Part 3: Impressions of Strauss & Howe’s The Fourth Turning Concept: Utah 8/21/24
Rome?
What was it like in A.D. 14 after Augustus passed, at its best and most brilliant?
There was no cycle of four turnings to follow the passing of the High age of excellence and community responsibility, which followed a good 100 years of Civil war and slave revolts.
In brief, this is what followed:
Most people were not Roman’s but slaves.
Most Romans were poor urbanites and just getting by rural farmers being pushed out of business by the Elites who owned thousands of slaves, including Gladiators to come take your daughter. These people filled the ranks of the early Imperial army. 20 to 30 years of service got you a farm and family. You were not, as a soldier, permitted to have a wife.
This was an anti nationalist dysgenic policy. The Zulus seemed severe for not permitting marriage until battle. The Romans did not permit it for 20 or 30 years, and then your sons were liable for conscription.
The elites, quasters, tribunes, legates, senators and other imperial shitheads were mostly, by our standards, violent, psychopathic sadists who branded, beat and slew slaves out of hand, to the point where Galen had to suggest not punching slaves in the teeth as a cure for infected knuckles to one of his patients.
Rome conquered some 3 dozen peoples or races and annihilated their culture, eventually bringing in the top traitors as Roman citizens. The soldier farmer, in retirement, had to move to the frontier and live across the river from barbarian foes. For Roman lands were owned by the elite, men who held as many as 20,000 slaves!
The bosses and big estate owners employed barbarian gladiators and mercenaries for body guards and bullies. The emperors and generals did so as well.
Ovid and Virgil, writing under heavy sanction for Augustus as propagandists [one in exile], in their writings, screamed for a Christ [even as he was born]. While the rural farmers of the enslaved races were slowly exterminated and driven into slavery, they held onto their ancient folk religions and faiths. The urban elites though, had become degenerates and cruel monsters, with faith largely limited to social forms.
From A.D. 14 to 96, about the length of one of Strauss and Howe’s modern four cycles, there was but one age, the age of Unraveling mixed with Crisis. There was no Awakening except among the tiny cryptic cult of Christians and the even smaller cults or elite Gnostics, Neoplatonists and Maniceans. Roman citizens spent 82 years as bystanders to the destruction of their once brutal and now senselessly cruel anti-nation. For, as a great Roman [1] quoted a Pictish rebel, with no argument, in a book about how his virtuous father in law was hated and murdered by the system for holding up Roman values such as not looting temples, at the end of this period, “Rome makes a desert and calls it peace.”
It was during this period that the Praetorian Guard, under international financial interest, took control of Rome, seating whatever emperor pleased them.
During the Roman peace that followed, these Guards as well as most of the regular army, would be increasingly staffed by barbarian mercenaries. This had to be done by the “Five Good Emperors,” in order to keep corrupt Roman conspirators from cutting their throats, and also because Roman Soldiers had not permitted to breed until middle age for centuries, weakening the once hearty Latin masculine stock.
By the time that Marcus Aurelias had been succeeded by his corrupt son Commodus in AD. 180, the Guards were entirely mercenary, and may in fact disposed of Marcus in favor of his malleable son, who would be killed. What followed, from 181 to 325 was one single season of Unraveling and Crisis at the same time, with no general Awakening and no Cultural High among the literate, political and military classes, until Constantine. For 144 years was one brutal Age of Iron, of rapine, torture, purge and taxation so punitive that what is now Italy and France would be occupied by more statues of ancestors and gods then of their flesh and blood descendants. [2]
But there was a time when Rome was less than murderous to its majority, when the emperor no longer wished to have slaves branded on the face [like Anglo-American runaways of the 1700s and 1800s], when enough peace and prosperity was engineered by the most benign rule of Late Antiquity, that some slaves were content.
How does the reign of the Five Good Emperors line up with the 4 cycles explained in The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe?
It was the most “modern” of Ancient times, the only period other than the Reign of Augustus from 31 B.C. to A.D. 14, in which Roman rulers seemed concerned with the well being of their nation and people outside of strict family cartel building.
The Roman Peace will be measured against the Modern Saeculum of War and Politics, from page 39, Seasons of Time, also pages 61, 70, 71, 74 and 81, demonstrating that the ruling archetypes contend with overlapping ages, in 5 generative and degenerative cycles
…
Crisis: Winter/Fourth Quarter
For Rome was in Crisis when Nerva ascended and Trajan wages constant wars of external conquest, maintaining total war crisis footing
A.D. 96-98: Sage/Prophet Ruler
Nerva gained the purple and established his rule based on his promise to select a successor on merit, a successor who was a soldier, the opposite of he the statesman. Nerva was the transformative, prophetic figure that ushered in an age. His reign and that of Trajan, spans one short lifetime, about the 20 years that Strauss and Howe use in their study.
98-117
Hero/Warrior Trajan
Winter continues with victorious major wars, including the extermination of the Dacian Culture and Race, and the avenging of the Parthian slaughter of Crassus in about 50 B.C. with the extension of Roman power to the Persian Gulf. Under Trajan there were two sea routes to Indian, including the Red Sea, mostly used for African trade. Trajan continues this odd blessing in human affairs with the appointment of his opposite.
…
High: Spring/First Quarter
117-138
Philosopher/Engineer & Builder, Hadrian
What Trajan conquered and protected through war, Hadrian developed, personally visiting every province, the only Emperor ever to do so. Hadrian was a student of Stoicism, and under the influence of Epictetus and Arrian, his teacher and his classmate, decided to select the next two emperors, the first on the condition that he in his turn dutifully appoint the second.
…
Awakening: Summer/Second Quarter
138-161, Pontiff and Religious Conservative, Antonius Pious
Rather than a world-questioning figure like Nerva, and rather than a soldier or builder, Hadrian chose the most moral man in the empire to instill decency among the frame that had been expanded by Trajan and secured by Hadrian. However, climate change was driving barbarian migration and the army had to be staffed by barbarians and imperial ease weakened the Roman character. So, Antonius was selected on the condition that the most brilliant Stoic among the disciples of Epictetus, would be chosen to succeed him, learning imperial administration under his wing.
Unraveling: Autumn/Third Quarter
161-180, Philosopher, Warrior a Nomad General, Marcus Aurelius
Universally considered the most benign ruler of antiquity, a sage still read today, Marcus, the most brilliant mind of his age, was forced by exterior climate and political pressure to spend his life on the frontiers as the moral fabric of Rome decayed, to include possibly his debouched wife and degenerate son. I think it likely, that Marcus had been forced to depend on barbarian mercenaries to such a degree to continue the empire, that he saw its defense as hopeless and permitted his son to take the purple. Either that, or he was murdered by Praetorians and/or at the command of his vicious son Commodos, or possibly by the bankers devaluing the currency and looking forward to looting the temples stocked by Antonine Piety.
Crisis: Winter/The Forth Quarter
181to 325 saw constant Crisis entwined with Unraveling.
Henceforth, most emperors were forced on pain of death to take the purple and were, as they had feared, murdered in office by those who elevated them. Severus and Diocletion would carve out brief 20 year periods of relative stability, the first through brutal efficiency and the second through ingenious humility. The period after 180, and also the period following Constantine from only 325 to 337, down through the next thousand years, to 1453, saw continued Crisis and Unraveling together.
It is my suspicion, that rather than an Augustean or Golden Age, what the Praetorian/Banker interests that I call Steerage Cults, wished, indeed needed, to continue their diabolical Conspiracy Against the Human Race, was a wedding of Political Crisis and Cultural Unraveling in order to productively render subject minds, bodies, families and hopes, into a profitable extinguishing. I see this process at work today, since 2001.
I shall continue this project in looking at a brilliant self-published book from the 1970s, when I return east into the belly of the soulless beast. For now, I thank Bob for the loan of this book which I inserted notes into, and go to sit with my deeply read friend before taking the train from Salt Lake City.
James, 8/22/24, Kamas, Utah
…
Notes
-1. Tacitus, Agricola
-2. Gibbon, The History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 25 or 26
Danny was a darling old girl, about 60, and obviously still missing a former beauty that she still embodied in her smile.
‘Needy is right.’
“He is amazing,” she admired, as Banjo held the door. “Doc said you are sleeping in a gym and need a place to stay. My renters stopped paying me and won’t leave and the police won’t come. If you could ask them to leave, I think they would. If you could repair the damage they have done, that would serve as rent. If you can escort me to buy groceries so I don’t get mugged, that would cover food.”
She looked up at him searching for a savior.
He smiled kindly, “That would be nice. All of my stuff smells like sour sweat.”
The Front Stoop Negotiation
On the short drive home, which convinced him that this woman should never drive on the interstate, Danny gave him the situation at her home, which she shared with renters who had lost their jobs during Covid and had stopped paying rent, buying groceries and looking for work. She was “being bled dry,” “eaten out of house and home,” and “felt violated.”
The street was green with two-tiered lawns on each side and two sets of concrete stairs to each house, as if the street had once been a stream bed. The early spring day was pleasant enough, with only one parking spot left for Danny. After five minutes of parking got her before her house, she sneered and looked up past him at a nice corner-of-row brick row house with old metal green awnings. Two men were sitting on the front stoop.
“There, Banjo, that is my house, though you wouldn’t know it. Those loafers will not even cut the grass. I pay the man next door to do it.”
“That ends now, Danny.”
His blood was up, his war face painted in a heart beat against the slothful minions of this Kali Yuga world.
“Alberto of Liberia—well enough behaved until Bradly corrupted him, and Bradly the huge African American, piece-of-shit,” were sitting on Danny’s porch drinking wine from the bottle as she narrated bitterly, “The last of my Carolina Muscadine for my arthritis, going down their greedy negro necks!”
“Pah!” she pretended to spit like a gypsy and he imagined her and Old Stump at breakfast over coffee while he eased out of the car.
Her safely around the car and on the first flight of stairs, he whispered, “Any weapon in the house?”
“Bradly has a bag that I think has a gun in it, it would be a little bag, so like a pistol.”
‘Oh, she can’t whisper. They heard that. Accelerate.’
Banjo took over, leaving her behind, trying to crib from Doc’s confidence of command book, striding up the sidewalk to the men sitting on the concrete steps before the small concrete slab porch girded in old wrought iron that needed painted, “Bradly, I’m Banjo, your new roommate.”
He said this extending his hand with a cold smile.
The hulk stood and towered and soared at the shoulders over and around him, but was mostly flab. Bradly did have good instincts and absolutely knew what was up, “You a bit light fo dis, ain’y ya?”
Banjo felt the soft hand and squeezed. The soft flesh and bird bones gave, so he broke it.
Bradly went to his knees, “Whad da fuck?” and Banjo snapped his wrist clean, below the two broken medicarpals. He searched the hand with his.
‘Nice, they are broken clean, won’t heal for months.’
The skinny Nigerian was wide-eyed, still holding the wine bottle that should have been upside Banjo’s head.
“Alberto,” he asked, in a kind tone of command, as he let go of the broken hand and grabbed the thumb of the big, soft left hand, “is Bradly ambidextrous?”
“Ambo what?” drowled the skinny primate.
Danny laughed and Banjo asked, “Can he use his left hand for stuff like cooking?”
“Oh, yes, he’s as handy with the frying pan as the spatula!”
Banjo snapped the thumb in two, cleanly, and did not break the skin and cause a compound injury. Bradly groaned and crumpled as the big black man next door retrieving his newspaper nodded to Banjo with respect and said, “It’s about time this got set right!”
Banjo nodded and asked, “Do you want his gun—I heard there were home invasions?”
“Sure,” said the man.
Banjo turned to Alberto, “Now, you will bring that man Bradly’s sneak bag with the gun in, you know the one.”
Alberto nodded, “Yes,” with wide eyes.
“Then, you will gather all of your things that can be carried—I will burn the rest. Leave his stuff, he’s getting off with his life. You will bring those things here, then you will take your friend, with his twigs for bones, to this Doctor.”
Letting Bradley fall to the grass on his side whimpering like a baby, he placed one of Doc Landon’s cards in the front pocket of the white button shirt stained with wine.
Banjo continued, hoping he was not asking to much of the 70 IQ memory, “First though, you will return The Lady’s wine, promise never to return, and pray that I don’t come for you in the night.”
Alberto’s eyes bugged, so Banjo piled on, working that superstitious landscape in the savage brain, “I can smell you, I’m a hillbilly, y’all have a scent that is keen to me.”
For emphasis, Banjo stomped that fallen sloth in the kidney, and cheered to the man next door exclaiming, “That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout! No accounts be owned!”
He then looked to Alberto, his sleek ebony skin now glistened, “Do you understand… everything that was said here?”
“Yes, I do as you command,” and handed the bottle of fine wine to Danny as if it were radioactive, “Sorry, Miss Danny—been a bad boy and you will see me no more.”
Alberto disappeared inside and Danny looked up to him, “I could get used to this! If you have any scary tattooed friends, please invite them for dinner. I sense you’re not a man that sticks around.”
He nodded, and she knew, again, he could tell, as she shrank demurely, wishing that she still had the glow of past youth to keep such a man around.
…
Notes
-1. This chapter was a combination of actual events experienced among kangly kind by Banjo, the author, and Doc Dread, my good friend. It is dedicated to Danny, who deserved better than me and hopefully found him. -JL, 9/21/24
In this psychological addendum we may discuss the down side of mania, as such are wont to manifest after battle, especially among the victors. For the losers do not have the luxury of second-guessing, confession and binge drinking from their lonely biers in the still corners of The Cities of Shades. Let’s not forget Achilles and Alexander brooding in their tents.
Death’s Shadow
After the moans of the dying, the cries of the women and the whimpering of the children have overtaken the comparatively pleasant Song of Battle, each character makes a 1d6 Esoteric check to determine if his soul was shivered. Monks and sorcerers, Yogi and confessors seek to develop and increase their esoteric score for this reason, to remain unbuffetted by the world.
About that, the GM should design a specific quest, inward against insanity, or outward into privation fraught nature, or into the chaos of suffering urban humanity for visions from beyond.
Barbarian warriors should typically gain a re-roll on after battle esoteric checks, as youthful vision quests are part of pre-civilized culture.
If the soul has been shivered, then the GM will either decide whether Body, Mind or Spirit was more tested in the recent action, and have the hero make a 1d20 mania check, or he will be a prick and demand from Heaven’s throne that the highest mania score be checked against a 1d20. You see, making this mania check is bad, failing it is good. In this way the crazy get crazier. Making the check increases mania by 1 point, failing it keeps it stable.
For these mania manifestation checks, good becomes bad, a “1” result amounts to a curse [adventure hook dangling] and a “20” a blessing [I prefer a permanent pathos re-roll for a heavenly blessing, or maybe War’s own sword falling from Heaven at Attila’s feet.]
Delilah, Brisais Clause
Oh, if the hero has acquired a slave girl of remarkable beauty, a 4 or better, he must make a 1d6 against her machinations or make a mania check against a second ability: Discord, Fear or Rout.
Conversely, if the slave girl is an ugly wench, and thus works hard to sooth all of his mental ills rather than bewitching him, he will get to re-roll a failed mania check.
If she, through her wicked beauty or caring conformity, gets him a blessing in this way, improve her utility score by 1!
Gathering of Furies & Angels
Again, what would make a mania check successful in action, makes it unsuccessful after action. This is why the best war leaders often get fired and demoted between wars.
If one rolls higher than the mania, without hitting the 20, there is no effect.
If one rolls lower than his mania, then have the other players convene a council of Furies or Angels, with the GM sitting as judge, to decide how the hero will be afflicted. This is the metaphysical version of the gathering of kites picking over the dead on the battlefield. This could result in a heavenly or hellish adventure, with the hero accompanied by dead from the battle who could be conveniently played by the uncursed players as a bonus adventure.
The GM should keep an eye on how a curse may be used as a test to gain a blessing if the hero prevails.
…
Curses
Body Mania or Discord
-1. Lust: must rape in full armor, now, never mind that you dragged the poor Thracian wench onto your Corinthian slave girl’s mat where she sleeps happily fettered to your cot—which the poor lad sitting wide eyed in the corner hauls over hill and dale… What could go wrong?
-2. Mirth: seeks entertainment and diversion and is difficult to focus on the next task.
-3. Drunkenness: drinking to insensibility and even helplessness is a common affliction after battle. Irish warriors and English pirates often suffer this affliction.
-4. Melancholy, a deep depression that prevents the use of the hero’s pathos until he is jarred by exterior action. This chaining of the hero’s physical instincts can be lethal.
Mind Mania or Fear
-1. Fear: A reluctance to take action, the craven shakes brought on by the calculus of post battle reality.
-2. Greed: The curse of Agamemnon, as the hero desires more than his fellows, based on the fact that he is smarter than those oafs.
-3. Brooding: Dark pondering afflicts the warrior second guesses his actions, the Furies using his mind to wrestle alone with the possibilities that might have been and might be in the future.
-4. The Distant One: This is a particular curse that causes the more brilliant maniacs, like Alexander and Napoleon, or Nathan Bedford Forest bitch slapping Braxton Bragg, to lose social traction as they gain in genius. This curse causes a Social disadvantage until it is lifted by a successful Social action, or by a battle that does not cause this curse to repeat.
-5. Doubt: That is correct, Oh Nimbus Minded Prince, big brained killers suffer between the ears a lot. The hero afflicted with doubt has a disadvantage in his next action, until he succeeds in something. This could be really bad for a low level soldier or army leader. You, Oh Prince, are privileged to have others fall in your stead!
…
Spirit Mania or Rout/Panic
-1. Faith Fall: The hero, such as Miamoto Musashi on Mount Nagasaki, writing The Book of Five Rings, Percival or Arthur, has a crisis in faith and must seclude himself and pray and is pretty much useless in the mean time. At the end of his ritual seclusion, such as when Xenophon would make sacrifice to Zeus during the march of the 10,000, the hero MAY [not must] now make a Social check on 1d6, to see if he can sell his insights to his companions. If the check is made, he gains the die difference in advantages to assign then and there to his fellows. If he fails, he is afflicted by the die difference in disadvantages in his next action, which might be a challenge to his enlightened leadership.
-2. Rage: Unreasoning anger afflicts the hero whose highest spirit ability is Animism, as it did Achilles. The instincts that the world is out to get him, have been proven true, and he will simmer in uncooperative hate until some greater emotion stirs him, in which case, all of that stored up rage [his Animism score] is applied to his first pathos check, when eh is awakened from his sizzling self pity. Woe to Hector.
-3. Cosmophobia: Fear of Heaven, Time or the Hereafter, or in the case of some Postmodern sorcerer, Climate Change, afflicts the hero who has his highest spirit ability as esoteric and triggers a vision quest. Whether it is Alexander getting lost in the desert looking for the Oracle of Amon, figuring out the Gordion Knot while Darius schemes, or merely your best sentry removal stud insisting on climbing a mountain to speak with a particular kind of owl before he slits throats by moonlight for you again, this can be mighty inconvenient. Yet, the Cosmophobic character, if he survives his quest, will gain an advantage roll to be saved for when he needs it, a Rout point, and a pathos point.
…
Please, feel free to add more mania pitfalls to your version of Grunt, such as specific fears that might take success in action at a disadvantage to overcome: such as fear of heights, of water, or even fear of failure causing a disadvantage check against pathos. Mania manifestations can be a good way to balance out play in which the party has been over successful.
Bestiary
Beasts are split into animals and monsters.
Animals
Animals are rated the same as humans, except that animals have no mania.
Predators have a pathos of 2-12.
Plant eaters have a pathos of 1-6.
Domestic animals have their pathos halved, such that a wolf will have a 2-12 and a dog 1-6, a zebra 1-6 and a horse 1-3.
In some ways animals are inferior and some ways superior.
Inferiority is addressed as a disadvantage, such that a domestic animal with an inferior animism, will operate at a disadvantage when trying to resist a command and a gorilla with a superior strength will operate at a multiple advantage.
The Standard Animal Keys
M = manlike [1d6]
Subhuman -1-4
Extraordinary +2-3
Superhuman + 3-4
...being a minus 4 ability to a plus value assigned to a 1d6.
Great = 13-18
Categories c. and d. below are for very large animals or monsters.
Values for animals and monsters may be set at, for instance, Strength:
a. 4-9 [1d6 + 3], wolf, stag, chimp, leopard
b. 5-10 [1d6 +4], lion, tiger, bear, gorilla, moose
c. 7-12 [1d6 +6], Hippo or over-sized beasts listed above
d. GREAT ABILITY: 13-18 [1d6 +6], elephant
An animal’s abilities are rolled, and then the subhuman score modifier is applied to reduce it as far as 0 or the superhuman is applied to increase it. Abilities increased beyond 18, such as Grendel’s strength of 22, still fail checks at 19 and 20.
For specific ability checks, an animal with a score exceeding 6 has its check done on 2D6.
Beasts [animal or monster], with scores exceeding 10 points make specific ability checks on 1d20.
Animals may have over 18 Overall body points and therefore higher Hit Points. But any body score over 18 is regarded as an 18 for Overall Body 1d20 checks.
I will make a hound dog, a gorilla and lion below as examples.
Hound Dog
Pathos 1-6
Body: Strength =M, Stamina =M, Agility =M
Mind: Knit =M [physical learning], Kit -3 [Does he understand what humans use that tool for?], Wit -2
Spirit: Animism =M, Social -1 [does he know what his master wants?], Esoteric [have fun here]
Weapons: fangs [2] Armor: hide [1]
Gorilla
Pathos 1-3 [a chimp would have 2-12]
Body: Strength +4, Stamina -3, Agility +2
Mind: Knit -2, Kit -3, Wit -2
Spirit: Animism +1, Social -4, Eosteric =? [I need some design help here for animal esoteric.]
Weapons: body/fists [1], Armor: hide [1]
That +4 strength could result in a +10 damage and the +2 agility an 8 damage reduction in case a 6 is rolled, is daunting for a single man armed with a hand weapon.
A great ape, basically a gorilla-sized chimp, with fangs and claw-like nails could make a cool monster, like Thak, in the Conan story Rogues in the House.
Let’s do a lion, before going to monsters.
Kit for animals may be used to determine how well they grasp the use of human weapons against them or tack to control them. A smart lion might understand when a gun is ready to fire. Thak, in the example above, figured out how to operate his Sorcerer master’s traps.
An animal with a 0 kit, really does not understand that the thing the human is holding will kill him.
A 1 grasps the danger vaguely and is afraid and runs,
a 2 has a phobia of weapons and takes evasive action,
a 3 knows how to overcome their use, like the Ghost and the Darkness pair of leonine man-hunters.
Lion
2-12 pathos [really overpowers a normal human in advantage and initiative]
Body: Strength +4, Stamina -2, Agility +4
Mind: Knit +2, Kit -3, Wit -2
Spirit: Animism +4, Social -2 [reading human group action and intent], Esoteric [This might be kept level and used for weather prediction on the animal’s part, or having some understanding of its specific human enemy, like the lion that tracked its hunter back to his distant home and killed him. In considering lions, I am inclined to give predators a full esoteric score and have it applied to their understanding of humans and/or their social interaction with their own kind.
Weapons: claws/fangs [2], Armor: hide [1]
Elephant
An elephant is an example of an animal with a monstrous strength of 13-18 [12 = 1d6] and a human range esoteric score.
Weapons: tusks/skull [3], Armor: hide [1] Military elephants wore armor of [4]
An elephant gore/toss/stomp/crush would use its weighted/pointed weapon array generalized at [3] plus a strength bonus of 13 to 18, killing most humans, even armored and/or agile ones, that it struck.
Multiple Weapons
Note that multiple attacks in Grunt are Advantage-based, and that multiple weapons on beasts and in the hands of grunts, such as using the shield along with the sword to attack rather than defend, are a matter of damage augmentation, not additional attacks. A lion is regarded as attacking with claws and/or fangs, just as the elephant with any or all of its weapons. So, an elephant, who uses weighted weapons [feet, trunk, skull], which each value 2 damage, but has tusks rated at 3, does damage according to its most forensically lethal weapon.
Likewise with monsters below, Grendel, for instance assumed to be clawing, rending or biting as he feels fit, with his greatest asset, his fangs, setting his weapon rating.
This steers us towards the Monstrous.
Monsters
These beasts have the bodies of superior animals or superhumans. They possess, as their main ability a high pathos. Roll a monster’s pathos with 3d6.
Their manias should also be rolled the same way, 3d6.
Each monster should also have one of its specific abilities in Body, Mind & Spirit, rolled as a 3-18, such as Grendel’s strength.
The other 7 specific abilities, might be rolled as:
M = manlike [1d6]
Subhuman -1-4
Extraordinary +2-3
Superhuman + 3-4
Great = 13-18
...depending on the GM’s sense for the monster. In any case, a monster should have one great [3-18] ability and the rest either extraordinary or ordinary.
Dragons and Titans, for instance, might have multiple Great Abilities. Hit Points and sanity points for such creatures are likely to exceed 20.
Like with animals, over all body may result in more than 18 HP, but never for an overall ability 1d20 check, except in the case of pathos. Overall Body checks should always fail on a 19 and critically on a 20.
Vampires
In the case of a vampire, I suggest a 5-10 strength and stamina and a 3-18 agility, which is damage reduction. For vampire nerds, you might make up an entire hierarchy. As kind of demigods of death, I like vampires to be mostly superhuman in various areas during their power arch at night:
a. 4-9 [1d6 + 3]
b. 5-10 [1d6 +4]
c. 7-12 [1d6 +6]
d. 13-18 [1d6 +6]
And during the day, when they wane, to have subhuman to extraordinary powers.
Subhuman -1 down to -4
Ordinary 1d6
Extraordinary 1d6 +1 or +2
…
I hope my fellow gamers like GRUNT. Other than providing some science-fiction and historical scenarios, the design is complete. Since I have almost no chance to play an RPG, the development is left to you, the experts.
Thank you,
James LaFond, Oakley, Utah, as autumns storms roll in, Saturday, August 17, 2024
Part 2: Impressions of Strauss & Howe’s The Fourth Turning Concept: Utah 8/21/24
Stopping the Culture Clock?
At the bottom right of the dust cover is a clock coming on midnight, in the last quarter. This is the inspiration for the following examination. I suggest the book be read. For in its pages, those 11 important predictions of where we should be, but are not, gives the blue print for how our masters, seen and unseen, have placed their plutocratic hand on the very gear box of our mechanized society, and have held the minute hand in place at 15 minutes to renewal.
The Crisis, midnight on the book cover, is predicted on page 50 to begin about 2005 and end at 2026, yet it seems to be looming now, to have been postponed by some unseen hand for a cool 20 years. We do feel a crisis looming? Yes, a Crisis that should have straightened out America in 2006, though it is yet to arrive as the Unraveling continues.
The Fourth Turning
An American Prophecy [Turning this arrogance into hubris is one artful thing our Plutarchs have done in the name of our oppression.]
What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny
William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of Generations and 13th-Gen.
NY, 1997, 382 pages
After viewing a two hour interview with Neil Howe, coauthor of the above book, who suspiciously brushed off numerous revolts in Plantation America as beneath American Studies, defining only the birth of the nation as worthy of more than a passing mention, despite his being versed in details that elude most, I wondered, does he share the same blind spots as other professional historians?
I then dove into his book, which is to say I targeted all of his evidence, the tables, charts, summarizes and capsule examples and quickly saw that though his predictions of various events have proven true, that the Fourth Turning, the Crisis that he predicted for about 2005 and he was still insisting in the spring 2024 interview was almost done, had, according to the metrics established be he and Strauss [who is sadly deceased] has yet to come.
My instinct is that when Steve Bannon told all of the conservatives to read this book, that he and his ilk were already resting upon laurels yet to grow, that they had expected a return to a Conservative Age, as surely as the clock—unless some hand arrests the machine. Meanwhile, that the people in Steerage, those who run the world from behind the scenes, already knew about cultural-economic Modern cycles and threw the necessary monkey wrenches into the machine to maintain the “Unraveling Cycle,” which should lead us, as if by gravity, into the purifying and rejuvenating Crisis, the winter cycle of social life, The Fourth Turning.
This occurred to me as the 4 cycle construct works perfectly for charting Anglo-American Modernity, so long as one ignores the lower classes [mostly ignored throughout all of history]. As the middle class shrinks back to Premodern historic norms there is an opportunity for Modernity to end. The 4 cycle season’s of life are something of an aping of Ovid, a nod to classical notions that work on a much grander scale. These cycles, even admitted by Howe, who is is a diligent demographer, ideally fit the Anglo-American surge into Modernity. Either due to lack of evidence, gaps in the record, but in large part due to the breaking of the World of Tradition accomplished in the previous age, the model is not universally applicable across humanity’s life on earth. The one other, great empire, that managed to break the word of tradition, was Rome. Part 3 will examine the brilliant mapping of Anglo-American history applied to that empire.
Here, in Part 2, I am concerned with the lens of actuality, of examining evidence that has never filtered up to the academic level, to understanding the failure of a cycle that has been reliably mapped as painfully predicted since the 1400s.
First, what powers the cyclicity of these four turning is obviously the increased involvement of the expanding middle class with work, with using hands, involving the admittance of some working types into its ranks, ranks quickly closing as that middle class that once represented a tiny fraction of the 4th Estate shrinks, and shrinks as it has become the target of a malignant focus. [1]
Before returning to the wrecking of this cycle let us look at some examples of the structure.
Page 81to 90
Seasons of Life and Time
Elegantly depicting the world of change, for the elite classes of any society, which includes the middle class. Lower class examples are omitted from this thesis unless access to ruling classes is achieved, and is generally relegated to abstract economics and values reflected downward on through the hierarchy. It being assumed that the lower orders follow ruling class norms, which they manifestly have not through most of history. [2] In time, reflected by cultural markers in The Fourth Turning, it is the function of the celebrity [actor/ singer/influencer] to align the lower orders with the will of their betters.
The four active age groups, of 0-20, 21-41, 42-62 and 63-83 [reflecting the logic of Social Security in excluding the working class from the crowning turn, as they traditionally died in one of the 3 earlier age ranges and now enter their 60s as dependents rather than leaders, if at all, occupying the dependent 84+ age class].
These four demographic groups are staggered across four cycles:
These are the archetype demographics of the ruling class:
The Bible 1, Homer 2 and Polybius 3 present three contexts of the archetypes:
-1. Prophet: Moses/Nestor/populist
-2. Nomad: Golden Calf (faithless), Agamemnon (accursed), anarchic
On page 39 we are invited to see the Four Quarters of social life, of inter-generational action and reaction cycles as Spring for peace, Summer for minor wars, Autumn for peace and Winter for major wars, with each of the four social archetypes [again, of the ruling class] staggered along this cycle, coming into power at different times.
Seasons or turning are presented first on page 3:
-1. The First Turning, a cultural HIGH, Collectivism
-2. The Second Turning, an AWAKENING, Spiritualism
-3. The Third Turning, an UNRAVELING, Individualism
-4. The Fourth Turning, a CRISIS, Secularism
The way in which the archetypes are generated and operate along the four turnings, I leave to the reader to review in this excellent book. It does not apply to all pre-modern history, but does apply in spots when we get a clear record of numerous succeeding generations of the rulers of a given culture.
Below I concern this 2nd section with the failure of the model to fully turn from Unraveling to Crisis, as predict in about the year 2005.
This is not a fault of the model, and can be seen to be caused by direct meddling with the very structure of Modernity. I was informed on this by my urban blight work, using data that never got to academia through the government falsification filters. Just as the millions of European slaves worked to death in early Modernity are utterly absent from Strauss and Howe’s perception, the plight of working folk like myself when we were supposed to be going into a Unifying Crisis, coming out of the Atomizing Unraveling, cannot be understood from the Ivory Tower.
Let us look at the section subtitled The Fourth Turning, from page 103-105 and ends just before the section Rhythm’s in History. As a fighter I understand, that victory is contingent on understanding enemy rhythm and then breaking that rhythm. In the case of Steerage, or USG, the enemy, as with humanity since antiquity is THE PEOPLE, THE SUBJECTS, the HUMAN HERD.
Not understanding that their blueprint for social cycles would be used by Steerage to break the rhythm and return to a pure imperial model, the two authors may have provided a blew print to a return to Praetorian Rule after exactly 2000 years.
Below from top of page 104, on cultural trends described within Crisis, within The Fourth Turning, I will count the number of false predictions that should have occurred, beginning in presented in this one paragraph.
#1 “A sense of public urgency contributes to a clampdown on bad conduct or antisocial behaviors.”
This began to come to pass in the early 2000s but was reversed by Steerage interference, in which 9 great banks were publicly absolved by the U.S.G. of of crashing the economy in 2008. [Strauss and Howe predicted the economic collapse, but not its open sanction and reward as wealth transfer to the rich. They predicted a narrowing of wealth disparity.] Antisocial gay and ghetto behavior were then promoted as higher values. In other words, the authors knew history deeply, but have a shallow comprehension of EVIL.
#2 “People begin feeling shameful about what they earlier did to absolve guilt.”
This is flatly counter-predictive, with guilt politics as we know them in 2020s not even taking off until 2008. In 2024 whites still constantly apologize for mythic wrongs of a past age.
#3 “Public order tightens,”
No. Police departments were redirected to assist in chaos and to watch looting in progress and not to arrest shoplifter as early as 2005 [shoplifting] and working as looter support beginning in 2013. Standing down began in 2020. This trend has increased, by visible top down government and NGO pressure to this day.
#4 “Private risk taking abates,”
No. Las Vegas is everywhere, with even the NFL and Major League Baseball, former pillars of national morality, promoting at home gambling! Many working people took out retirement money to work the stock market, casinos have exploded across the nation and thrill crimes like the Knockout Game, with no attempt at gain, began and expanded. Again Steerage pressure is apparent in the mischarcterizing of the Knockout Game, which killed people, and of other pack attacks on innocent folks as “fights.”
#5 & 6 “..and crime and substance abuse decline.”
No. black on white crime tripled in 2008, doubled again in 2013, then increased in 2015, again in 2017, and doubled again in 2020. This is a redicules statement against reality, and that Howe did not address this glaring failure [on the PBD Podcast] to predict an extension of the Unraveling cycle, suggests he was either selling books or afraid to affront his masters. Drug addiction has exponentially worsened along with crime, by way of obvious Steerage events like the 2015 Baltimore Purge, which began the fentanyl crisis.
#7 “Families strengthen,”
No, the shattering of the family accelerated even as the Amish are attacked by local governments and the family was attacked in schools.
#8 “Gender distinctions widen,”
NO! Look around, most action heroes in movies are 90 pound women and we have dozens of fantasy genders, with 1/3 of young people not sure what gender they are!
Again, top down, medical, scholarly and political actions point to Steerage.
#9 “Child rearing reaches a smothering degree of protection and structure.”
Only for dog parents and cat women! Child care centers expand as parents have less children and less time for the ones they manage to have, and, children are being butchered and drugged with parental supervision into asexual experiments.
#10 “The young focus their energy on worldly achievements, leaving values in the hands of the old.”
The opposite has happened, with values now more then ever in the hands of the young, to include children informing on adult protesters sought by government and pushing social media mob morality.
#11 “Wars are fought with fury and for maximum results.”
This has been the opposite, with billions of equipment left in Afghanistan, USG’s longest and lowest intensity war, a similar languid effort in Iraq for over a decade, and now a European war mired in a standstill.
With 11 specific predictions proven wrong, each one can be seen to have been social engineered, except for Eastern European war, which is honestly beyond the book’s scope, and may be a question of technology.
On page 105 is a table of turning aspects, predicting 13 things that should change in America beginning in about 2005, only 9 of which are in play.
I will let the author’s have the last word, with my brief [in brackets], and see if they predicted a crisis rather than a continued unraveling based on their closing pronouncement in which they state that if their prediction of a Fourth Turning from Unraveling into Crisis was not destined to rescue us from a spiral then…
“The 2020s would be a mere extrapolation of the 1990s, with more cable channels [yes] and web pages [yes] and senior benefits [?] and corporate free agents [YES!] —plus more handgun murders [yes], media violence [YES!], cultural splintering [YES!], political cynicism [YES!], youth alienation [YES!], partisan meanness [YES!] and distance between rich and poor [YES, greatest in human history]. There would be no apogee, no leveling, no correction. Eventually, America would veer totally out of control along some bizarre centrifugal path.” [Exactly, Sir, which might explain your retirement in West Virginia!]
Strauss and Howe go into write that a society always evolves its way out of such spirals, but do not bother with examples such as Rapa Nui in which it imploded, or that of Rome, which was ruled from behind the throne by a permanent class of Praetorian Guards who killed, elevated, controlled and replaced their so called ruler, the Imperator, in a process that kept Rome in an almost constant state of unraveling for hundreds of years, aside from the Pax Romana, which will offer a chance to apply Strauss and Howe’s brilliant guide to social seasons to our best ancient analogue, Rome.
America and Rome will be examined in Part 3, to post on the next open Monday, Wednesday or Friday at jameslafond.com
…
Notes
-1. The four Cycles of Ovid: Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages places us clearly in the Iron Age and is also reflected in the common card deck, with the 4 suits representing the 4 classes of Christendom, which also reflects the ancient Arуan class structure of 4 classes.
-2. Looking into the past is always done in a manner that aligns us with the ruling class due to literacy and publication. For instance, the vast and rich religious traditions of the ancient world, we are told by academics that certain periods had no faith, simply because faith waned in the urban centers and among the literate elite, when the faith of country people was strong enough to demand that state religions exterminate them or make such concessions as admitting gods as angels or naming the days of the Christian week after heathen gods.
-3. The most that is done to include normal humans below the elites in this study is movie plots, which is telling, as audio visual fiction narratives are the primary means for setting, predicting and controlling lower order behavior in Late Modernity and is now central to early Postmodernity.
Part 1: Impressions of The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe: Utah, 8/20/24
I come to every general history presentation, in audio, visual or print form, with the question: “Will forced European labor in Plantation America, be glossed over in favor of, voluntary immigration of heroic farmers to Colonial America?”
The answer is always, yes, there were no white slaves.
What is it that generates this permanent blindness to the massive trove of primary source material on the actual condition, in favor of the strange fixation upon an imagined condition?
Even entertainment would dictate that Americans read about William Moraley or Isrаel Potter rather than re-reading Benjamin Franklin. No. Not only do we continue to fixate on [but not read] Franklin, but we mythologize him and gloss over whatever he had in common with William or Isrаel.
On the other side of the racial coin, only Frederick Douglas and a few high class black slaves get attention, with no one concerned with William Wells Brown or Moses Roper.
Why must we read the same story over and over again?
So that we will stop reading! So that we will turn away from the past out of boredom, turning our spirit of inquiry away from the key to inquiring into our current situation, and instead directly inquiring into the current world without any of the reference tools necessary to understand it. This is the brilliant crux of American Myth making.
Over the past month it has been a great pleasure, as I sit with Bob, to view interviews by various podcasters with historians. While these historians have specialties, in terms of the periods in the past they investigate, they are all generalists. Mister Howe does admit to this, as well as being at base a demographer for politicians and the system functionaries that operate their puppet strings. I do recall the fuss about this general history, based on general histories, being promoted as a right wing conservative handbook for the cyclic return to greatness of the nation.
The author does claim 5 predictions, including the pandemic, which was not a pandemic but a shamdemic, initiated by the progressive elites, which proved only that those folks read his book more deeply and purposefully than their conservative enemies.
I will get back to this concept, and the fact that the author’s cyclic observations have been correctly correlated and for this latest cycle, arrested by two full decades.
First, this history, like most general histories, is correct in its measure of past cycles, but only within the false construct that life on this planet is only experienced by the literate elites, such as himself. His every example is from the top strata of society, concerning the ruling 1% who write to each other in Time and down through Time. His examples are of higher arts, religious leadership, scientific policy, military policy, macro-economics, activities of the ruling elites, to include their celebrity meat fetish actors.
Such general histories, of which numerous are currently being propounded, unwittingly follow Ovid’s 4 Ages: Golden, Silver, Bronze & Iron, but in microcosm. We, on this planet have lived within the last, Iron Age since antiquity. What is lost is the perspective of the ordinary human, of the common worker, soldier, farmer, slave.
The irony of the written word that I am so enamored with—perhaps more than any of my meaty fellows—is that we, the common debt slave of today, since we have, rare among the “Lower Orders,” literacy. We thereby identify with the literary class of early Modernity, of The Middle Ages, of Antiquity, the people who would hate us for the very condition of our birth, if we shared time with them. Rather than identifying and empathizing with our social analogues of yesteryear; the slaves, servants, vagabonds, paupers, serfs and peasants who once did what we do, we identify with the towering elites. This single dynamic has rendered historical investigation a process of curtain dropping before the stage of the past and discussion of the fabric of the curtain instead of what has been concealed behind it. We have been conditioned to see the fantasy of the decorative curtain, the paisley veil, the intricate mask, not the plain face of reality it conceals.
First, to buttress the concept of The Class Curtain, I shall quote from the forward of an academic book discussing the veracity of an ancient source, through a lens that pretends to be modern, but is a class lens. This is the crux we are hung upon, the empathy that makes ideological identification with our pitiless masters possible, making nationalism and globalism function, along with all of the isms in between. Unlike our mostly illiterate Ancient to Early Modern social analogues, who knew damned well that the ruling class despised them, ruled them and owned them, we, by tittering turns, actively fantasize that our nations, our governments, our politicians, NGOs and the unseen and unnamed functionaries they represent, are our SERVANTS, our collective Leviathan Slave, our Tlalos, guarding our island of moral perfection.
…
Xenophon the Athenian
The Problem of the Individual and the Society of the Polis
By W.E. Higgins, NY, 1977, 183 pages
The first question, is why this book is readily available, while Xenophon’s writings are not. Xenophon was not wordy. You can read his every word in a week of 2 hour daily readings, even if you are a slow reader. Yet to find them on a book shelf outside a facility of higher learning [despite the animus “the learned’ hold for Xenophon, is unheard of.
That is the first part of the dilemma, that we require a distillation by some professional and do not trust the very words of the subject. It is the same in current life. The mugging victim is not given a sound bite on the newscast, rather a police spokesperson or “expert” describes their plight, very often mis characterizing the taking of their autonomy and possessions as “a fight.”
Higgins seems an honest fellow and conducts a debate with historians past and present, some of which is quoted:
“… that a simple author like Xenophon, who never managed to research his facts as well as he might have, can be taken seriously.”
This warrior, who wrote about the war he fought in, is devalued for not spending his life in libraries and schools rather than on the battlefield. The subtext tells us that experience is of no value, and that writing in a vacuum is. He is most distrusted for writing plainly and not engaging in class jargon.
“Xenophon’s reputation among the learned has yet to recover… a squire in tweeds, tiresome and hardly rigorous… the very simplicity of style which renders him so accessible to the beginner in Greek has charmed out of perception the scrutiny of scholars… the danger in reading Xenophon is the feeling of fast comprehension which derives from the ease of expression.”
These quotes are from page 1, laying out a portion of the scholarly argument by many ivory tower intellectuals over 150 years who instinctively hate the man of action who was Xenophon. Higgins will go on to defend Xenophon, presenting himself as an outlier in his own field.
Historians of our day detest Herodotus and Arrian for these same reasons, that Herodotus walked the world he wrote of and interviewed both sides and that Arrian himself committed the unredeemable sin of taking the field in war. In the academic opinion, no act could better disqualify Arrian for writing about war in Asia than the fact that he fought a war in Asia!
Hence, it is no surprise, that the following professional thinkers wrote a history that focused on 13 generations of the ruling class, not 13 generations of the doomed and dammed.
…
The Fourth Turning
An American Prophecy [Turning this arrogance into hubris is one artful thing our Plutarchs have done in the name of our oppression.]
What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny
William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of Generations and 13th-Gen.
NY, 1997, 382 pages
I am low on space here and must cut to America and Rome, Part 2, which will Post on the very next open Monday, Wednesday or Friday on this site.
Spoiler Alert:
Despite the author’s contention, a few months ago, while selling his sequel on the Patrick Bet-David Podcast, that his predictions came true, the 4th turning did not happen!
The author and his deceased coauthor, predicted the 4th turning from Unraveling into Crisis for 2005. Yet, according to their writing on pages 104-5, the conditions have remained in the unraveling.
The Postponement of the 4th Turning will be continued under America and Rome, with examples from the book its self, refuting its conclusions, and, also agreeing that the concept and models were correct, and that the author’s were not wrong, but rather that their excellent book compelled the “Enemy of All Mankind,” our collective tyrant, to break the rhythm of Social Time, the dance of Discord and Concord, and cast the world into a former failed form.
Part 2 will be a superimposition of this 4 cycle concept upon the best period in the history of the empire, that ancient polity which America was consciously modeled on, Rome, and the period of the Pax Romana. That shall close with a suggestion of what our rulers have achieved over we, the idiot, emotive mass of humanity.
6:05 PM, Sunday, after rounding the fence from Bob & Deb’s house and pressing the doorbell.
…
Are you lost?
Come on in then, and I’ll show you the way.
[laughter and a hug]
I’ve missed you—heard you were hurt. By God, I never thought I’d see you tired. But as good a thing as it is to avoid Death, it does result in Old Age, and Old Age does bring its problems.
Have a seat—you’re such a good friend, have done me so many good turns, aworkin’ your guts out, I can hardly say thanks enough.
Walked by the old gas station, did you?
Fifty-six years we ran that, Dutch and me, then with Timmy, you know, the one who scared you to death with his bad driving. I sure miss them. It is so nice to get a visit from someone I can recall. I’m slipping. People come over and say “hi” and talk, and I’m embarrassed that I can’t recall their name and too ashamed to ask. You know, you coach children, then when they get big, you might recall the voice but have a hard time putting a name to it.
Bob, though, what a kid he was, full of life, and a man so full of knowledge—please ask hi what to do about my raspberry’s. Maybe someone can take them for starts. I have not gotten a cup from those plants in years—my own fault for neglecting them. But it’s easier to get them at the market. It’s nice though, that people care. We have such a beautiful valley, this place on the bench under our beautiful mountain; such nice people; by God, we are blessed in our valley—even though the traffic is getting so it is a bother.
I haven’t seen so much as the country as others, only the West Coast from ball playing days. But, the only place that is more beautiful to me than this valley is Chalk Creek. We had 350 acres, very hilly farmland: my father, mother, my two little brothers and me. My father planted grain; wheat and oats. He had threshers come to get out the seeds, because it was a lot. We ran a lot of hay, bound it in small bails, loaded it on the tractor, and brought it to the barn so that the animals had something to eat in the winter.
We raised milk cows, sold the calves, had our own beef, pigs, chickens, sheep. Slopping the pigs was the worst. After we’d slaughter them, you dipped them in scalding water so you could shave the hair off—poor things. First order of the day was milking the cows. You didn’t lay in bed and say, “Oh, I don’t want to get up and milk the cows.” No, you got up and milked the cows. We had a nice garden, grew our own food. There was deer to be got too, occasional bigger game too. You know they all liked grass and we had grass, a very steep property—you didn’t just walk right across it.
We docked our own sheep, the chickens were always good for the eggs and that was a good job for children—just watch out for the darned rooster. They could be mean. Well, they were mean, vicious creatures, just a matter of the mistaking you for a hen or a threat.
One morning, my bother and I were milking the cows and decided it would be more fun to ride them. Well, old Gissle didn’t much care for that, rolled me right off her back and a sprained my ankle. Then, as I was pulling myself up along the rail, something hit me in the back. I thought to myself, ‘My word, what is hitting me?’ It was my mother, whipping me for riding the cow I should have been milking and being a bad example for my little brother who was doing the same.
[laughter]
Oh no, she didn’t use a broom and didn’t have a dedicated whip—thank God. She was a practical woman, reached up and grabbed a green willow switch. That was good enough. She kept telling me to move and I couldn’t. Then when she found out I had a sprained ankle she felt bad and babied me.
We had to drive the cows to the fresh grass. My father disliked me crossing the river in my shoes and creasing them up. We were supposed to take them off and cross bare foot. But this big old cow—old Gissle, was trotting along just fine, so I hitched a ride. That dirty bugger, don’t you know ran at full tilt and then stopped mid stream, dumped me right off, in about two feet of water, up to your hip. My father did not care for that, and Gissle made it to the dinner table right quick.
We had no phone, no one up Chalk Creek had a phone, By God. Makes me wonder today—I spent a life with a phone on the wall, this wall right here that I papered, did the carpentry too, I’m handy like that, or I was—now I have this thing I can barely understand. I like you wishing me happy Mother’s Day and sending pictures from around the country. Don’t think I’m rude for no answering. I just can’t figure this darned thing out!
We had a wood stove and oil and coal lamps. There was an out house that was a good piece off from the one you slept in. We put up our own food for winter. One winter we were snowed in for two weeks. They eventually sent a big machine to blow us out. I’ll never forget that shower of snow blowing a road for us—four miles up Chalk Creek they had to blow us clear. But we had plenty to eat and wood for the stove close at hand—and when you have snow and a stove, you have water.
Eighteen years I lived up Chalk Creek. Then I married Dutch and moved down here. Owning a gas station is hard work. But you meet a lot of people. There was [name forgotten] you probably don’t know him—a big shot politician. Then there was [name forgotten] a famous race car driver from California, won all his races it seemed, the man to beat, and he stopped by often. Doctors and politicians lived up The Canyon and would come for gas and repairs.
One time, after they oiled [paved] the roads, Dutch was in a hurry. So, he hopped on his horse. He won a few rodeos when he was younger and he told me it was his fault for jumping on the horse’s back when it’s spine was still cold—kind of like not warming up your car. But a car doesn’t buck like the devil. That horse threw him off on his face. His entire face on the left side, the cheek, the nose, the forehead and up around to his ear, peeled off and fell like a flap across his face. He went to Doc [name forgotten] and he said, “I won’t touch you,” and sent Dutch to a famous plastic surgeon, who had also gassed up at the station.
It has taken a while, after Dutch passing, then Timmy, then selling the station, and now it being a few years, for me to be able to walk by it without missing it. I’m going on 88 now, and finally, I no longer miss that old gas station.
I used Miss Arla, a lady I do some chores for, as the matriarch of a frontier family in the medieval American fantasy, Wife.
The staff in the old dentists office next to the library, across from the vacant lot fenced for demolition, was slim. With fear of the plague still raging, receptionists were spotty. Banjo filled in on Monday for intake. He did not want to be on the books as even being in Maryland, what with his Omaha I.D. and California phone, which remained off most of the time.
‘The Over Whore is ever watching,’ was a constant muse of his.
Doctor Daniel Landon, “Doc” to most, was okay with that. The honest doctor weathered a constant haze of withering lies spewed by the medical authorities. They agreed Banjo would work in return for free medical care, so long as it was practical. Doc did have his own X-Ray machine and had removed a subacious cyst and possible skin cancer from his back. The ingrown toenail was gone in ten minutes. Doc yanked a molar with no need for the dentist chair. It had been a good few months. Banjo even sparred with the doctor in the office after hours and received a clean bill of health on a pre fight exam, as Sink was suggesting a bout in Delaware.
‘This is starting to feel too much like home. There are so many good people stuck in bad places.’
The first patient of the week came through the door with his mask on. Banjo was at ease, “Good Morning, Sir, Doctor Helms?”
The tall, thin, middle-aged man, with the air of a doctor, glared over his N-95 mask and scolded, “You are not masked, in violation of CDC guidelines. Who are you?”
Danial heard the tone of voice and was out of his office and down the hallway, “Doctor Helms, how are you?”
“Doctor Landon! I am amazed at your neglect for mine and the public health! You are not masked. The CDC and the AMA, as well as the Society…”
Danial, a man that was built like a major league shortstop, a square-headed Scotsman if there ever was one, who spoke as fast as a carnival barker when recording examination results or dealing with idiots, cut Helms off, “The Society of American Child Mutilation can kiss my ass. The AMA get a standard fax from me any time they send a notice, which is a picture of this middle finger! I built my house with these hands, and when I wore any medical grade mask I still inhaled ten micron particles—it’s all bullshit you idiot. Get your head out of your ass and start saving lives!”
Helms stewed, steamed, stemmed even, looked at Banjo, noted his long hair and beard and barked, “Go ahead, smile and follow him to the doors of hell. You will all be dead. This is serious.”
Landon was now using his stethyscope on Helms, comically pressing it to the rainbow banded polo shirt between the buttons of the open tweed sweater. Helms was frozen, terror and indignation fighting within his sunken chest.
Landon winked comically, “No signs of intelligence—Aristotle did teach us that the heart is the seat of thought, Right P.A. Banjo? Leave the patient upright. If it is still here when I return, I will conduct the moral autopsy.”
Landon turned his back and went back to his office, slammed open a metal cabinet, pulled a cord on a chain saw, and when the thing belched to acrid, grinding life, yelled over the gas-powered machine, “P.A. Banjo, bring the deceased to my office!”
Going along with the sarcasm, Helms still standing in stymied indignation, Banjo put on his war face and rose to stand like a loyal Ming soldier. Helms looked at him in abject horror, turned, ran out of one of his shoes, jerked the door open, nearly knocking himself out, and bolted out onto Harford Road.
It was all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. He did crack a grin that did not want to leave his face, Pulled Helm’s intake sheet down, crumpled it and threw it into the round file, as Doc shut off the saw and laughed like the shepherd of the damned.
…
The rest of the morning saw a steady stream of customers, 35, in four hours, Doc a Dynamo of diagnostics, rehab instructions for the injured and elderly, diet and activity suggestions for fighters getting the medicals, even doing the X-rays himself, all with a good humor. This highest functioning human being that Banjo had ever encountered was administering like a clinical angel to a gaggle of old, poor, jocks, child athletes, worn out laborers, patients who needed to get off of pain management, in the worst city in America.
The office only had one newly arrived patient, a lady suffering anxiety, a lady, who Banjo noted, was none other than the contact he had avoided calling, Danny Wilson, ‘Yes, BIG titties is right. I can see her with Old Stump.’
Danny was teary, on a cane, wondering about knee options, and was obviously suffering from shamdemic anxiety when she looked at Banjo and whispered, “You seem to be a tranquil soul—I’m an empath, I know.”
Thank you, “Danny,” he responded as she rubbed a crystal pendent between thumb and finger.
She smiled, “You knew that ma’am would make me self conscious about my age. Thank you.”
“Ma’am,” greeted Doc, out of the back, in full dynamo and she smiled but shrank down into her seat. Turning to Banjo he ranted:
“Pain management doctors, I’d kill them all and dig the hole myself if I were King. Oh, speaking of which, has Mister Jerome King stopped postponing his insurance claim exam?”
“Currently, Doc, he is calling for directions, or was, seemed to have been lost across the street. Only four hours late.”
Then came in the man in question, a surely, muscular man wearing a full body BLM jump suit, with the letters in blood on black, a fitted white hat with black BLM lettering, announcing, “Y’all done hid dis muvafuca good.”
“Sir,” barked Doc, “kindly refrain from swearing in my office.”
“Whateva, whateva, sign me up.” Jerome walked over to the clip board in front of Banjo’s desk, as if owning an instinct for signing in to clinics.
“Danny, come with me to Examination Room A.”
The woman smiled and began to rise, but her move was arrested, as was her smile, by Jerome, “Bitch needz ta wait ‘er turn. I were scheduled fer eight-fideen!”
“And you are late, sir! I will see you on my lunch break.”
“Say what,” champed the thug, shaking out his hands and ready for action.
Doc came nose to nose in stare-down mode and said like a drill sergeant, “You will sit now while Banjo spells your information correctly, then I will examine you. If this fails to meet your out-sized expectations, you may leave.”
Jerome was aghast, “Datz some racist bullshit. Led me talk to the woman in charge?”
“Woman, that was your insurer’s scheduling person. This, sir, is not a company, not a democracy, not a republic, but a monarchy, a kingdom, and I am that KING, a sovereign physician, who can do without you among my billable rabble. Further, Sir!”
Doc was pushing back the now ashen-faced man, half his age and 30 pounds heavier, by shear force of will, never touching him, “Further, Sir, you have insulted a lady who is under my protection! You will apologize now, this instant, without hesitation, or I will remove your throat, here, NOW!”
The man stepped back with wide eyes and barked, “Sorry, Ma’am—and good luck, dis cracka be carazee!”
And a second man bolted from the door.
Doc turned to Banjo, “Block Allied Insurance’s phone number, take them off the referral list, and if they fax or email, send or fax my middle finger. Thank you.”
Danny was limping towards the doctor, beaming up at him like he was indeed a savior King.
After her examination, Doc directed Danny to Banjo, “Mark Danny as paid. She is bringing beef stew for us next Monday. And Banjo, walk her to her car and do a security check of her house. There have been second story home invasions on her street.”
“Yes, Sir,” was all that could be said, as the man who was indeed King in these parts went into the back room, where he hung like a bat from a traction bar for lunch as he dictated diagnostic notes and exam results to his silent recorder.
The victor of our mini Clontarff, from September 26th who dropped this Irish potato negro with a long sword thrust and sent me back into the fields, has decided on an illustration for his site link device that is my absolute favorite early modern art, which i always called Knight among Devils.
Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death and Devil, 1513, engraving, 24.4 x 18.8 cm (9 5/8 x 7 3/8 in.), Albertina, Vienna
The Device
I loathe my smartphone. An audit of the hours in my day would say otherwise. I would destroy it and trade it in for a Nokia if it were not so insidiously enmeshed in my life. Work, social life, banking, travel; it is increasingly difficult to do any of these things without a smartphone (which is constantly monitoring you on behalf of the state, by the way). Even Mr. LaFond, who is fortunate enough to eschew the damned device, relies on others who use them for publishing and web related purposes. We have so completely enslaved ourselves to The Device that I doubt many would be able to survive without them. What is to be done?
They are not going away, soon anyway, and living without one requires an almost complete exit from society. This is no doubt attractive to some, less so to others with ambitions of conquering some small part of this decrepit civilization. This is for the latter, those who for whatever reason have to move and interact within society at large, and thus must carry the scrying mirror of the Great Eye with them.
The power of the smartphone is great, imagine what heroes of the past could have accomplished with instant communication over vast distances. The power of the Gods contained in your hand. Connection to others who you otherwise would never have met, the spread of knowledge and networks, this is what men of power do with this capability.
The smartphone is a tool, and like any tool it can be used well or poorly, to benefit the user or destroy them. It is like the Palantír from The Lord of the Rings; offering great power and insight to its master but requiring an equal amount of will to use it without being overcome. This is how it must be treated.
A careful cultivation of the will is necessary to wield this tool effectively (a cultivation which any person of strength is likely undergoing already). Those without such strength or will are easily overcome, we see it all around us. Slaves to The Algorithm, they stare at their screen and are mesmerized by the conjurings within. Many who are otherwise possessed of great will have no doubt experienced this as well, pulling themselves away as if from a trance.
Cursing ourselves doesn’t help. The adversary is powerful and cunning, and works tirelessly to absorb your strength and your time, to weave their webs further into your life. Of course we are ultimately responsible for our actions, but we must recognize the strength of the foe we contend with. Recognizing this and setting ourselves against Them, rather than against ourselves, is the first step.
Then we must be brutal. Greedy with our own time. Decisive with our usage. “What am I using this to accomplish right now” is a simple question but will act as a guardrail for your attention. Anything we find that does not benefit us, that merely wishes for more of our time will be cut out mercilessly. Timers are a message we send from our strongest mind to shock us out of the clutches of the coddling screen.
“Is this edifying, will this bring me strength or am I merely rotting away my gifted hours?” Is another powerful mind-centering spell. James LaFond’s website is a boon, and even the likes of social media sites can bring us strength and resolve, if we are ruthlessly discerning with our usage. The man of taste is now more defined by what he ignores than what he knows.
The final message we must always remember is “I am being watched, always”. This matters more for some, but it is true for all. There are ways to mitigate this, and I highly recommend looking into personal OPSEC for the technologically inclined. Remember that they have used the pings of a cell phone to launch precision missiles. They will use it against you.
Yet if we are strong, if we cultivate the resolve within ourselves to resist the tricks of the enemy, we may use these tools to do great things. None of our ancestors ever faced a foe this cunning, able to penetrate into the mind and bend the will with such precision. So we must be stronger, and develop for ourselves the will to overcome, to be above the slaves who fall prey to The Device, and to become its master and dominator.
Vanguard
A valley littered with bones
Scattered upon the earth like piled stones
Grinning skulls and sun-bleached backs
Wind whistling in empty chests, ribs full of cracks
From the blow of sword and mace
The remnants of a long forgotten race
Left to rot in the fields
With shattered spears and splintered shields
Who were they? Who so long ago
Fought to the last against the merciless foe
That left them dead where they lay
Food for ravens and beasts of prey
Wolves lapped up their blood and flesh
The worms and flies devoured the rest
Leaving only skeletons behind
The only thing left to remind;
The world that they fought and died there
Now only empty sockets stare
At the sky over the field of slaughter
Where wind and snow, sun and water
Wore away the rest
Not maille or standard nor helm with painted crest
Survived the weathering of years
None remain to over them shed tears
Valiant men once strong and bold
Now only bones withering in the mould
12.15.24Maud'Dib — fantastic!
12.18.24Barry N. Bliss — "..I doubt many would be able to survive without them."
Perhaps I am fortunate.
I have no cellphone or landline. I do not know how to operate a smartphone
other than a few moves shown to me at workplaces when the organization
required me to do a simple task with one of their's.
I use Instagram, X, read blogs, etc. all on my 14 year old laptop, which
works just fine.
Admittedly, I spend most of my non-working time alone.
The number is the amount of intrinsic damage it does. If one does not have strength equal to the damage of the weapon then the difference is reduced from the weapon’s damage. So, if a scribe tries to fight with a battle ax with his 1 strength, then the 4 damage of the battle ax is reduced to 1.
If a slave girl with a strength of zero uses this weapon, her weapon damage is reduced to 1, but she is not able to ad a strength score of 1, like the scribe does. Soy boys be warned. A person with a 0 strength using a 0 weapon does 0 damage. A weapon valued at 1, does 1 damage in the hands of a 0 strength wielder.
Knit and Damage
Note that Knit may only be applied to damage when the weapon is used by a skilled wielder.
Knit may be used to reduce damage on the part of a skilled fighter.
An unskilled fighter, let’s say a rifleman who has never used a sword and picks one up, may use the sword for defense with a skill check. If he does, he is now skilled.
Also, the use of non weapons, for instance a man at banquet picking up a stool and improvising it as a shield, is also determined with a Knit check. Once this check is made, Knit and the forensic property of the weapon, using a bench as a heavy shield [3], a chair as a medium shield [2] or a stool as a light shield [1] may be sued for damage reduction. The fighter now adds chair to his skill set.
Knit and Projectile Weapons: A skilled archer or thrower or hurler, may employ his Knit for damage. When he does so, he forgoes the die difference damage, which is a random indication of how sensitive the portion of the target impacted was, and instead relies on his skill. But, if a roll is made that would inflict more damage than the Knit score, that total is used instead. The point is that in using projectile weapons Knit and die difference are never added together, it being one or the other.
Armor
All armor counts as strength weapons, as the material must be worn or carried. So, lack of strength to fully employ a shield of 3 and an armor of 3, on the part of a man with 5 strength, means that his agility damage reduction of 3 [his agility score] is reduced by the difference between his armor and his strength, to a 2.
Let us cover weapons and armor together, with armor occupying the second line, the third line occupied by archery.
Strength Weapon Progression
The number lists the damage the weapon does and the damage the armor deflects or absorbs.
0 =
Weapons: the human body, cords, ropes, straps, belts that require strength
Armor: the human body and simple unlayered, unquilted, unpadded, unhardened clothing
Punching, kicking and grappling are unarmed combat means, which rely on Strength in the unskilled, or the Strength, Knit or Agility of a skilled combatant [his choice]. A skilled user may choose to use Strength, Agility or Knit for damage modification. An unskilled boxer or wrestler MUST use his strength. Damage reduction is also a use of such a skill. For instance, Beowulf, a skilled wrestler, used his pathos roll [18 over Grendel’s 12] to gain two advantages, used one advantage to grapple defensively, reducing damage with a Knit check, and the other advantage to dislocate the monster’s arm.
Archery: Dubs, or dummy arrows with no points but padded, do only strength/draw damage, with no damage done for die difference.
…
1=
Weapons: sticks, rods, stones, hooves, being simple weapons along with whips, chains, knotted ropes and other flexible weapons that require strength and skill for use. Skill permits the application of a hero’s “Knit” to damage, but does require strength to wield, sling stones and bullets.
Armor: hides, padded or quilted garments, a small hand shield, a helmet, though it covers only a small area covers a highly exposed, targeted and sensitive area
Weapons may be dedicated to defense rather than attack in any type of combat. In a stick fight against a Ugandan porter who does not want to carry his scientific instruments, Sir Captain Richard Francis Burton, might use his stick to defend [damage reduced by 1 for the stick’s properties, plus Knit or Agility or Strength, his choice]. This combat is a prop, in order to set up his mesmerism stare which will hopefully convince the savage to worship his master as a very god of cudgel work, without the need to injure the laborer, thus tragically reducing his ability to carry his master’s instrument case over the mountains.
Archery: child’s bow, kinetic impact of light poison dart.
…
2 =
Weapons: edged weapons that are not weighted such as claws, fangs, talons, also knives, edged weapons that are limited such as a dagger with no edge or a razor or cleaver with no point, limit damage potential in a fluid combat.
Also, weighted weapons such as clubs, clubbed muskets, weighted flexible weapons like flails, etc. Also darts, javelins and other thrown hafted point weapons. This category may be rated higher against a non resisting or bound target.
Thrown or hurled weapons used by the unskilled add Strength. Those thrown by the skilled may apply Knit, Kit or Strength.
Armor: Hardened leather armor, or protective garments somehow reinforced, a slight or small shield or pelte, a stick and hide Zulu shield
Archery: light bow, which can be drawn by a person of 2 strength. For instance, a normal man of 2 who grabs a more powerful bow, may use it, if he makes a strength check, but may only draw it to a 2 power. A strength of 1 using a 2 bow inflicts 1 damage plus the die difference, which is the aim.
…
3=
Weapons: weighted edged weapons like sabers, swords, hatchets, or heavier hafted light blades like spears, pikes and lances, which enable horizontal weighting, and making them similar to their natural analog which would be a horn, a tusk, or an antler that might gore the enemy. Thus, any man thrusting two handed, or a skilled spear man thrusting one-handed with a spear, a man thrusting a spear from a horse, a soldier with bayonet on musket, or a unicorn charging and goring, all accomplish the same improvement, adding strength to the weapon base of 3.
Heavy shields such as the aspis, hoplon, bogarian, scutumn, kite shield, Viking shield, various mail and scale armor
Archery: heavy self bow, cross bow
…
4 =
Weapons: Bastard swords, light two-handed swords and exceptionally forged blades, battle axes, war hammers
Armor: Mail improved with plate additions.
Archery: composite bow, heavy cross bow
…
5 =
Weapons: Great swords, great axes, lockbar axes, halbreds, two handed war hammers
Armor: Plate
Archery: Small siege bow, long bow
…
6 =
Weapons: Dragon Claws, Titanic and giant weapons, mechanical steel weapons like chain saws, back ho buckets, etc.
Armor: Modern ballistic armor, dragon scales, etc.
Archery: heavy siege bow, great hero bow
Kit Based Weapons
The armor is the same as in Strength based weapons, which is depressing. The damage enhancement of these weapons are skill, not strength based, with Kit, Knit or Wit added, at players discretion. As with archery, the skilled user may choose Knit instead of die difference for damage, but differ to die difference if it proves better. This is a kind of safety against just rolling one’s Overall body score on the 1d20 to hit roll and doing only base weapon damage. It is an option of the skilled gunman.
Note, that most military musket users in the Black Powder Era, did not have aiming skill, but were simply loading and discharging. This would be the difference in the Kentucky rifleman and the Red Coat with his musket in 1776-83, or the Texan rifleman and the Mexican soldier 1837, who was using the left over Brown Bess muskets once used by the British Soldiers.
Fast Draw: the ability to quickly deploy a secured weapon, be it a sheathed sword or a holstered pistol, is a function of Knit or Agility, which ever the player chooses. Once a firearm is out Agility is only used for damage reduction and Knit [that is interfacing of the body with the tool], Kit [knowledge of the tool] and Wit [overall smarts, like Clint Eastwood’s character in A Fist Full of Dollars wearing a steel plate under his poncho, knowing that his foe always aimed at and hit the heart].
Gun nuts will of course want to correct and improve the load ratings of the weapons below, which, I predict, will not make the targets of these weapons any more comfortable in their perforated suits or uniforms.
0=
Paint ball gun, bee bee gun, etc.
…
1=
Air rifle, small caliber pistol [.22, .25]
…
2 =
Medium caliber pistol [.32]
…
3=
Primitive dueling or light pistol, small caliber rimfire riffle, Black Beard’s brace of pistols.
…
4 =
Primitive heavy pistol, often used as a club.
…
5 =
Primitive light long gun, fowling piece or horseman’s carbine, 9MM pistol, 36MM pistol
…
6 =
Primitive medium long gun, Jaeger’s light rifle, Pennsylvania or Kentucky Rifle, matchlock, arquibus, hackbutt… .38 special
…
7 =
Musket, a heavy, large caliber slow load, that was used on a tripod by sword armed musketeers in the 1600s, and, beginning at about 1700, was replaced with a lighter but still heavier weapon which bore a bayonet and was a better than a pike in overall hand to hand. From this point, pike’s were made short and given hooks for naval action, as pikemen were no longer needed to defend musketeers from horsemen as they reloaded, .40 to .45 caliber pistols, 4.10 shot gun
…
8 =
Modern light rifle [5.56 MM], improved musket [mid 1800s], late black powder rifles of higher caliber used west of the Mississippi, magnum and .50 cal pistols, 20 gauge shotgun
…
9 =
16 gauge shotgun
10 =
Modern medium rifle [7MM]
11 =
12 gauge shotgun
…
12=
Modern rifle, standard [9MM]
…
13=
10 gauge shotgun
…
14=
Modern rifle, heavy
…
One may continue with more specialized, advanced fire arms. But Grunt becomes an exercise in luck and attrition once high caliber high velocity lead starts flying. I don’t expect this game to be much fun beyond bank robberies and sniper duels and blasting colonial savages armed with machetes after 1900.
16 =
1 pounder, Colvern, swivel gun
…
20 =
2 pounder.
For larger loads add 4 points per pound of shot, up to the 32 pounders that ripped through ships timbers and men and killed 30 armored knights with one ball at Pavia in, 1538, I think.
…
Booty & Healing
Gilgamesh, Alexander, Attila & Timur collected booty that often had names; fleshy possessions who could recall with a tear in their dainty eye, dashed hopes and crushed dreams and back stories that no one cared about. Some of these had healing powers, such as apothecaries, physicians, witches, sorcerers and slave girls. The former may be rolled up by the GM with values assigned as they make sense for the wise man’s vocation. But the other healing slave, the woman, is valued below.
Body 5-18
Strength = 0-2
Stamina = 1-3
Agility = 1-3
Utility = 0-3 hauling your gear, tanning hides, dressing scalps that you took, rummaging through the dead and dying on the battlefield for useful loot, etc.
Beauty = 2-7 [7? People are going to murder you over that bitch.]
Fertility of your slave girl is based on a body check, with the die difference how many children she can bear.
Wits?
Really, you had to ask!
Okay, if the wench insists on exceeding her design and using her head for something other than a musical instrument, then add her agility and utility. That score will determine how good of a healer she is, rolling her provisional wit or less.
Warning, a wench with a 6 Wit, will cause you endless headaches and probably seduce one of your meathead bodyguards into challenging you to a duel.
A bitch with a 7—Attila is coming to claim her, so trade her for a good horse.
A Family Monologue Given from Peoa to Oakley, Utah: 7/23/24
Bob and I had just had a sasquatch leprechaun foot race down at the Rockport Reservoir, he being the large lumbering winner as my short steps could not keep up. Driving home I asked him about a building, was it a pumping station?
He began a dissertation on how it was built, how it worked with the station on the hill, how many pounds of pressure and dollars of energy per year it took to pump that water up from the Greek named Weber River, that flowed by God’s gravity down by his house, up and over 30 miles and 2,000 feet to Park City for the rich folks to consume.
The man is an encyclopedia, with an attitude, a book with steely eyes grown weary divining the crazed intent and dazed progress of of an insensible gaggle of rootless people. We drove through the rock cut to Peoa, a tiny community, and I wondered out loud about the security of the water supply in case of disaster.
The previous day, Sunday, a water operator had called Bob to ask him some questions about valves and pressure in a building that antedated his employment, checking in on the man who antedated the building’s construction. Bob has not only operated pumping stations and filtration plants in three locations on the Wassatch Back, he has spoken with geologists and operated with a number of scientists. He has a mental map—though incomplete and filled with wonder—of the liquid underworld in his family’s second homeland.
“If the power grid fails, Park City is in trouble. Our water sources are gravity fed [snow melt and rain] and artisian. Artisian sources are springs, the water that seeps down from the surface over the years. There is so much pressure, eight pounds per gallon, to force that water up thousands of feet to well up as a spring. There are also under ground rivers and lakes we but barely understand.
We pass a small, shaded lane and he notes my continued curiosity over Woodenshoe Lane, which I have yet to stroll down as his big white Ford F-350 Diesel rumbles around the bend.
“Woodenshoe, where the Dutch settled. People used to settle in ethnic blocks. Up ahead, on the left, is Little Norway, where my family settled, the Norwegian half that is. I recently met one of my cousins, a geneologist from Norway. I took him around and showed them where the Johnson’s first settled, where our grandfather put down his roots. He informed me that I had some relatives I didn’t know about, the Stonebreakers. We were masons, quarry men. The Mormons needed us, our skills, to settle the upper valleys. So they prostiletized to us and those who came to Utah took the name they suggested, Johnson. But some kept Stonebreaker. I’d like to meet some of those folks. This man has a sea going fishing boat he takes to the Arctic Circle every year. He has done well.
The first Mormons were English. They needed the Pace Clan from Appalachia for armed me, to deal with Indians and persecutors. That was my Dad’s side of the family, the Paces, the fighters. Mom’s side, the Johnson’s they lived up on this bench that was called Little Norway. My Grandmother always said that they chose to settle here because it looked more like Norway, the timber, the rock—they were timber men too—than anywhere else in America she had seen, despite this being a thousand miles from the sea. So up here we settled. Most of its sold off—hell and bad times are coming, these billionaires bringing their problems and even their Section Eight welfare people with them. My son and his friends have done well. I tell them that they will have to be the old hands to rebuild after whatever comes.”
Grins harshly.
“My cousin told me, you know, you have relatives in the Orkneys, Iceland. What does that tell you—that our ancestors did not get along with the neighbors!
The truck rumbles east along the bench of Little Norway, the horse farms running two miles flat to the North Hills on our left.
“I’ve learned in this life, not to trust—like you learned it in the city. A lot of people here, they were born when there weren’t ten percent of the population in this valley—they are too trusting. So things will be taken out from under them by the rich newcomers. The rich folks voted a tax to build a fire department when our volunteer department was doing just fine—they have to have the best and can’t do anything for themselves. So we get pinched some more—costs me $480 more a year to appease the rich on that one count. It is ironic, don’t you think, that the people the Mormon’s brought here because they were self sufficient, the rebels and Indian fighters on one hand and the Norwegian masons and timber men on the other hand, that there descendants are being driven from this very land by men who can’t change the oil in their car, apply a wound dressing or even grow a potato? And to these people we are supposed to bow our heads—and we are! That is the sad fact!
The road veers south as we merge right, bringing the South Hills of the five mile wide by 20 mile long, east-west valley in sight ahead and to the right. To the left now, is the towering Uinta Range, that boxes this valley in to the east with a soaring dominance that is sometimes awful. Far to the right, in the west, over the dry shoulders of the South Hills, can be seen the back of the Wasatch Mountains that tower over the Great Salt Lake. Way down there, at about 3,000 feet, in the Great Basin, in the lowland Bob despises, English Mormons from new England, Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley settled. To serve as a buffer against the wild mountain tribes, harvest it’s timber and mine it’s minerals, slaughter its buffalo and elk and run dairy herds, families from Norway and Tennessee were recruited to provide these sustaining frontier needs as the lot fled from America. America caught up quickly.
Now, one looks to the west and sees mountains scared brown in summer with the ski slopes of the sterile rich. But, further south, one can still glimpse Tipanogas, the mountain shaped like a woman lying down to die in grief. The mountains still remain, and the families of the Stonebreakers, timber men, miners, dairy men and hay farmers continue to breed in that lisping shadow.
After we pull in to the driveway, Bob’s youngest grandson visits the house; a towering 6 feet 4 inches with blond hair and blue eyes, smiling as he declares softly, I won my lunch today, wrestled [name forgotten] for it.”
His grandmother, instead of admonishing him over violence or gambling, asked, “Did you pin him?”
“Yes Grandma—and lunch tasted good!] smiling softly. This 17 year old already works as a mechanic as he finished high school.
Shaking my hand and towering in the doorway, the young man looks over me to his Grandfather and smiled wryly, “I drew and Elk Tag.” Even there, in the living room as grandma recovers from foot surgery and Grandpa ices his artificial knee in his recliner, plans were discussed for hauling the elk off whatever mountain it is taken on, with three generations lending varied hands.
Bob grins a he winces in pain, “You see, James, why we stayed—though the winters are a bitch!”
12.15.24Maud'Dib — Quote
"It is ironic, don’t you think, that the people the
Mormon’s brought here because they were self sufficient, the rebels
and Indian fighters on one hand and the Norwegian masons and timber men on
the other hand, that there descendants are being driven from this very land
by men who can’t change the oil in their car, apply a wound dressing
or even grow a potato? And to these people we are supposed to bow our
heads—and we are! That is the sad fact!"
In These Parts Afterword: Closing Report from Portland: 7/10/24
Last night I accompanied the Eskimo Wife to the Dive Bar where I was informed that I was no longer welcome in Portland after this visit expired. She did say, “You don’t have to get a motel. You can stay until its time to go.”
I nodded, finished my diet coke, as she wove drunkenly, over-served by her so-called best friend again. I asked, “Are you okay?”
She snarled and it was on.
Driving home, at night, sitting in the passenger seat of a 4-door sedan as a little Eskimo, so drunk she can barely stand, pilots a car like a dog sled down the nighted streets of Portland is something that has often made me cringe, and sometimes smile. She made it into the driveway without clipping the gear head’s car across the street again. [1] I left her sleeping in the car as I went around back, said “Hey, Big Boy,” to Crazy Dog [2] and then refilled his water bowl, which had gone dry. He and his boss dog, Rileigh, an immensely fat Ausie Shepherd, then cornered me in the kitchen as I opened a pack of Trader Joe’s Guoda cheese that went out of date last December, and started sharing it out between we dogs.
As I stood there, where I had cooked for The Chief’s Widow scores of times as she smoked cigarettes and told me of her former life, It struck me that I will miss Portland and its environs, that I understand Kelly’s “In These Parts,” at a short-lived level.
Everything is milder, even the recent heat wave, then back east. Even divorce is easier. On March 24, I thought I had left for the final time. I had, however, offered to finish the house and yard tasks that The Chief and I did not complete as he sunk into sickness. The soul has been ripped from this family. Again, this brought me to recall Kelly, being raised by a wife who had been abandoned by her husband with seven children on her hands.
Leaving is easy when the world is so big and empty, the mountains taller, the road to the next town longer. But, there is something strange and icky that hangs over all of the Pacific Northwest like a pal: government. There is even a town called Government Camp. There is a lot of signage. There might be more laws on the books back east. But that, “there should be a law,” impulse that is so basic to the American mind, waxes strong in these parts, a collective slave impulse Kelly and his friends laughed at.
That makes it more interesting to see private signage here. Earlier in Kelly’s story, he was driving across 82nd, which is a main avenue for everything local in the Southeast, including crime. It is like U.S. #40 in Baltimore, or in Denver: diners, motels, pawn shops, massage parlors. At that time, a young man, less then half his 70 years, wanted to fight him over a traffic incident marked by a mere driving point, not by a collision.
While I accompanied Wife to the bank on 82nd to get money for Gary, who is replacing a beam under the house here, I noted an armed military contractor patrolling the front of the bank. Earlier in the week, there were two of these army guys in a supermarket, with a store detective and a security guard. The day after that two military contractors patrolled Home Depot as I gathered materials for the patio extension.
Vacant homes and store fronts still yawn even as big bugman hives are being built blocks away. The busses are so empty they have to stop and park to keep from running ahead. Yet TRIMET is hiring and offering a $7500 bonus for drivers. This message blinks on every bus!
Who is coming?
What is coming?
Kelly doesn’t want to know, just wants to go down to the coast and fish, crab, clam and relax.
It has been an honor to have this man, and many others, offer to show me their homeland. This is a halting experience, to have men of a kind that are not permitted to be a native of any land, eager to show me the ruins of their transmogrified homeland in hopes that they will be able to reveal some of the beauty that was once there.
Entering the 82nd Bar and Grill, which had the ugliest and meanest [all in the same bitch] bar maid west of Baltimore, I noted a sign that prohibited Masks. Below this was also a standard sign prohibiting backpacks and hoods. I recall some 7 ears ago a bus driver refusing to continue to the end of the line with a masked passenger. He pulled over and told us that he would not continue until the likely robber took off his mask. The government that had long mandated no masks, hats, sunglasses in its facilitates, run by banks that have never permitted facial obscuring wear in its sacred precincts, in 2020, mandated criminal attire. This was done at the same time that FEDS and NGOs transported armies of looters from city to city.
Something is coming.
I walked into the Shamrock—I suppose such a bar exists in every Murkhan city—on 82nd, across the street from the other even less imaginatively named bar, and noted the same NO MASK sign. The bar keep, a nice, tattooed and pierced symbol of the city, and the cook, a middle aged man just learning his trade, were very nice. The prices were low. The place is huge, by eastern standards, 4 pool tables, 2 dart boards, a punching bag game, no gay gaming stuff.
As I went towards the everysex bathroom, I noted a sign:
“God invented liquor to keep the Irish from conquering the world.”
As I nodded agreement. I noted a hand written sign:
“Do not enter the restrooms with a backpack or bag. Store it behind the bar.”
Below this was security print still on copy paper taped to the wall. It was of a tall, blond, whigger in gray hoody, wearing a paper social distance mask, and reaching into a string bag style back pack dangling under and in front of his left arm as he drew a pistol with his right hand, as he approached the restroom from the very spot where the picture was posted.
This recalled that yesterday, at Ross discount store, 4 security men ejected 2 teenage looters of blond, skateboard demi-viking kind from that store while I stood to be “metered” for entry.
When the army of whoever these bug hives are being built for and the barely used mass transit is being expanded for, arrives, I think their might be an indigenous criminal army waiting to do barbaric battle over the crumbling civic safe space of this land that Kelly once worked, hunted, boxed, arm wrestled and misadventured in.
What a pleasant, big-hearted man.
I will miss Kelly, and these parts that have been my winter home since 2019. Here I never expect to venture again after crutching to the bus stop down to the train station this coming Sunday morning.
-James, Thursday, July 11, 2024, 105th Avenue, Southeast Portland
…
Notes
-1. She leaves notes apologizing on the windshield.
-2. A hundred pound lab/pit with telepathic powers who has asked me to stay and be his new owner since The Chief died.
How Often Has a Loser Whiteboy Been Denied? Kamas, Utah, 7/28/24
Up until two yeas ago, I was still called “boy” by the ascendant members of the master race—small case, don’t you know.
Last night Bob and Deb and I viewed The Long Game, an uplifting and wholesome movie about a Mexican-American high school golf team in 1956. There is a key scene when the Mexicans are refused service at a diner. The movie was based on a true story and the fates of the characters where related in text at the end. But, this scene seemed lifted from a Rock Hudson/James Dean movie filmed in the 1950s, Giant, I think. And with a James Dean mention in the film, we wondered.
Bob said, “James, I’ve never seen such a thing. But then again we rarely had money to eat out in those times. The Mexicans and the Indians never got treated any different then the rest of us, Tongans either. Of course the first time I met a black person I was spit on.”
I said, “I have been refused food at three locations in Baltimore,” and then began to brood, and hence this article, which I should place in Work, the most desultory memoir ever written.
This should include all refusal of service, and it will. [0]
Between 1992 and 2017 I took the bus to work, multiple buses a night and by day, numbering from 2 to 6 busses boarded per 24 hour period. However, due to being hunted by PIGz and Yoz, I walked a lot rather than waited. There was another reason I walked a lot, sometimes passing numerous bus stops and even walking to the next bus line—because, about once a month until 2006, a black bus driver with a handful of black riders would look at me and keep going. They never did this on those rare occasions when a white was on board. Some times they glared, sometimes smiled, sometimes shook their head, ‘No, whiteboy, walk’ and rolled by. I would then walk to a bus stop that was busier, at a big intersection, and when the bus, sometimes driven by the same driver an hour later, would stop for the master race, this lille Whiteboy would get on.
This did also happen from 2007 to 2015, with less frequency, about once a year, as I took far fewer busses, and walked more. From 2015 to 2017 I was never refused service by bus drivers as the blacks riding the bus were hunted out by the blacks in cars. This almost got me fired for tardiness numerous times. If not for me doing the work of two men, I would have been fired over this.
1992-2005: estimated 140, rounded down to 100, halved for misunderstanding, to 50.
The rest I shall forgive except for the day I spent 3 hours standing in wet boots in Middle River, waiting for the only bus to come. After the third time the same black bus driver pulled up, he took pity on me and let me board, not even making me pay—let’s just forgive that.
Bus service refused by blacks for the crime of being born white = 50
Cab drivers would not pick me up until I got fat in 2016. Dozens of times forgiven as they refused to pick up blacks too. I was moving up in the world.
2001, Dundalk Village, Baltimore County
Chinese restaurant owner refused me service, because I ate to much and he had seen me wolf down food at his buffet for three weeks running. I waited 1 hour for a bus transfer at this spot, and since my wife did not cook and was about to kick me out in 2002, I ate with relish, until he shut the door in my face, with good cause and no racial animus. Leaving the house at 8 PM, working from 11 at night until 7 in the morning, then training at Riverside Park with Chuck until 9 AM, walking to the Inner Harbor and boarding the #10, I had quite the appetite while awaiting the #4 bus.
2013: Rosedale Library, Baltimore County
After being invited to attend a writing group in person by the organizer, I sent in a link to my site and a copy of Buzz Bunny. I was promptly dis-invited, although I would have been the only member of the group to have been published in print. I suppose that this rejection was due to the content of my character.
2014: Highlandtown, Baltimore, Eastern Avenue
Mescaline Franklin and I were granted service by a Honduran waitress, who did not charge us for our drinks, because the Salvadoran woman cook refused to cook our meal outright. We tipped the cutie and walked after an hour.
2014: Ibis Bar, Harford Road, Baltimore City
After the pretty black barmaid eagerly served me beer, knowing that she would finally earn a tip at the all black bar, the black Jamaican man who owned it refused to cook my goat curry lunch and told her, and me, with his glaring eyes alone, to stop serving me. 1 beer and out.
2019: Epic Pharmacy, Joppa Road, Baltimore County, Liberal White owner [who it seems had read my website] gave me my medicine, refused to accept payment after 2 years of doing business there, and told me not to return.
“You’re good! Go!”
2023, June 7, 5 PM, Brennens Pub, Harford Road, Baltimore
After being cursed by ageless black Haitian midget, Juju Quartermaine at the corner of Harford and Hamilton, which did happen as I bought water from him and double paid him, thus angering the hoodoomaan, I entered Brennens’s bar. The GQ Mugging Inquest had been written at this bar! Of Lions and Men had been researched at this bar, which was essentially my living room while renting a room from Sensie Steve from 2010 thru 2017. Both black barmaids looked at me like the bus drivers of the 1990s and refused me service with a silent glare, twice, each. I count this as a single business decision.
2024, April, Safeway Pharmacy, Joppa Road and Satyr Hill at North Plaza Mall, Baltimore County.
The young gay man taking orders pretended to type in the information for the gabapentin transfer, gave it back to me, told me it would take days [when all other Safeway clerks do it the same or next day], barely suppressed a gate keeping grin, and did not enter the order or call in the transfer. Figuring he had off the next day, since that had been Wednesday, I returned, and the lovely black girl tech and the Chinese pharmacist worked together, giggling, so happy they had a visitor from Portland, to make the transfer and refill happen in ten minutes! The Pharmacy clerk at the Portland Safeway is an angel, and recalls your name on sight.
Like the black barmaids and the bus drivers, the gay man let me know I was being denied service with his eyes, voice tone and body language, something that most Americans do not believe is actual communication, when it means more than words in most violent survival and gate keeper situations.
So, how man times, over what span and for what reason has this low down cracker whiteboy been denied for:
Transportation X-50, based on race
Social gathering X-1, based on writing
Medication X-2, based on writing [1]
Food X-1, based on eating too much the previous weeks
Food/Drink X-3, based on race
It never occurred to me to complain to them or their bosses—that’s what they do.
…
Notes
-0. In the case of the writing group, it had been promoted to me, by the organizer, as a networking service, to improve chances of publisher acceptance, book sales, etc. I had been approached based on my use of the Iuniverse self publishing service to evaluate my fiction anthology Darkly.
-1. Both of these gay, white pharmacy men, one an actual pharmacist the younger a tech, had access to all of my information and had previously been effusively helpful. I think the knowledge that I traveled, indicated by strange pharmacy transfer locations, made them curious and they searched my name and discovered that the shadow of deepest evil had passed their counter top.
-2. The narrative of Work will be posted on substack, the sidebars like this at jameslafond.com.
12.10.24maud'dib — refused service in the aloha state for being howly boy
only got into asian restaurant because I had asian friend with.
refused service in minnedishue restaurant for being cracker
all kind of stairs from young bantus hating me. Old ones fine once you give
respect.
Old Stump Mingus had directed him to head north and east, “the more east the better,” once he got off of the train at Penn Station in Baltimore. He had been likewise told to use Charles Street, on which the train station—looking a wreck and under halted construction—as his west most boundary. “Until you get north of Northern Parkway, west is generally worse.”
Banjo found himself on the Orange [bus] Line, unable to use cash or card, the only customer along with the masked driver, who stiffened terrified behind his plexiglass door. Banjo pulled his sweater up over his face in order to gain admittance, and decided to walk to the other gigs once this was done.
…
He sought Coach Sink’s BJJ school on Eastern Avenue in Essex, further east. The bus, empty but for him and the terrified driver, and the computer voice of an unreal woman announcing the stops, rattled past an abandoned mall, shuttered banks, over a dirty river on an ugly bridge where a man in yellow safety vest fished the brown water fed by the golden-domed sewage plant…
‘Good God, I miss the west! I’d rather freeze in Utah than feast in this place. But your wizened angel sent me here on some mission he didn’t cook up. Is it you, Vishnu, who propels me to some purpose across this Kali Yuga world?’
As was to be expected, no answer was forthcoming from Heaven, the clues rather to be placed in the sojourning way.
Eastern Avenue, described a deserted stretch of urban blight stuck like a dirty middle finger out of the gray-paved, clay-bricked shithole city into a land that was once a pristine estuary before the coming of Money Man. Now, Back River was a sewer for millions, with the combined volume of water exceeding the Colorado, Provo, Truckee, Sacramento, Green, Bear and Duschene rivers combined.
‘A river of sin. Has my soul been stolen, derailed maybe?’
That chill reminded him that Stump had spoken of this journey as something he was no longer fit for, that Banjo was, but was too trusting.
The diner to the right was closed.
Most of the businesses to the left in the old town front, were shuttered for the world-ending plague.
The gym had its windows entirely plastered with fight posters, with no means of seeing within. He rang for the stop, and the bell did not work, as the meter had not worked to gain him entrance, or to read the e-ticket he did not have, or even take the poison cash he did have, the cash slot jammed with a folded up bus schedule.
“This stop,” he said, raising his voice.
The bus jerked to a stop without pulling over, the driver peering at him through the mirror with worried amber eyes over sweating ebony cheeks and black mask. The door opened and the masked minion in the mirror, shouted, “Next time, no mask, no ride.”
Banjo smiled as he hefted the ruck, in his left hand and slung the backpack and banjo over his right shoulder, leaving the rolling tube of hell for good.
‘Not again, my never friend.’
Banjo crossed the street to the west side, counted how many doors down the gym was, then walked around and approached the back door from the alley, a dirty white cat and a giant black rat halting their scuffle and leaping out of his way.
A tall Slavic man, with a boxer’s nose and the build of a sambo champion, stood grinning in the doorway.
He eyed Banjo as they shook hands, a shake that was a test of strength and suppleness, “You are a bit light, but will do. I have a fight in Dubai. You help me prep for that, then stay and watch the place, sanitize the mats, spar with my team and you have a place to lay your head, provided…”
“Provided what, Coach?”
“Provided you can roll with me for the next hour, until my team gets here—then you box with them. If your work is good, you’re in.”
Banjo’s inner voice rose with a roar of confidence in his heart, a roar he muffled to an easy whisper for the world, whose monstrous keen ears he did not trust, “Then I’ll make myself at home—the threshold will be mine.”
The man pulled him in easily, with a wry grin, and shut the door, “Good work then.”
Banjo looked around and Coach pointed to a dressing room door, “Stow your gear there, and sleep on the mats after you clean them. You’ll get the key to this and the front door as soon as you keep me from gaining side control off a takedown. You won’t avoid the take down, but I expect you to sprawl like you could.”
Avoid the take down he would, he knew, the inner flame within him, certain as the steel in Old Stump’s ruck, and as cold.
…
Ninety minutes on the mat with the monster called Sink and they sat, the keys pulled up off a neck knife ring from under that soaked blue gi, and tossed across the sweat-streaked mat.
One stuffed takedown out of ten had convinced the Coach. Then, as Banjo scrambled and escaped twice, then earned a reversal out the back door from guard while some of the fighters rolled in and watched from the wall, he knew he had a place to lay his head.
Banjo grinned, “Thanks for not gong Quinton Jackson on me—you’re a beast.”
Sink grinned, then introduced the team. Banjo had a sweat-reeking home while he found work from the names and numbers—names and numbers on paper, not phone contacts, old bullheads who still used land lines. He broke as the fresh men rolled and Sink oversaw their work, took out the wallet from his jeans folded under the chair on his boots. From within he read the list folded in the wallet within, for a hundredth time, in case anything happened to it, like a night out in the rain. The description on the ATM receipt was in blue ink, from Stump’s shaking hand.
With the slap of back and hand on mat as a background, in his mind’s foreground he could hear the old bum’s voice grate steady as his hand printed unsteadily, while the Chinese girl named, “Min” looked on, seeming afraid that her ownership was going to be transferred again. He would never forget her smile of relief when she finally figured out that her savior was signing over his train tickets and vouchers, and not her.
The letters were jagged large case print, the numbers crunched and lacking inner voids, 0s looking almost like a small case c, 4s and 1s almost indistinguishable. His own clarification print was repeated under the questionably wrought numbers.
“Doctor Daniel Landon, orthopedic surgeon, renegade shock doc, needs a door man in his ghetto clinic, 410-621-8888”
‘What the hell? A bouncer for a doctor’s office?’
“Danny Wilson, BIG titties, needy widow, pianist, can’t cook, 443-869-1626”
‘Like this can’t get entangled.’
Banjo sat against the wall, pretty sure he had just been concussed on the ninth takedown, the one where he got slammed against the wall first, tried to commit this list to memory, like an Irish James Bond, folded it, convinced the numbers might slip or combine in his mind. Feeling the world spin on its uncaring axis, he closed his eyes only to hear Coach Sink bark, “Banjo, on deck for round robin hands—glove up; no shins.”
“Yes, Sir,” he whispered with a self-effacing grin, as the real hazing began.
‘All four are ten years younger than me—never knew forty would feel so old.’
‘You knew, whispered some evil monkey in his mind—you just failed to accept me.’
Grunt Role Playing Game Episode Creation & Play # 6
Episode Creation & Play
A historical and a poetic episode are each presented. Each may begin the start of an Epic, traditionally called in RPGs, a campaign.
The Agrianes Yielded Nothing
In a little known campaign in the mountains of Asia Minor, an Asiatic tribe defied Alexander. These people held a severe mountain pass and, according to Arrian, were a tribe of a renown race of warriors. A key height was occupied by Alexander’s advance light troops, the Archers and the Agrianes. The archers in Alexander’s service were often subject to terrible casualties. The loss of no less then three “brigadier” generals commanding them attested to their use at close range with no armor. As the barbarian warriors counter attacked, they drove the archers from the hill, but “the Agrianes yielded nothing.”
The Agrianes were semi-barbarian volunteers who fought in an ethnic block and seem to have been armed in three fashions: 200 Royal Agriane Guards, light hoplites [similar to the Arkadian battalion of the Spartan army, known as the Skiratt], 200 slingers [shepherds], and 600 Thracian-style peltasts, probably owning small, mixed agricultural plots. This was Alexander’s elite strike force, seeing 65 actions and rarely suffering significant casualties. For this reason I suppose an integrated force, with small units reflecting that mix, and preventing enemy light forces and horse to wipe out what most historians assume were simply light armed peltasts.
For this adventure, the players roll to determine their position in an overrun file of Agrianes:
Clitus, File Leader [Sargent], cowherd, hunter
Armor: Aspis, heavy shield, [3] Corinthian helmet [1]
The characters should each gain a re-roll on Stamina, Agility, Knit and Animism.
Additional players are all peltasts like Glaukus.
Names: Phrynon, Eurymachus, Aretion, Timon, Creon
…
Missian Enemy
These foes number 10. Nine of these are peltasts.
There abilities should be rolled as so:
1d6
1-2 = 2
3-5 = 3
6 = 4
The tenth man is the file leader, and is armed with 2 throwing axes [2] and 1 battle ax [4]. He has a 6 pathos, 3 Discord, 3 Fear and 3 Panic.
His abilities will be rolled on the same table as his men, with one re-roll permitted for Body, Mind & Spirit.
…
The goal of the episode is to hold on the hill against superior numbers for 5 rounds of combat.
-Elimination of the Missians is a decisive victory.
-Breaking of the Missians a marginal victory.
-Holding without breaking or being wiped out is a draw, as, on the 6th round, the Foot Companions, in heavy armor come to the relief. The Agrianes are being used as bait.
-Being wiped out is an honorable end, also a draw as this is a holding action, with any KO’d or maimed warriors rewarded and the slain given a heroes burial.
-Breaking is unacceptable and is the only means of defeat.
If the players like, this might be the beginning of a campaign with increased pathos, mania and skill helping these front line fighters campaign with Alexander into India. If this is desired, all characters who did not runaway get rewarded and increase in applicable areas of ability, mania, skill and pathos. Any players whose character’s are slain may roll up a new replacement of that grade [Guard, Slinger, Pelast] and follow the veterans into glory.
My book, The Son of God, will detail all of Alexander’s battles for those interested in such a campaign. At this point, the Agrianes already have a dozen actions behind them.
…
Heroat Hall
House Carls Defend the King’s Hall against Grendel
This is a horror show. The players should try and have fun being slaughtered. Whoever does the most damage against he monster should play Beowulf in the rematch, with the others playing his Shieldmen.
Carls are rolled at random, with a 1-6 Pathos and 0-2 mania scores. They must roll a successful agility check to get their shield to arm and another to grab their spear. Swords are considered at hand.
Armor: leather coat sewn with iron rings & helmet [3], shield [3]. If a house carl only has a 3 strength, then he subtracts 3 from his agility damage reduction.
Arms: spear [3], sword [3].
Grendel (see bestiary at end of equipment for reference]
Pathos = 12
Body = 23
Strength = 12 [giant monsters roll 1d20 for strength checks but do base strength damage, Grendel doing a minimum of 14, 12 strength + 2 for claws or fangs]
Stamina = 6
Agility = 5 [-1 damage for hide, for a 6 damage reduction]
Discord = 9
…
Mind = 9
Knit = 4
Kit = 2
Wit = 3
Fear = 9
…
Spirit = 9
Animism =6
Social =1
Esoteric =2
Rout =9
…
After this horrific introduction, one might wish to begin a campaign in which Beowulf is insulted at drink on arrival and either yarns or duels with his heckler, then his Shieldmen lay in ambush for Grendel in the hall, then hunt his mother, then fight a battle against Skraelings, and then fight the Dragon.
Wending Shield Men
Pathos = 5, 6 or 7 [roll 1d6], manias are rolled on 1d6, abilities random with 2 re-rolls on Body
Armor: Brass or oiled iron scale coats and bore tusk helmets [4] shields [3] (Since no man has a 7 strength, such armor will result in loss of agility damage reduction.)
Arms: Spear [3], Sword [3]
Beowulf
Pathos = 20
Body = 18
Strength = 6
Stamina = 6
Agility = 6
Discord = 12
…
Mind = 14
Knit = 6
Kit = 3
Wit = 5
Fear = 9
Skill: Swimming, Dueling, Rally, Diving, Wrestling, Stalking [Grendel], Hunting [Grendel’s mother], see equipment for effects. Beowulf does, in the poem, set aside an advantage roll attack and sue it to make his wrestling [knit score] skill check and reduces grappling damage.
…
Spirit = 14
Animism = 6
Social = 5
Esoteric = 3
Rout = 6 (This is the 1d20 pursuit of broken foe ability, which he fails as Grendel escapes.)
Beowulf is armed and armored like his fellows, but has a remarkable sword [4]
…
Epiloguery
Below are some outlines for Episodes I plan on eventually writing and publishing on the web site.
-3. Primal Episodes: 3 Ice Age Hunts
Mammoth Hunters versus Auroch Hunters circa 30,000 B.P.
-4. Mythic Episodes: 7 Footfalls of the Distant One
The Early Bronze Age characters face the foes of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.
-5. Ancient Episodes: 3 Feats for Alexander
Tasks assigned to the famed Agriane warriors from 336 through 323 B.C.
-6. Dark Age Episodes: 3 Viking Raids
Like you would want to play anything but a Viking?
-7. Early Modern Episodes: 3 Foraging Forays
Hundred Years War, 30 Years War, Seven Years War
-8. Harm City Adventures: 3 Gang Fights
Baltimore Groes, Joliet Jocks, Oakland Tweakers versus the Player Gang
-9. Dark Future Episodes: Foes from The Last Whiteman
In These Parts Epilogue: Three Monologues Given as Kelly Drives: July 6, 2024
When I say I ran the bar—which is the Electric Lettuce place up there on Foster now—I meant that I was the regular that helped the owner out with his deal. We, my friends and I, the boxers and wrestlers mostly, we had a regular table. We ran a tab. If there was any trouble, we waited to see if the owner could handle it. If not, we handled it, like the time I got maced!
I was in stumbling distance of the house I was buying at the time, this house. If there was something the owner wanted. I brought it to him. He liked coke, but his deal was weed. He was the only person I ever brought stuff to. It was cool. If we wanted to stay and fuck the bar maid—who was crazy—on the pool table, it was all good, so long as we didn’t make a mess.
[laughter]
I was dating his daughter, who was crazy. She was great, but was living in one of the grow houses! Her mother is buying corvettes and shit, and I could see the trouble on the wall, and said, “I just can’t be around you any more—this deal is gonna go bad.” And it did, in a big way and I was thankfully far away.
Yesterday, [his wife, who he always calls by name and never title] and I were driving across Hood River and there was this fruit stand, first big fresh fruit stand of the year, and she wants to stop and get some apples.
[His wife can be heard in the background groaning, “Here we go, Kelly talking about produce again, apple gas levels!”]
Apples! [he grins] are out of season. They’re not gonna be any good, especially with how this idiot is like to have handled them after he got them out of storage. When these things get picked, they get stored in negative pressure, and sealed with a coating that is going to keep any ripening process at bay for a year. Now, when you are a roadside guy, you’re not selling to people who know, so there you go, she gets her apples—I told her only to buy two—and they were terrible. She takes a bite and complains that they’re not fresh and I’m like, don’t worry, if they would have kept them another five months under negative pressure and released them at least at a time when they were designed to ripen, they’d be fine!
[laughter]
So, apples, put off ethylene, a gas, that causes other fruits they are stored with to ripen, so you have your apple room, or since the things are wax sealed, you do what you guys on the night crews did, park them on the dock away from the more sensitive fruit, which, of course, goes in the cooler. You want to ripen an avocado, put it in a bag with an apple.
Bananas are an even bigger deal, because they come from out of the country, your #1 green and inedible, [basically the way the big wholesaler gets them], your #2 starting to ripen, your #3 green and yellow, your #4 yellow, and your #5 spotted and you better fuckin’ sell it today. This process factors into the day chance rush, and the deal with the sorting system and secondary and discount outlet billing, credit, what have you.
The banana room is something I was offered to run when driving was just getting too tough. But, one mistake, and you just lost the boss a bunch of money. The company spent a ton of money for a banana room where the fruit could be hit with gas, or hit with cool air, where the gas could be vented off. That guy, whoever ran that, could do well, but if something went wrong it was his ass—too much for me. I’d rather be over the road. I used the credit book, which was as good as a check book in produce, to smooth things out with the clients and get more deliveries done in less time with less shock to the produce. Some guys just want to make it rough on you at the door because its their store and you’re the driver. So I made it easy on them. You have to, because you have some stores where easy does not fly, where there is no home for a smooth delivery, sound ordinances, what have you. Hauling an entire trailer down a ramp with a dolly is something that bites into your time and your body.
[Kelly pulls over above a body of water to survey hundreds of canoes, kayaks, boats, pontoons and white water rafts, country music playing, American flags waving, good looking young ladies in bikinis smiling. Over half the trees on the mountainsides above are standing charred and dead from a forest fire. The mountains are sheathed in green, even moss clinging to shear rock faces.]
You see, its beautiful even now. Some asshole burned it with tanarite five years ago. Now, a woman or some dude from the butt hurt city, will look at this and cry, want to make someone pay. But the mountain don’t give a shit. Those trees are toothpicks compared to what’s forty miles up the river, trees so big around we couldn’t hug them together. Even here, some trees were missed and look at all the green! Look at the berries, the feed, the young trees sprouting from this gnarly ass mountain! You can see, after the burn, how rugged it is, doesn’t look so picture perfect as the trees make it seem in maturity.
Point is, I walked these hills, hunted these hills, fished the creeks and rivers. By the time some kid is my age, it will look like it did when I was his age and the ash will have fed that forest like mother’s milk. When you walk the land, rather than fly or drive, you get less ruffled. Like my friends who made it back from Vietnam—and some of them didn’t; in these parts we lost a lot of men, on the ground, to that raw deal war. But, what is the sense in being angry about something that was done fifty years ago—I mean done? The men I knew who walked the ground, they’re not all butt hurt about it. But the fliers [aviators], the big wigs [officers], the Monday Morning quarterbacks, they are the ones who are butt hurt over it, like the woman who never hunted a bear looking at this and crying about the burnt tree, a tree where the bear can still sharpen its claws in what is to a bear a Garden of Eden—prime habitat.
It’s nice to be up here with your, Brother. Glad you get to see the mountains of my youth.
Kelly likes to watch a show set in Sturgis, the summer biker mecca of legend. After speaking with him last night, I understand why. We had two shots and 3 beers over 2 hours as he strung a few yarns together.
The night before, this gimp a few hours into town, had joined Kelly, Ken and Duke at Red’s Bar and Grille on Taco Tuesday, the ladies at another table. He bought me two double shots and I bought us two pitchers. Making room for Duke, he knocked over the nearly empty pitcher and I used a napkin to mop it up and squeeze it back into the pitcher and refilled the glasses. Kelly new Duke of old and teased him about his preference for Bud Light, “I’m only fuggin’ with yah, brother, because you have a fuggin’ hole in your throat and can’t talk back!”
Kelly is so big he has to sit at the end of the table, like a viking king attended by his house carls, his arms way bigger then my thighs.
“Brother, I boxed and wrestled between 180 and 210—I’ve gone to shit!”
He smiled tolerantly as Ken relived one of his oft repeated Vietnam stories, he and Duke both veterans of that war.
…
At his home the next night, the ladies on the porch smoking and us seated in his living room, him wrestling with his 25 pound dog, Cooper with his right hand and drinking a Busch lite with his left he smiled:
Heard you fell asleep at Andy’s! I’m not takin’ the heat for that! Go light tonight. You know, after last night, finding out that Ken his been dragging that old fugger Duke to all of his doctors appointments, managing his medical care—like what most people won’t do for their own parents—I have a lot of respect for Ken; will make it easier to listen to his same old war stories. Poor dude’s got fucked in that war, like a vinyl record got scratched so it replays the same song in their head—fuck, what a bad deal. I never trusted the government enough to get involved in any of their bullshit.
You ever been maced?
[no, nods the runt to the giant]
You’re not missing much—fuggin’ sucks!
Happened to me right up the street here, at that bar. [Name forgotten and since changed.] I used to run the place, meaning I had a tab there, worked 60 hours a week and drank there 20, about $150 dollar a week tab when beers were $1.50. Well, somebody gets bumped, apology isn’t enough I guess, and this dude wants to fight. I’m like, brother this only runs one way, let it go. But his woman is egging him on. He can’t stand the heat, not for a second and this bitch maces me, the bear spray, right in the eyes. I was fuggin’ blind. So, I grabbed him, turned him [mimes leaning back against a wall] and choked him, choked him out with the forearm across the coratid. I was afraid he was dead—was lucky I didn’t break his neck. She wouldn’t let up. I’m not one for hittin’ women, but since I was blind, it could have been anyone that hit the floor from that punch!
…
Okay, so here’s one for the book. Don’t know why this reminded my of that. So, there was this old biker dude in Forest Grove. He had a 220 pound bull mastiff chained to a clothes pole with a logging chain. That dog hated me. Never did nothin’ to that dog, and it just hated me, bent that pole trying to get loose. I’m walkin’ home from school one day, and he finally snaps that chain. I ran all the way across Forest Grove on porches and over cars, running along parked cars—that thing could have killed me. I get to my friend’s house and his mom and grand mom are like, “He’s not here,” and I came in any how. They called the police and the cops would have killed it if old Verb had not come and got him.
Verb was a mechanic, used to buy the surplus little willy jeeps that came in the crate on the pallet, with that little 4 cylinder Hurricane engine and fix them up and sell them, would make ten times his money. He helped us learn on our motorcycles. I drove around on a Yamaha 180. He needed his roof shingled and no body had the balls to do it, it was so steep. He paid me and my friend, the same kid whose house I ran to from his dog, to shingle his barn roof. We set the shingles too tight and some of them popped and cracked. The next year he called us up and we went and fixed it—that’s the way it was. This was in the 1960s. Verb was old as dirt and he passed.
His wife asked us to come over. She said, “Verb has something out back for you. Go pick one out.”
We go behind the barn and there are three bikes there, there are two Harleys. My buddy sees an Indian, Chief, with the Indian right on the front, and he says, “That’s mine!”
I didn’t care. I was getting’ a free Harley, a 1947 Panhead.
So there we go, my buddy and me, driving out to Sturgis, fucking South Dakota. You gotta be a young, stupid motherfucker to ride a panhead for two days; only does 55 [miles per hour] and burning your leg, leaking oil.
So, and here is another arm wrestling story for later, you go out past Bend, Oregon, and you’re in the desert for two hundred miles of bumfuck nothin’. We were coming up on Ontario, Oregon, almost to Idaho, It’s a hard way to go, especially on a bike. We’re 18, young and dumb. We pull up on this sign, that says BEE CROSSING AHEAD, 5 MPH.
My buddy is like, “Fuck that, that’s a prank.”
Sign looked official to me, so I obeyed and did 5 MPH. No shit, I was rumbling through a swarm of bees, the bee hives on one side of the road and the clover on the other side. I stayed cool and did not get stung. Then I find my buddy laid out on the side of the road with his Indian, all stung up. Bees don’t like speeding!
So, it was such an experience, rolling into Sturgis with FBI all lining the road with their Hollywood movie cameras spying on you. There were these bikers there that wanted my panhead and were fixing to take it. Now, there was this guy who I didn’t know from no body [name forgotten] and he was the president of Brothers Speed, they still have a club over there [points to southeast]. He told them bikers that I was his brother and not to fuck with me, that I had more balls then them being wet behind the ears and driving that thing across country. I couldn’t afford to fix it up properly, so ended up selling it later. I got a good deal riding back in the van with the girls they had brought along, with the trailer rig that they brought for any bikes that might get wrecked.
I always loved fishing. I used to swim down the Columbia River and dive for tackle and line, cleaning up the bottom. Never had no sons of my own. But I love kids, fishing should be all about kids to me, at least sport fishing. Basically, you have commercial fishing, then tribal fishing, then sports fishing. Sports fishermen take the least and put the most money into the fishery programs. In these parts, the Indians have a whole nother level of writes that you have to respect.
One time I was up lake [forgotten by writer] fishing from a canoe when I saw this kid just sitting there on sore. I paddled up and asked him if he was okay. There were people all over the place for the weekend. He said his dad was passed out drunk in the tent, not even dinner time yet. So I loaded him up and taught him the rudiments of canoeing and fishing.
Shrimping is great, but you do it in deep water with weights and a winch. You could haul that pot up 400 feet by hand, but its not advised.
My buddy and I were fishing up at [writer forgets name] Lake one time and there were these squirrel hinters up there. They had women and children and ATVs with .22s mounted on swivels. They almost got caught and ditched their bag of squirrels and told the rangers it was us. We have fishing tackle and .357s! We pointed to those guys and said, “They have the squirrel rig—any of those little things have their head blown off by a .357? I’m a meat hunter, and I would not waste the time taking a life for an ounce of meat.”
The rangers leave us be. But these fuggers, they got their wives and its summer time and they have a generator going in their camp—no good for fishing or sleeping. After it got dark, we had this one girl, kind of a riskay girl, if you know what I mean, and we give her a can of coke and she sneaks over there and pours it into their generator. By the time she is back, its sucking wind and the fellow is trying to start it. We go over, wearing our cowboy gun rigs, and ask if we can help, and console the guy, explaining to him that generators don’t last forever, while the women were gathering up the kids, afraid we were bad men. We weren’t goin’ to start no shit with them, they were the guys with the hunting rigs!
Kids are great. There is this little fella up the street that comes down with his father and helps in the yard some since my knees are so bad. He gets whatever he wants, antique matchbox cars, all the fishing tackle he likes. Ain’t no sense in hoarding shit when you got but a few good years left.
[Kelly looks across the table, this July 4th, 2024, and smiles to the Chief’s Widow and addresses her.]
My favorite place to fish was up around Sitka, in Alaska, your neck of the woods. For the most part the crabs and shellfish were reserved for the natives. We took Chinook and Sockeye. We run into this one blond, blue eyed fella, and he asks us if we’d like to take some clams. We couldn’t, we weren’t native. He says, “I’m native, got my card to prove it, you can clam on my permit.”
What the hell? This guy was a blond as can be.
So, we take our buckets and when the tide goes out, goes way out, we’re walking out there gathering clams, digging them up with our hands. These two guys come by on ATVs and tell us the tide is coming in and asked if we wanted a lift. We said, “Oh, no, we can walk!”
[The Alaskan woman laughs.]
Yeah, you know what happened, fuggin’ twenty foot tide in no time is what happened!
[general laughter]
We were running with our bucket for the river mouth, which was no wider than this table. Those guys on the ATVs were just watching and laughing.
Then, this Old Indian sees us with our clams the next day and says, “You boys are stupid,” not because we almost got drowned by the tide, but because we were digging. He showed us, when the tide went out, how it cuts a new channel each time in the sand. He walks along and kicks the bank of the new channel and clams just fall out—so we ate our fill. There must have been a hundred bald eagles at the mouth of that little river.
I had this big dog, a Doberman, I took fishing with me alone up there; slept on the pier. These pipeline guys, they worked 14 days on and 14 days off, and they’d come down and fish and use old refrigerators on plywood as smokers for the salmon. They had these big ass Alaskan dog breeds, kept saying their dogs could beat mine, but then also wanted to buy my dog. He was a good dog—not for sale. Those guys did well. I was offered a job on the pipeline—the pipe is as big as this house, built up off the ground in spots for the elk and caribou to graze. That was too much time alone for me. Those guys not only made out, but they got to buy gold from the guys on the North Slope for $200 an ounce, because the goldminers didn’t want to have to pay the taxes on the gold transfer.
I go down this one road, and I see a sign, that 46 Moose have been killed this year, on this road, and to be careful. The next day, the sign has been changed to 47 and you see this big moose on a tow truck being hauled off and the car is in the ditch. Once your car its a moose, the moose meat is worth far more than that piece of junk, so in the ditch it goes. I asked the driver, “What, do you feed the moose to the prisoners?”
He says, “Hell no! Jailbirds eat salmon for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This moose goes to orphans and the poor and elderly.”
My salmon, I like dry, like to cure it with brown sugar and apple cider, run it in the smoker for a good seven, eight hours.
Actual Biographical Events in the Under Life of Banjo
2020 Grand Junction Colorado
A cold April wind was blowing down off the Book Cliffs. Banjo had come by bus to play at the Goat and Clover Irish-themed pub, a place that did Irish much better than most of the phony American venues. They didn’t even want blue grass, but some picker in a corner strumming a melody for the nubile dancers in their plaid skirts. Well, he could handle that view for a couple hours he supposed. Part of him had looked forward to this. The booker had been so eager back in early March. Now, silence and a “mailbox is full” automated voice greeted his phone call.
Now, on April Fools day of all days, the world seemed to be progressively losing its mind over a cold. The Goat and Clover was “closed for Covid.”
A wounded person, a man by his gait, was limping up to his side.
“This is exactly why I left Denver!” he whispered to himself, for Banjo never raised his voice—never, not in the world.
The man was shorter, just below average height, with a deep nasal voice, “Why my broken ass left Portland.”
The man was already looking at Banjo like he was assessing him as a used human to be sold on a used car lot, determining what price was to be written in grease pen on the inside window.
‘That must be an art. How do they do it—if they write on the outside, the price might be tampered with. Used cars can’t be that high-trust a business.’
“You are a man of contemplation, for your young years, I see.”
The man extended his shaking hand, a large one for his size, an arthritic hand that was palsied a bit, but not too much.
“Stump.”
Banjo grinned, nodding to the banjo slung from his back, “Banjo… why Stump? You’re not that short.”
The old fellow raised his left hand do show two missing fingers, the small ones, “Left hook ain’t worth scratch with the ring finger missing, so coach called me Stump and it stuck.”
“Where from?”
“Ah, the Mid Atlantic Mud Mouth Dialect betrayed me. Baltimore—got too old to dodge spears so I tramp about cornerin’ at small gyms, until this shamdemic hit and the bitch world lost it’s bowl of Prosac.”
“We’re in a bit of the same spot then, Stump. You know where we could get a coffee?”
“Yezzir,” grinned the old man, not so old as he looked, despite the coffee stained teeth, “came over here from there loogin’ fo a soul to steal.”
A chill lit up his spine, igniting a quizzical twitch of his left eye. This was noted by Stump, who apologized, “Simply wanted to exchange my place on Fate’s night train with some fellow more able.”
The old comic cipher nodded for Banjo to follow, Grumbling over his shoulder, “ ‘sides, I couldn’ ‘ave took you when I was young. You have the easy gait of a wolf.”
Banjo smiled, “You were stalking me?”
“Just that dry watering hole, eye out for a man who did not belong, looking for coffee where its opposite spring wells up.”
Banjo caught up to speak side-to-side, for there was no one to step aside, the place a literal ghost town.
“Something is the matter with your hips, both of them.”
“Both?” the man winced with a pain of realization beyond that of his battered frame, “Thought the left one was healed—seemed my knee and back, not either hip.”
“I studied Chinese Medicine under a Joe West—lives in a cave, or did, near Hot Springs, Montana.”
The man looked up at him seriously, “You have a trustworthy bearing, ain’ enough deception in you for what’s commin’.”
Banjo grinned, “You believe me, a stranger, just like that?”
“You’re not a stranger—we shook hands. ‘sides, you walk wary, but not like a cat. My resolve is up, if you think I’m about to rattle apart.”
They had turned left off of Main past the hotels and were headed to the train station, off a block to the east.
“Resolve for what?”
“You have the same sense about me, don’t you, that I’m not workin’ you.”
“Yes. Resolve for what?”
“Already the parent in this crew, aye? Okay…”
Stump stopped, drew in some air, which seemed to hurt him somewhere, and obviously looked back at himself through time. “I was never a catch. But I was once a sawed off version of you. Women of a certain kind took to me. This one, a rich one, let me go, insisted I was being replaced by a great big hockey player and told me to take all the clothes she had bought, with me—she had dressed me up to meet her friends so they wouldn’t know that she recruited some white trash at Jake “The Snake’s” gym. I had my pride, so looked for a man my size, and gave him the clothes at a bus stop at Light and Pratt—a man in need, looking for a job with holes in his shoes. So, with Time herself giving me the heave ho, I came looking for you, not wanting to make a gift to some tweaker or junkie of what I have to give.”
“A gift?”
“A shift, let’s say. The devil done caught up with me on my way back to see my family, who have told me not to come, bringin’ the plague as they believe. I will not be able to use these train tickets to see my grand children one last time. So, was lookin’ for a good man to send to some place bad—which is the way I figure it ought to go.”
They were in sight of the Good Will Center. The many coffee pots could be seen lined up in the window. But only staff were within, the homeless and the needy in line for coffee in the lot. Away from the line was a pretty Asian girl in a white business suit standing with a large white roll-on suitcase next to an old tattered military rucksack. Her eyes lit up when she saw them.
“Stump interpreted as they crossed the street towards her, “I have Amtrak tickets and credits, which I want to transfer to you. I have names, men of the type who stay in business at such times as this, men who make good off of bad. All you have is that small pack and the banjo in the case?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then you can have my ruck as well—won’t be needing it. I wear, as you can see, pants and shirts three sizes too big, hand offs from six footers mostly. The clothes will fit—and there are things in there, legal things, no drugs or bombs or such: camping gear, that might serve you well.”
The woman was not yet thirty and on her tip toes like a returning hero was come to rescue her from a dragon’s den.
“Conditions?”
“None. You goin’ to that place that spat me out. That’s enough. You see here, this pretty thing terrified of this horseshit panic, has give me a reason to stay put.”
They came to the young lady who hugged the old fellow and, tears in her eyes, whispered, “Mingus.” Banjo could tell she was just off the boat, unlikely to have much English.
“So your given name is Mingus?” he raised his eye brows.
“Got her for three packs of Cigs in Oakland from some lowlife of her kind. He was plain terrified of the plague and convinced that cigarettes would keep off the death wind—can you believe that, kicking a girl to the curb like that?”
“People are being revealed for who they are,” opined Banjo.
The man winked over her tiny black haired head, “Tried to convince her I was Genghis Khan, thinking she was Mongolian. But she’s Han, was havin’ none of it.”
The woman was smiling and petting the beard of her apparent savior, “Mingus, me Mingus.”
“Stump, Mingus” whoever he was, patted the girl’s shoulder, nodded to the rucksack and hefted her things. Banjo, taking his lead, hefted the ruck, which had something heavy and metal in it, and they headed to the train station, three easy blocks away. Despite putting on the appearance of health, Banjo could tell that Stump was having a hard time, simply walking wheeling the carry on behind him with his left hand as she held his right, and walked happily between them.
“You be okay, Mingus Khan?”
“Truth is, I hope the heart gives out tonight. But if Him that cast it down is not done with this broken toy, we’ll see about a bus to Vegas, ged dis beauty married up, and then I try en wait out the legalities long enough for her to collect on whad I earned bending the knee ta this damned world.”
“From here, looks like you’re getting the best of the deal.”
Stump grinned, “What deal? I’m trickstering the only drifter in this town likely to be better for this discarded girl to take the train. This is my moment!”
“Thanks, Stump. I’ll need those contacts—never been to Baltimore and heard its a rough place.”
“You will have them and they will be glad to have you.”
‘She is as content as a cat prancing between two dogs could be.’
“I hope you last, Stump. Be careful with your hips.”
The old fellow grinned and ground his coffee-stained teeth with some trepidation creeping into his narrow, gray eyes.
Not sure if this is automatic or not, but wanted to reply and compliment you and your work.
I discovered you recently on myth of the twentieth century, and am thoroughly enjoying going back through your interviews with them.
I'm a 27 year old NZ antipodean, and am attempting to confront a lot of issues that you raise re masculinity and general civilisational outlook. This is especially the case as it relates to violence, and the extreme pressure on men to not defend themselves, or confront those who insult them in their environment. Both the form and content of your perspective speaks to a part of myself that I've always known existed, but lacked the conceptual framework whereby I could understand it.
I'd returned to writing and begun boxing recently anyway, but your approach to these areas has invigorated my will in a way that is dearly held. Especially the confidence in your writing, and the lack of regard for dogma, or formalized approaches.
You're having an international impact sir, and I'm honored that you'd freely send a piece of your work.
Cheers for your time.
Jack
On Tue, 19 Nov 2024, 2:39 pm JL Bookstore,
Jack, I read this a couple of days back and saved it hoping that life would help back light your comments on boxing, dogma, writing and will, which I sensed at the time were more cohesive than I was picking up at the moment. i simply had an instinct that boxing and writing together are conjoined twins of the soul. A few days later I have returned home from a surprise dinner outing with a man who boxed long before we met and rejoined that fraternity after reading here, on this site. He brought along his absolutely beautiful woman with whom we had a nice ramble of conversation. Such interwoven narratives remind me that each boxing round is a chapter in a story of sorts.
Boxing and writing, for reasons I do not clearly understand, have coexisted in the same will more than any other physical and mental cultures. In both circles, the man from the mirror circle has increased credibility. Boxers have a high regard for the boxer who also writes. Likewise, writers have a higher regard for the writer who also boxes.
There is more here surely.
I will leave the subject hanging for the many boxers and many writers among the readership of this site to consider.
Thank you all for stepping out of time and visiting here.
12.02.24Webbie — I can tell you that I typically ask someone if they've boxed 'or
have experience with martial arts' or are a combat veteran, to see if
they're tested / real / balanced / trustworthy / unchanged / authentic
/ human / ...
I have nor repeated the rules for pathos, mania, folly, madness and berserk from Chapter 3.
Mind’s Eye
Before a combat of some type, a hero may decide to seek a vision at a glance, taking in whatever the field of battle, a fencing strip, a boxing ring, a battle array or a siege, and trust to his intuition. A 1d6 check against Esoteric grants a temporary increase in Pathos equal to the die difference. If those temporary pathos points prove crucial, that is necessary, for prevailing in the pathos roll, then they become permanent.
Rounds
Combat in Grunt is conducted in rounds, with some actions done in “you go, I go” fashion, and some simultaneous. The length of a round is abstract, and may represent seconds of dueling, minutes of battle or hours of hunting.
Mania
Once in every combat of any kind, any hero may apply a single Mania score to an action:
Discord to Pathos,
Fear to damage reduction, and
Rout to damage.
If any such action results in success: In Pathos Advantage, avoiding death or disability, or taking life and cheering War on his scalp-draped throne of discord, that mania score is increased by 1.
Once a hero has reached a mania of 6, it can be obvious that he will steadily gain that mania and also pathos. I do not propose a limit to adding discord to pathos. But a roll playing solution. By the time Alexander returned to Babylon he was over 30 in pathos and 18 in Discord. He would have to roll 20s or be killed to loose in a military action. The Chaldeans had him poisoned.
Pathos
Before a combat, the foes, and in case of a battle or team fight, the leaders, make a pathos check. Whichever has the highest die difference, being a roll on 1d20 lower than the pathos score, gains advantages equal to the difference in the lower die difference and the higher, for his side. This has been covered earlier with Achilles and Sarpedon.
If the losing pathos hero rolls over his pathos score, he gains 1 disadvantage. This score, his over roll, is not factored in the advantages of his foe, who simply takes his raw die difference, between his score and roll, as his number of advantages. This is probably a disaster.
Pathos advantages and disadvantages must all be used in the first round of combat. These represent the initial favor of Fate or Fortune, with War and his three servants taking the 2nd round and on.
Dueling
Including boxing, wrestling, MMA, stick-fighting, sword fighting, knife-fighting and gladiatorial combat, pistol dueling, are forms of ritual combat in which the foes agree to certain limits on their actions [like not leaping into the stands at the arena, but fighting it out, or ducking during a pistol duel] and are usually supervised, or, held to a strict code of honor.
Note: The damage done in unarmed combats are covered under equipment, as is defending.
Preceding a duel the following checks are made:
-Minds Eye
-Pathos
-Knit: 1d6 check for damage reduction
-Kit: 1d6 check for damage augmentation
-Wit: 1d6 check for advantage/disadvantage, meaning one might overthink the duel and gain a disadvantage. Wit disadvantages and advantages are additional to those in pathos and may result in rolls and counter roll cycles.
A dueling round is simultaneous.
The duelist’s each make an Overall Body Check, with no factoring of damage done until advantage and disadvantage rolls are all exhausted. Advantage and disadvantage re-rolls are NOT applied to damage results. Damage reduction and augmentation is covered in more detail under equipment.
Once the rolls have been made, a duelist who has missed his check and rolled higher than his Body takes a number of damage equal to the difference—oops, ran into that jab!
Then, the hero who has rolled under his Body inflicts Strength+Weapon+Knit, Minus the Armor and Agility of the other.
Dedicated Defense
At the start of a round, a player may announce that he is dedicating his weapon to defense. His knit will not be factored for damage, if he is successful. However, it may now be used for damage reduction if he is hit.
Nuances
Balk: If their natural die Roll is the same, they both inflict ZERO damage.
Time & Measure: If both make their body check, the hero with the lower natural roll, which may not have succeeded in the die difference, earns an advantage for the next round, if he survives this round.
Fury: If a hero rolls a 1, and the die difference is still against him, then he still strikes and is permitted to add his pathos & discord mania to the damage.
Fate: A hero who rolled higher but still one the die difference, suffers a disadvantage in the next round.
Once damage has been factored, if this is not a first blood duel, but a mortal affray, another round begins without additional Mind’s eye, Pathos, Knit, Kit or Wit checks.
Armor and Agility: are always subtracted from damage.
Exception, a hero who is wearing more armor points than he has strength points, reduces his Agility modifier by the number of points his armor exceeds his strength. As described above knit may be reserved for damage reduction rather than dedicated to damage.
Mercy: Damage may also be reduced by the hero striking his foe, at will, sometimes to disarm, or, perhaps to gain a surrender. The duelist has the option not to kill his foe, though it may not always be successful, as he may only reduce damage equal to his agility.
Disarming
A duelist may reduce his damage equal to the number of Agility points he has. This enables him to make an Overall Body check to disarm. If he fails, he has still reduced damage to his foe. If he rolls a 20, he gives his foe a chance to disarm him with a Body check. A roll of a 1 results in a disarm that gives the weapon to the disarming foe. Simple disarms knock the weapon away.
Disarming is done differently in brawling, which is the kind of combat one engages in in Battle. However, disarming in hunt and skirmish situations is the same as in dueling.
Dueling mechanics permit both parties to be slain or injured at the same time, but this is rare.
Any time both foes make their Body check and the die difference is the same, they both inflict wounds, making this a rare case of a possible mutual kill in a duel. Above are some other nuances that might result in both duelists inflicting damage at the same time.
Knockdown
Any time a foe is damaged, a hero with an unused advantage, may use it to make a Body check. A success results in a knockdown, which inflicts the downed fighter with a disadvantage. In modern boxing, it afflicts him with a lost point and the fight is restarted after a 10 count.
Hunting
Including skirmishing and manhunting, low intensity efforts to outwit, stalk, outmaneuver and ambush, have been covered under Mind.
Brawling
A brawl is, like a duel, simultaneous combat.
The difference is that you are in chaos or urgent straights and have no time for dancing.
Disadvantage rolls gained in Pathos must be used in the first round.
Use of advantage rolls is optional in a brawl, where they may be saved, or more accurately, “pushed.”
Both players make a body check, do not compare their results, and inflict damage based on the difference in their roll and their Body Ability, inflicting Strength+Weapon+Die Difference, rather than knit, minus Armor & Agility.
Brawling Defense
A defensive effort might be made by assigning the die difference to damage reduction, rather than just hitting the foe while he hits you. In military battles, this decision is often a top down affair, with soldiers told to hold before counter attacking. Berserkers, of course, are not permitted such a craven option.
Pushing
In a brawl, a hero with an advantage may use each advantage he has against a second foe, fighting multiple foes at a time.
Momentum
In a brawl, anytime a foe is disarmed, downed, disabled or Slain, the hero who did it gets an Advantage, permitting him to attempt to finish the foe where he lays with that earned Advantage, or attacking a second foe, and so on.
Disarming in Brawl
This governed by Strength, reducing damage by the strength score, and, if successful in striking the foe, makes a strength check to determine of he disarmed the enemy. A 1 gives the disarming hero his foe’s weapon. Other successes knock it away. A failure permits the enemy to try and disarm by making a strength check.
Bowling Over Foes
In a brawl, instead of disarming, a hero might try and knockdown a foe he has damaged [the stroke must have resulted in damage, not deflected by armor or evaded by agility] with a strength check. A 6 failure [or double 6] for heroes with 6 strength, sends the strong man down. Being downed, in a brawl, as in a duel, results in a disadvantage. A success knocks down the foe, who now has a disadvantage.
Battle is brawling, a more direct and less evasive kind of combat than dueling.
Battle
Minds Eye [above]
Pathos [above]
Discord
The side whose leader has gained the pathos advantage decides if his men are attacking or defending.
Rounds: attackers and defenders make Overall Body checks. The attacker inflicts damage Strength+Die Difference+Weapon+ and the defender nullifies damage with Armor+Agility+.
Defending in Battle
A battle, rather then simply a brawl, is a more formal set piece affair in which equipment plays a greater role. Essentially, a fighter acting as soldier, who makes his Kit check, may assign his weapon’s damage to his own damage reduction, along with the die difference used in the normal brawling defense. The damage value of the weapon in the equipment list is now assigned to damage reduction.
Shield Attack: Conversely, in battle, brawl or duel, a shield may be withheld from damage reduction and used for offense and dedicated to damage augmentation.
Fear
After a full round, in which the defenders were able to counter attack, the fallen are counted. If losses are equal, to within 10%, battle continues to another round.
The side who has suffered the most losses must make individual Gut checks. Those who fail these checks will not counter attack the next round, only defend, dedicating weapons and die difference to damage reduction.
Design Note: when a fighter who knows what he is doing, refuses to attack and dedicates himself to defense, it is really hard to get to him as he does not open up.
After any round in which half of the combatants on one side have failed Gut checks, the leader must make a Social check. If he fails, his men who have failed their Gut checks break and run. Those who had made their Gut checks, he may attempt to Rally. If they make an additional Gut check they gain the Calm skill, a Fear Mania point and a Pathos point, and will not break the rest of this action.
Sarge Bought It!
If a leader is killed, his men must make a Gut check or an additional Gut check. Any man who makes such a check, may rise to the occasion by attempting a Social check after his successful “I lost my leader” Gut check. If he fails, no one notices. If he succeeds he gains a Fear Mania and Pathos, and the Rally skill, and is a natural, leader anointed by WAR.
A good adventure for a single player would be making him a squad leader and attempting to rally his men as a rear guard for his fleeing main platoon.
Rout
Running away and pursuing are the name of this phase. Any unbroken individuals on the broken side, may stand and fight in a last stand with a Gut check. A leader who has not broken, can take the individual unbroken men of his party and direct them in a delaying action if he makes a Wit check.
Warriors on the winning side, if they are not commanded to stand or pursue, lets say in a chaotic battle without clear leadership, make a Gut check, or a Rout check if they prefer, to pursue broken foes or try and slaughter the rear guard. The die difference is retained as that man’s advantages against broken [not rear guard] foes. Failure to make this Rout check, means the character tends to the Rapine of fallen foes and/or care of his wounded fellows.
War Fog
When a team, squad, platoon, company or army has broken, in order for either side to organize cooperative actions, such as meeting a second force, marching to another place, gathering a broken army’s remnants into a new place, must require an Overall Spirit check on the part of the Leader, before he can order and conduct Rallying operations and maneuver, to include pursuing broken foes. In the Napoleonic Age, certain cavalry leaders, like Murat, were valued largely for this quality of hunting down fleeing foes in pitiless pursuit.
Rapine
Rampaging victors each gain a Pathos and rout Mania point, and may each then, make a Pathos or Rout Mania check on 1d20 to determine if they captured foes, camp followers, women and children, horses, however the GM defines the booty, equal to the die difference. Rolling higher means he looted only gear and goods.
Say, Geronimo, with his 18 pathos, rolls a 12, for a difference of 6 after hitting a wagon train. That could be six ugly mules, or perhaps a fine, blond, white, Texas Heiress good for ransom or breeding!
See equipment listing for female values.
Death’s Door
Hit Point
0 = Disabled, for a few moments, KO’d in boxing, choked in wrestling, unable to act unless a berserk maniac, see Berserker section
-1= Disabled, all day or night, with loss of 1 Strength, Endurance or Agility, walking wounded, able to stagger or limp, but not run or march.
-2 = Disabled all day and night, with loss of 2 body points at GM discretion
-3 = Disabled for 2 days and nights, with loss of 3 body points.
-4 = Dead, meet Eternity
Put those maiming points in brackets as some might heal below. Medical healing is dealt with under equipment, where the slave women and physicians are stowed.
Crippled Yore
Characters who are disabled to -1 and below recover like so:
Have long term body point losses for a year.
Every year that passes, they can make a check against existing Overall Body to heal 1 point, of their choice.
+1 per day, until conscious/able to move and able to act as walking wounded
When a wounded warrior gets to 1 HP, he may make an overall Body Check against his current, maimed total. If he makes it he regains the difference between his original Overall Body and his current the 2nd day. Then each day after he gains his current Strength back until at full.
Medical and faith healing are covered under equipment.
Surrender
A hero may reduce the damage he does with a hand weapon, not a missile weapon, at will, by a factor equal to his strength, instead of driving his enemy lower, in order to spare and gain the surrender of a foe. This may leave the foe able, above 0. Yet, the foe will know that he was “dead to rites” [not rights] and have a chance to insist on death or agree to surrender.
A foe at mercy then makes a pathos check. If he fails he surrenders. If he succeeds he demands death and refuses cooperation. If he insists on death, the withheld strength damage may now be applied.
The hero who receives such a surrender gains a pathos point from his captive, who loses a pathos point. If the captive has an equal Pathos to the captor, he gains 2 and the captive loses only 1. If the captive has a greater pathos than the captor, than that happy hero gains 4 pathos to the captive’s 1. Feudal Europe was in part governed by such mercy relationships gained in battle.
