.

Some of these practitioners have supernatural aspects that seem independent of what's common between sorcerers. There is a vampire, who could be represented as a sorcerer with a blood-drinking Parasite. There is a werewolf, also potentially representable as someone with Parasite demon, albeit with less control over it. Being a werewolf is something that can be "learned', as we see when the Great Detective becomes one at the end, which suggests a demon being summoned and bound.

At least one potential practitioner isn't even concerned with this upcoming event - the Good Doctor, who is just there to bring the dead to life, which, fortunately, seems to work with the other themes of sorcery pretty well.

One issue to reflect on is where the sentient animals fit in. In my day-to-day analysis, I presumed that they were demons - but an important feature of demons in the base Sorcerer game is that they are very two-dimensional. They are driven by their Need and Desire to a comical degree. The GM is encouraged to play them as cartoon characters. But Snuff, Graymalk, Quicklime, Bubo, and the rest are not two-dimensional. They couldn't be, because otherwise the book, which is mostly from their perspective, would not be as compelling.

One way to try and address this would be to flip the roles - what if the companions are the sorcerers, and the practitioners we called sorcerers were actually the demons? Since we get to see far less of their inner worlds, we could reinterpret Jack, Jill, Rastov, and the rest as somewhat more two-dimensional, even cartoonish. But the problem is that they are clearly the ones binding demons, and in some case, the instigators of supernatural change for the animal companions.

Snuff himself is the biggest problem in this regard, because his origin story almost compels us to identify him as a demon - Jack made him into a supernaturally strong guard dog after he was something else, which he didn't like being as much. Owen's severing of Cheeter's shadow also seems like a sorcerous action, and it was instigated by Owen, not Cheeter.

I kept referring to base game, and the reason is that Sorcerer has supplements. When it came out, there were two advertised: Sorcerer & Sword, which expanded the game to capture the Sword and Sorcery genre, and The Sorcerer's Soul, which is supposed to take Humanity and expand its use, adds angels, and, importantly for our case, allows demons to be played as full-fledged player characters. I have read the first supplement, which is a fantastic read if only for the analysis of the genre, even if you end up using different systems, but have not read the second, which might contain solutions to some of the issues I brought up here.

Stepping back from all this, it's clear that there is potential here for at least one mostly straight Sorcerer scenario. Specifically, the existence of an upcoming sorcerous event, which draws sorcerers from all over to one place. In game terms, perhaps it provides unique bonuses or access to power levels for demons not otherwise available. It makes for a great template for Kickers, whether the characters want to change something significant about the world, or see their role as protecting the existing order using unorthodox means. In my own one-shot, which I hopefully will discuss more extensively sometime in the future, that was pretty much all that I brought over - the setting was modern Troy, New York, in which an event was about to occur which would allow stronger demons to be more easily Contacted, Summoned, and Bound, and the pregenerated characters were human archetypes that I would expect to live around the area in the here and now - although a Passer cat named Graymalk, and an elongated intestinal Parasite named Quicklime, did survive.

Through Sorcerer's eyes - Oct 31, in which the full moon rises, and a rat is in the works

Part of a series analyzing Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October through Sorcerer.

Starts here.

October 31

The event is coming this evening. Snuff repeatedly looks for Larry, with little to show for it. He finds Graymalk and chats with her. It seems that he and Jack are the only Closers coming; Vicar Roberts and Tekela, Morris and MacCab and Nightwind, and Jill and Graymalk, are all Openers. She also tells him that she has maneuvered things so that they will be positioned just to the left of Jack and Snuff, and that Snuff should stand just to the back and right of her, this provision having to do with the wisdom the High Cat dispensed to her. Snuff mulls it over, and decides to trust her, despite their opposed alignments.

They part ways, and he runs into Quicklime, who has been missing Rastov and getting drunk on rancid plums. He describes liking being needed, which is an inversion of the normal sorcerer-demon relationship. He says that the Vicar had killed him, and that the Count had then killed Owen to send a message. Snuff is confused, but Quicklime insists that the Count is, in fact, alive, which he found out by hanging out at the Roma's camp, and accidentally finding himself under the wagon where the Count's coffin lies. He probably also still possesses the Ring. Quicklime confirms that this coffin was established after the new moon, so the calculations are still in order. Neither of them is sure what this says about the Count's own alignment - he could be a Closer, or just an Opener who was trying to stifle direct violence before the day itself.

Quicklime nevertheless has left the game, so he bids farewell. Unlike Cheeter, and very much like Bubo, it doesn't seem like his intelligence, his ability to communicate, indeed, his personality, is really different than whatever he would have had without being Bound. However, the fact that he still needs or desires to drink alcohol might suggest a Possessor's attributes, rather than his own.

Later, Jack leads Snuff out the door, not bothering to lock it. He takes his implements of sorcery in one hand, and some logs for the banefire under his othear arm. The banefire is a requirement for the ceremony, that all players contribute to. Its lighting is before midnight, after which it starts burning in more than one world, and the Opening can be attempted. The Openers get to start, as the Closers are simply attempting to stop them.

The event itself is very dense: The Vicar, Morris and MacCab, Jill, and Jack form an arc around the stone with scratches on it, so that the Vicar and Jack face each other. Graymalk and Snuff are situated as she had suggested to him. Lynette, drugged, lies on an altar near the fire. They all wait for midnight, when all of the companions can talk to their masters - this is not special to Snuff and Jack as I had supposed. The hour comes and they begin to talk, and the Vicar and MacCab start positioning the Pentacle Bowl, the Alhazred Icon, and the sacrificial knife, when the Count startles them by descending in giant bat form, transforming disconcertingly, and joining to Jack's right - he was a Closer after all.

The Vicar starts the Opening by saying a word of power, and the rectangle which previously pulled Snuff and Graymalk into the Dreamworld opens again, and they hear otherworldly chanting. He then attempts to sacrifice Lynette, but Larry, in wolf form, quickly jumps in and starts dragging her away from the altar. The Vicar takes out a revolver and shoots him. The second shot causes him to drop to the ground. The Vicar orders Morris and MacCab to put her back on the altar, but the Count and Jack protest that it is forbidden to undo an attempted rescue or escape of a sacrifice. The Vicar does not believe them, and orders the other two to proceed with retrieving her. The Count responds by seeming to teleport towards them, then wrapping them with his cloak and snapping their necks, killing them instantly. The Vicar and the Count get into an altercation. The the Vicar throws over-consecrated earth at the Count, which weakens him so that he drops to the ground. As they are fighting, another large wolf sneaks from a different direction, and drags Lynette the rest of the way off of the hillside. Snuff recognizes his scent and look, and realizes that this other wolf is, in fact, the Great Detective - these must be the new experiences he had been alluding to. 

It is unclear whether the Great Detective was simply able to use drugs and botany to affect this transformation, or whether he also infected himself with lycanthropy from Larry. And how do demons, Object, Passing, or otherwise, or the "natural" lycanthropy, enter into this? It might be simplest to consider his plants an Object demon providing him with Shapeshift: Wolf. As for the Vicar's and the Count's battle, the over-consecrated earth might be a Punish, or even Banish attack on the Count's Parasite - which might be necessary for him to continue living.

The Closers now notice that Lynette is gone. Annoyed, but determined, the Vicar continues with his words of power. The participants, alive, unconscious, and dead, undergo transformations which seem to expose some deep truth about them. But then they undergo identity-switching transformations, where each finds themselves with a different head and body. Snuff is highly perturbed, and is unsure whether this is illusion or reality. Everything becomes hazy, the moon drips blood, and stars are shooting. 

The temporary surrealism mostly ends, and the Vicar speaks the last word of the Opening, when he notices the Count's hand twitch. This seems like an attack from the Ring, which he blocks with the Pentacle Bowl, a Special Damage attack rebuffed by some kind of Armor or simply the Object demon's Stamina or Will. He then places the Alhazred Icon on the Count, and the latter is still. Snuff realizes that he deserves far more respect than he'd given him. His Lore must be significant.

The Vicar instructs Jill to use her Opening Wand. Strangely, for a moment, it seems that the light from the writing on the standing stone has abated. However, Jack starts using the Closing Wand, and it grows again. Jack strains, to no avail. The Experiment Man comes forth, and addresses Graymalk while standing in front of Jack. Again, the Opening seems to falter. The Experiment Man grabs a protesting Graymalk over to the side and starts petting her. The Opening proceeds again. Tentacles appear to take up Morris and MacCab.

Suddenly, Snuff hears Bubo muttering from inside Jack's jacket pocket. They talk and it transpires that he'd swapped the Wands around last night, so that Jill is Closing while Jack is Opening. Snuff realizes that the High Cat wasn't making fun of him by essentially telling him to "fetch" in Latin, he was telling him to grab the Opening Wand. He does this, to Jack's surprise, and the gate starts Closing. The Vicar yells in alarm, and then Larry, who had been crawling towards him this whole time. pushes the Alhazred Icon off of the Count and leaps on the Vicar. They both tumble into the gate. A great wind forms to pull the rest in, as well. Jack takes out the bottle with the Slitherers, formerly in the Mirror, and throws them in. The Experiment Man stands between them and the gate, and they yell at him to get the Count. Jack, Jill, Snuff, and Graymalk then run off the hillside, to keep clear until it is no longer dangerous.

We learn definitive specifics about the tools during this event. The Opening and Closing Wands might not be demons after all - otherwise, switching them around would cause notice, and they do not seem usable for anything other than sorcery itself. Meanwhile, the Pentacle Bowl, the Alhazred Icon, and the Ring attempt to have actual effects on sorcerers, which does suggest that they are Object demons.

Sorcerers and Demons

• Jack - Binder of Snuff (probably 0 or +/-1), a big knife (probably 0 or +/-1), as well as a Container of several Things. Keeps a curse connected to his knife which has him lose control to murderous urges. Has played the Game before, as a Closer, as far as anyone can remember. Had the Closing Wand but that is swapped for the Opening Wand before the event.
• "Crazy" Jill - Witch, Binder of Graymalk, and a flying broom. Friendly with Jack, but an Opener, although she was tricked into using the Closing Wand during the event.
• Rastov - Former Binder of Quicklime and the Alhazred Icon. Closer. Killed by Vicar Roberts.
• Vicar Roberts - A sorcerer in his own right railing against sorcery, Binder of Tekela, the Pentacle Bowl, and the Alhazred Icon. Some combination of Satanism and Cthulhu Mythos. Sacrificed a policemean, and has attempted to sacrifice his stepdaughter to empower the Opening, but failed. Was trying to have a vivisectionist turn Snuff into a set of special candles via a ritual they did not understand. High Will and Lore. Pulled into the Closing gate by Larry Talbot.
• Morris and MacCab - A pair of sorcerers who have both Bound Nightwind. They count separately for the purposes of conversation, although not clearly in terms of the rules of sorcery. They are very new in this endeavor, yielding to Vicar Roberts` authority. Killed by the Count.
• The Count - Binder of Needle, a blood-sucking Parasite, and the Ring. Telltale: needs to be invited in. Might have multiple places to sleep. Served by a group of Roma. Fakes his death. Saved by the Experiment Man.
• Larry Talbot - Possible sorcerer, definite werewolf, Binder of several plants. Attempts to save Vicar Roberts` stepdaughter, but his weakness to silver bullets fails him. Plants confer some control over his transformation, but it in itself seems natural to the setting. High Lore, potentially high Will, too.
• The Great Detective - Very perceptive, good at disguises (although the smell gives it away), not explicitly a player in the Game, but taking a keen interest in what is going on, to the point of moving into the neighborhood in disguise and befriending some of the players, and is on track to know what it's all about. Probably very high Will, some Lore. Has become some type of sorcerer, Binder of some plants and drugs.
• Snuff - a Passer whose Cover is a watchdog. High Will. Possible abilities: Command: dogs, Hold, Perception: heightened senses, Perception: sorcerous implements, Perception: sorcerous pattern, Special Damage: claws and fangs, Special Damage: holy hell. Able to trace paths between sorcerers. Keeps up with who has which tool. Able to communicate with Jack verbally right after midnight. Has played the Game before, as a Closer
• Graymalk - a Possessor of a cat. Possible abilities: Cloak, Travel: teleportation. Possible Need/Desire: burying and uncovering things. Originally an Opener, a Closer due to influence by the High Cat.
• Quicklime - a Parasite living in the gut. Possible abilities: Cover: Snake, Mark, Special Damage. Has played the Game before. Closer. Attempting to return to being an ordinary snake, now that his Binder/Host is dead, but still seems to enjoy alcohol.
• Tekela - a Passer whose cover is an albino raven. High Will.
• Nightwind - a Passer whose Cover is an owl. Possible abilities: Perception: sorcerous pattern, Special Damage.
• Needle - a Passer whose cover is a bat. Still in the Game.
• Count's Parasite - Possible abilities: Perception: heightened senses, Shapeshift: Large Bat, Travel: teleportation, Special Damage: Lethal. Possible Need: other people's blood. Weak to over-consecrated ground.
• Larry's Plants - Object demons. Possible abilities: Boost: Stamina (werewolf transformation), Boost: Will
• Great Detective's Plants and Drugs - Object demons. Possible abilities: Shapeshift: Wolf.
• Pentacle Bowl - possible Object, empowering during the event, neutral
• Alhazred Icon - possible Object, empowering during the event, neutral
• Ring - possible Object, empowering during the event, neutral
• Things in the Mirror - Unknown. Not communicating so far. Able to break out of their mirrors with time. Slither within their confines, change color when excited. Possible abilities: Special Damage: disease, Special Damage: stick, Taint. Now in a half-empty bottle of port, thrown into the Closing gate to protect from backlash.
• The Wise Old Cat/High Cat - a demon or sorcerer. Able to summon demons, or possibly cats? Lives in the Dreamworld, possible abilities: Hint, Perception: Future. His predictions for Snuff have come true so far, and he has provided Graymalk with useful sorcerous information, including how to affect a successful Closing while saving her mistress.
• The Experiment Man, AKA The Big Man or The Corpse Man - a Possessor of a stitching together of several dead bodies. Not very bright or forceful, but strong, and a speed belied by the awkwardness of his movement. Probably high Stamina, low Will.
• Bubo - an actual rat who has figured out the Game - including how to win it - without being a player himself. Low Stamina, high Will, Lore 1/2.

Sorcery and Setting

• The gate that opened into the Dreamworld is the same that has the potential to Open for the Elder Gods to return.
• In-world description of magic items does not explicitly distinguish between what are likely sorcery implements, and what are likely Object demons with the power to change reality directly by attacking or defending actual people.
• The conditions of the Count and Larry Talbot, and now the Great Detective, as well as the nature of the Experiment Man, are still in need of some elaboration. I've made some judgments through this series, but where the line between fringes of setting and sorcery lies is unclear. The Great Detective's leap into sorcery might be instructional in how this topic is discovered in this setting.
• During the event, each of the players and their companions who were present underwent a transformation which seemed to show something true about them. Is that some variation on Perception, conferred to all involved, without them having Bound any demons explicitly? Who is or are the demons in question?
• Quicklime describes being needed - is this an illusion, or perhaps Rastov was the demon after all? Either way, we again see that animals have personalities that seem independent of the relation to sorcerous masters.

Endnote

This ends the book. Writing these out daily for the whole month has been quite a challenge. I'll have to gather my thoughts for a few days, and hopefully will have a post up with some conclusions and further discussion.

For now, I'm going to try and enjoy the rest of my vacation, untroubled by silly October obligations. Thank you for joining me on this journey!