The Book of Antitheses

 

The Book of Antitheses by Jobe Bittman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Massive trigger warning: If the practice of magic, extreme violence, and/or strong sexual themes offend you, skip this review and never, ever read this book. Now that that's out of the way . . .

Lamentations of the Flame Princess again presents one of the more obscene and transgressive roleplaying game works out there. Say what you will about LotFP, they have a brand identity, and they unapologitically stick with it. This is not a book for children or the easily offended - not. at. all. If you're looking Saturday morning cartoon Dungeons and Dragons, this ain't it. Now, I'm guessing that if you read this far, you are not easily offended. But you might be a child. After all, I started playing D&D when I was 9 years old . . . a long time ago. As a preteen and early teen, I was enamored of the game. And, yes, it did introduce me to some . . . alternative ways of thinking/viewing/believing. And, yes, the bare-chested illustrations of the harpy, sphinx, and others were *ahem* attractive to this young man and, I'm guessing, just about every other young man out there.

So, while the Satanic Panic was overblown, there were some elements of truth to it. The original D&D game was filled with Devils and Demons (sanitized into "Tanar'ri" and "Baatezu" in some later editions) and there were, occasionally, straight-up occult elements in the game (c.f. the booklet of monsters and magic items module S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth - which is, incidentally, my favorite module of all time).

In The Book of Antitheses, Jobe (yes, I know him - more on that later) fully embraces something that I've realized in my later years - the ritual nature of roleplaying games. Whether you believe in magic or not, you must admit that playing RPGs is highly ritualized. Gaming groups typically meet at a set time and place (even if said place is virtual), surround a table (again, sometimes virtual) and delve into a realm of imagination, fate, and, (dare I say it?) faith. We create alternate personas, much like an initiate into magic arts, we oftentimes concentrate to a state of near-meditation, we use dice as divinatory or soothsaying tools and bind our characters (a piece of ourselves?) to the results. Often, we laugh and joke, which seems to contradict my argument until one notes that magical practice, by and large, is ended by "banishing" the ritual space so that the things summoned there don't creep into everyday life. Magicians engage with the demons, get what they want (or not), and banish the entities at the end of the ritual.

A few years back, these commonalities struck me quite profoundly. If I recall correctly, this thundering revelation took place in 2019. I was so struck by the thought that I immediately contacted several people who were gamers and who had a deep understanding of magic and the occult and set up an improptu online meeting. Two of the people who came into the discussion (I think there were seven of us total?) were Jobe Bittman and the person who would later write the profoundly-insightful foreword to this book, JF Martel (who is the co-host of my favorite podcast, Weird Studies). In fact, I like to think that I facilitated Jobe getting in contact with JF and having him write the foreword. Then again, maybe I am deceived by some whimsical spirit.

I also sat at the gaming table with Jobe at Garycon one year and played through a game he ran. Well, partially, I had to leave about halfway through, unfortunately. He began the session by letting those at the table know that they would be participating in a ritual exercise and that any who wished to not participate should leave. He then rang a clarion, a singing bowl, and effectively invoked and opening to the session. We then played an RPG with Jobe randomly determining how encounters would go, not by rolling dice and consulting tables (the "normal" way one would), but by casting a number of small objects ("charms," if you will) and "reading" the results to determine what would happen during the encounter we were involved with by examining the relation of the objects (each of which represented different persons or elements) to (or against!) each other. These seemingly strange methodologies really helped immerse us into the game and the imaginal plane (though he would argue that this "imaginal" plane was an actual real place, though it is only visible in our minds). We felt that we were a part of something, much as one normally does while playing an RPG, but more intensely, in this case. We had more "buy in," all-in-all.

And this is one of the techniques that is outlined in The Book of Antitheses, a step-by-step guide to gaming-as-ritual. Jobe claims that the book is a real book in a real place as real as the book you hold in your hand. In fact, one of the adventure threads involves characters seeking and finding The Book of Antitheses, which is, in reality . . . well, The Book of Antitheses!

Several other techniques are outlined here, as well. The thrust of all of these is this: When running a roleplaying game, don't use pre-existing structure as a crutch. Toss aside those adventures that have a numbered encounter that shows exactly what is "in the room". Let fate decide for you! You'll never have to prep again, so long as you have a good grasp of setting, non-player character personalities and motivations, and "resonances".

This last piece is important. A resonance can be anything from a rumor to an event. The gamemaster should have several one- or two-sentence descriptions of possible or even probable encounters for a given area. This doesn't mean the old "wandering monster chart," though monsters can be a part of the lists. It is important that these lists are NOT numbered, like the wandering monster charts of yore. The gamemaster needs to decide which element presents itself to the party based on intuition and, potentially, casting the charms as outlined above. The presentation is much less proscriptive than say, rolling a "4" on the chart which gives "1d6 ogres," which sometimes gets ridiculous, even when such charts are tailored to the environment in which the encounter takes place. Resonances are much more loose and free than this, allowing the gamemaster to divine which of the potential events, rumors, interactions, etc., will happen at any given time. it's a much more nuanced approach than the old tables.

The last half of the book is composed of an "adventure," though I hesitate to use that term. There are several locations, several non-player characters with strong motivations, a cultural milieu with conflict brewing just under the surface (waiting to explode at any moment), and a couple of potential "problems" that the party of adventurers can try to resolve. There are multiple possibilities here that can only be explored at the table. No need to worry if your players have read the adventure ahead of time - it won't help. There are just too many variables and the stochasticity of throwing and interpreting the charms ensure that you will never run the same adventure twice, even if nothing has changed with the book itself.

There is also a section on monsters that give more insights into their motivations and ambitions, along with, yes, a stat block (LotFP stats).

I'll end on a side note. In my Dungeon Crawl Classics game this morning, one of the players' characters spun some crazy yarn (this happens every time we play) and one of the other players (but not his character, this was an "out of character" comment) said "I think you're just making crap up". To which the response was:

"Dude, it's ALL made up!"

et sic est


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Being and Time

 

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Did I learn?" This is the only possible question I can ask about my reading experience with Martin Heidegger's notoriously difficult tome Being and Time. I would be lying if I said I clearly understood more than 25% of this work. Warning: unless you are a trained philosopher or a genius autodidact, you will find within these pages a long stretch of imposter syndrome waiting for you. I cannot rightfully or accurately assess whether I "got" this book. Some of it, sure, but I don't know enough here to assess what I really, really know about Heidegger's philosophy.

But did I learn? Let's find out. Below, I've cut and pasted the notes I've taken along the way. Immediately following each self-quotation, I will assess whether, at the end of it all, I learned anything in relation to these initial impressions. Let's go:

Well, the foreword and translator's notes successfully put me to sleep. Hoping that the actual text is a little more engaging.

This did get better. As I crawled along and picked up an occasional idea here and there, along with bolstering my knowledge by watching very specific youtube videos on particularly difficult passages, I found myself more and more engaged because I understood more of the previous groundwork as I went along.

Heideggering is hard work. I'm glad I know some German or the footnotes here would be mostly nonsensical. Or at least misleading.

Yes, Heideggering is hard work. That did not change. Knowing German helped quite a bit, but sometimes my knowledge of German actually got in the way because of the way that Heidegger uses the German language. Some of his wordplay is incredibly subtle and I suspect that even native speakers with a high level of academic training need to use the footnotes as a crutch to help understand the precise way in which he uses specific words with specific nuances. The footnotes, along with having German "at hand," so to speak, were extremely helpful.

My brain hurts.

This was true throughout.

That Philosophy 101 course I had 27 years ago isn't helping me much here, for some reason. I want a refund on that portion of my tuition!

It actually came in handy later, when Hegel and Aquinas came up I had a comparative framework to diff off of Heideger's ideas, which gave me an unexpected and needed context. But I still want that refund!

I cheated and watched a youtube video or five to get some grounding. Glad I did that.

Essentially, Heidegger is rewriting Philosophy 101 as it relates to ontology.

I'm still glad I "cheated". That helped things immensely. And I STILL want that refund!

Hmm. About 10% of the way through the book and I understand about 25% of what I've read.

This proportion of understanding proved true from the beginning to the end. I understood things well about a quarter of the time. Truth be told, I *somewhat* understood other things maybe another 15-20% of the time. Not bad for an imposter.

Page 65 . . . and I'm just at the beginning of Part 1?

Yes, I was. But that preamble was necessary not to set the stage, but to strip the stage down to it's loose wooden planks and rebuild philosophy. Heidegger was a philosophical marine drill sergeant. He destroys you, then builds you up again.

We're going on a cruise in a couple of weeks. I strongly suspect this will NOT be a book I take with me. Sorry, Heide.

Well, that cruise didn't happen. My wife got a blood clot the week before we were supposed to leave, and with here then-recent cancer scare, we couldn't take a chance. Good thing, too, as we would have likely ended up in a hospital somewhere in Anchorage. We still plan on taking the cruise, but it's probably going to be a year or two. 2022 was pretty brutal.

"Linguistic gymnastics" is the phrase that comes to mind when trying to describe what my brain is doing now. And I've fallen off the balance beams more than once here.

See my comments about German above. Lots of linguistic gymnastics in this work.

I'm glad I don't *have* to read this. It's one thing to discipline myself to read something inscrutable; it's quite another to have it assigned to you.

In the end, I'm glad I read it. But I could easily see a huge number of philosophy majors going to the counselor's office to change their majors after this. Easily.

Every two pages I spend on Heidegger is a hard-won battle. Most of the time, I lose, but I'll hold onto my feeble victories and improve upon them. Slow and steady wins the race.

It wasn't *always* torture, just most of the time. Slow and steady did win the race, incidentally. Or at least I finished the marathon.

This text can feel so mechanical at times that one forgets it is about human beings. Then, occasionally, one slips past the strictness of the language and realizes that not only is Heidegger not philosophizing about an "ideal" human being, but that he is sympathetic to humans in their weaknesses, even when they don't reach their full potential.

This was a surprising revelation that became more and more clear the more I read. Heidegger's primary concern was the inner life of an individual human being, replete with its faults and foibles.

Any review I do for this book can only scratch the surface.

c.f., this pithy review.

Back to the philosophical salt mines . . .

Looking back on this phrase, it was definitely ill-advised and I didn't even think about the implications at that point, given Heidegger's overly-problematic political leanings. It was not intentional, but I suppose it might have been subconscious. My apologies for the "bad optics". I suppose I could redact this note altogether, but that wouldn't be intellectually honest.

I'm not sure if Being and Time is considered "analytical philosophy," or if I'm even using the right term, but this sort of Definitional work seems like definition for the sake of definition. It's academically interesting, but emotionally flat and intellectually tedious. But I will press on and finish. I'm learning things, but it's not particularly enjoyable.

Obviously, from my earlier comments, this feeling came and went. But when it came on, it came on strong. Reading more slowly helped me to cut through this academic wall and get to the actual "soul" behind it. I do believe the book has "soul," but it takes some digging to get to it.

The whole notion of death in this book is utterly fascinating. While acknowledging the cessation of being in this world, and thus no longer being a Dasein, Heidegger hints that there is a sort of existence of one, even as that one has ceased being in the worls as Dasein here. But the Being of that being is unknowable by Dasein.

This actually helped me connect with this work in a way I hadn't up to this point. This probably has to do with my admiration for Existential philosophy in general. The seeming paradoxical nature of Heidegger's statements in relation of Dasein to death actually tied things together quite nicely for me. Your mileage may vary.

Death enters the picture and suddenly all that came before in this tome makes much more sense. Existentialism instantiates clarity!

As I just said . . .

317 pages in, I feel like I'm beginning to grasp what Heidegger is on about. Call me ignorant. But I am starting to put two and two together.

Mmmmmaybe I was learning something?

There is something fundamental about the call of conscience, an irreducible something that is at the core of Dasein's Being. There is no good answer to "where does it come from?", it is intrinsic to Being. So far as I can tell, this is the closest Heidegger gets to some notion of "spirit," "soul," or "essence". But what do I know?

This, I think, is where Heiddeger's view of some sort of "soul" became more clear. I went back and scanned throughout the book, and one can find ghostly whispers, very faint, of this feeling, here and there throughout. Perhaps this is inevitable when one is talking about the inner life of a human?

There's something a bit Ayn-Randian about the concept of conscience here, but it seems less mercenary. Self-serving? Yes, more a focus on authenticity, to being true to one's self, than just snubbing every other human being around you without mercy for the sake of the argument.

Heidegger's ties to nazism are fairly clear, from what I understand. Though Ayn Rand wasn't a nazi, per se, her individualism-to-the-point-of-extreme-selfishness rings with some of the same echos, albeit on a personal, rather than national scale. I find Heidegger much more kind (if that's the right word) than Rand, but still adamant about the individual need to be oneself, despite what society as a whole thinks. Of course, if you get a whole bunch of people who think they are being individualistic, while they are merely all following one person's individualistic personality, well, you get facism.

I'd love to be able to state that I understood thus and such percentage of this book. But that would imply a continuous "block" of understanding, and that's just not true. It's more like a journey where certain points were more lucid and memorable than others, like pearls unevenly distributed along a string.

This notion also held through, especially in hindsight. And this is the most corect summation of my reading experience with Being and Time. Will I read it again in full? Probably not. But I will dip into sections from time to time in order to both build my understanding of this work and to provide context when other philosophers refer to Heidegger.

So I feel that I did learn from the book. And i will keep on learning. Some of the ideas herein and some of the structures have provided glimpses for me into the workings of philosophy, even if uneven and obfuscated by my own ignorange. Gradually, though, I'm hoping the light seeps in and grows and I can use this as a springboard into other, perhaps equally difficult, works. My intellectual muscles have been strengthened, though I have yet to understand how to integrate the whole body of work into my philosophical routine. That, I think, is a lifelong pursuit.






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The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor

 The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor by Benjamin Tweddell

For the uninitiated, Mount Abraxas produces some of the most beautiful books out there, featiring dark, "weird" fiction in very limited editions unlike anything you will find anywhere else. I've had a few of my novellas published by Mount Abraxas and I am continually amazed by the quality of physical artifacts that they produce. Getting a new Mount Abraxas title never gets old. 

The auctoral lineup for Mount Abraxas titles is one of the best-kept secrets in the weird fiction world. One will frequently find books featuring the work of some of my favorite contemporary authors, including Damian Murphy, Mark Valentine, John Howard, and Adam S. Cantwell. They are always beautiful books, exquisitely written, with strange twists and turns of an almost reverential quality. The Veneration at Polwheveral Manor holds this standard high. 

The story takes place sometime in the mid-20th Century and considers the retreat of Jacob Thurman, an ex-military medical man who is stricken with bouts of blindness, into a dreary cabin away from civilization. Here Jacob hopes to retreat from society, dreading the inevitable next fearful attack of blindness and, eventually, the permanent loss of vision. Here he discovers Polywheveral Manor, an old manor house whose caretaker, Julius De Monte, is a scion in a long line of guardians of a holy (or unholy?) relic: the remains of the Blind Seer, Saint Eusebius. De Monte, it is rumored, was once blind, but now cured, though doctors have no explanation for how the cure took place. 

Going into more detail than this will spoil the story, so I shall forbear. 

The atmosphere and mood of the piece is a throbbingly dark, overhanging cloud until the revelatory end. I'll be honest that I found some of the emotional turns just a touch disingenuous, but this is only because we are given such a short time to know, to really know, the main characters. The characterization was not bad, not by any means. On the contrary, it was quite good, yet seemed a bit sudden at times. This is my only complaint about the book, and it is only slight. The work is brooding, which one might expect, given the subject matter, and one can find themselves easily immersed in the depths, particularly with Jacob's plight and the grim prospects for his future. If you appreciate a frisson that can border on claustrophobic, you will appreciate this. 

Tweddell's style throughout is, as usual with his works, exquisite. His delivery is smooth, transparent when it needs to be, and drawing attention to itself when it needs to do so. The cover art, by Mysterious Four, adds to the mystery by evoking, quite intentionally, I believe, the cover of the first Black Sabbath album. "The Wizard," indeed!

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The Science Fiction in Traveller

The Science Fiction in Traveller by Shannon Appelcline
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I've spared no praise regarding what is one of my favorite roleplaying game systems, even claiming that it is The Simplest RPG System Out of this World, and by "Simple," I really mean versatile. But this review isn't about the game itself, it's about the book The Science Fiction in Traveller: a book about books about the game which is contained in books. Let's go down the rabbit hole.

The title might as well have been "The Traveller in Science Fiction". While the first section reviews books that Marc Miller claimed were inspirational to him (some of which I also thought were good, some not so good), this section is actually quite short. This isn't Appendix N, by any means, and I was honestly surprised by the scantiness here. But Appelcline is careful not to impose his own thoughts of what might have influenced Miller. Rather, he defers to Miller's own claims on the subject. As a strict exercise, I see why Appelcline did what he did, but I would like to have seen more of his insights into what might have influenced traveller. I think there's a lot more that can be seen between the lines of the published game material itself.

The vast majority of the book is taken by reviews of books and stories either influenced by Traveller (Jefferson P. Swycaffer's Condordat series, derived from Swycaffer's Traveller campaign, has an entire section dedicated to it) or written for the actual Traveller universe. Or universes, if I'm being proper, as the fiction reviewed here covers the breadth of all eras of Traveller (Classic Traveller, Megatraveller, The New Era, T4). Appelcline rates all of the works here by their literary merit and their applicability to the Traveller game (whether in terms of direct gameability or just inspiration/atmosphere). I've learned that there is a lot of really bad fiction associated with Traveller, most especially the "gaming fiction" that seems to compose the majority of the work. There are also a few titles that I will likely pursue for a read at some future date.

I wouldn't call The Science Fiction in Traveller "essential" reading for players or referees of Traveller. But sifting through the titles and using Appelcline's ratings as a guide is . . . an okay idea. I hestitate because, at times, I feel he contradicts himself. The ratings, as with any person rating books (myself included) are subjective and inconsistent with one another. I also noted several editing errors throughout the book, which gives me pause because I have copyedited several books and am particularly bothered by lazy editing, which is evident here. So don't take the ratings as gospel-truth. Your opinions may vary wildly from Appelcline's, but I feel this is a good starting point for your explorations into science fictional work associated with the game.

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