Strength

Your Person’s Strength Trait measures their major contribution to the course of the story. Your Strength could be a personal quality, such as loyalty, courage, self-control, generosity and so on; or it could be something they can do that the other Persons cannot, such as Strong People Skills, or Developed Senses.

Strength allows you to flex that quality in such a way as to shine. This is what your character does best: the quality they are renowned for, like Horatio Caine’s “child whisperer” trait from the old CSI: Miami TV series, or Mata Hari’s fabled seduction skills, or Hercule Poirot’s “little grey cells.”

Weakness

Your Person’s Weakness Trait, in contrast, is something your character must fight to overcome. Weakness Traits increase pressure when you are making a decision. Your Weakness could interfere with your judgment, or emerge when your character is confronted by the source of a fear or emotion-triggering phenomenon. Example: the low-pressure task of keeping a cool head in a car chase during the evening could be complicated by the Weakness of Hates Driving At Night, increasing the Pressure from 2 to 3 or even 4.

More about Pressure soon.

Document Q Continues

Doctor Gooding, Vicky, rises and beckons for you to join her. Together, you head for one of the exits from the room. She leads you through a short, curved corridor to another unmarked door. The chamber beyond is dark. Going by the echoes, it is also huge.

A dim light comes on over at one end of the room, highlighting a stage and a large screen. You see seats when you turn to face away from the stage.

‘Come on,’ Dr Golding says, heading up towards a seat near the centre. ‘Let’s get a good view.’ You follow her, and sit beside her.

Vicky snaps her fingers. The room lights dim to blackness, and a video file opens on the screen.

‘This is what’s on that flash drive,’ Vicky says.

The story continues in two weeks

‘So here we are. All this time, and it has come down to this.

‘Shall we dance?'

Welcome to the bastion of villainy in your story. Here, you finally meet the Big Cheese - the head of the organisation which has been such a thorn in the side of your Government.

And he’s sipping jasmine tea from a porcelain cup, listening to Erasure.

If you dared to ask him, he might confess to being a huge fan of the musical Hamilton. But somehow, by now you’ve already guessed as much.

Funny how all the villains these days seem to be queercoded.

In case you’re wondering, “queercoding” refers to the display of LGBTQIA+ mannerisms, behaviours, traits, and trappings, by a character, without making explicit that character’s orientation or identity. The behavioural stereotypes convey the villain’s identity and orientation without naming the dreaded Q word.

Examples might be a male fictional character who has a pronounced lisp, who prefers musicals, or who knits in his down time (like Roger Moore’s Naval Commander Ffolkes in the movie “North Sea Hijack”), a female character who keeps her hair short and smokes cigars rather than cigarettes, or a villain whose sexual identity is deeply agendered, such as Ra (Jaye Davidson) in the movie Stargate (1994).

Not to mention the same actor’s role in the movie The Crying Game.

Evil Is Bisexual

There’s a whole trope devoted to this theme. Bisexuality as a symptom of depravity, a mark that an evil character is willing to go too far to show off their villain credentials.

Somebody has composed a list.

Here’s a rebuttal of the trope.

The Trans Assassin Trope

Gods, this horrendously offensive trope goes on forever.

Here’s one take.

Here’s a page exploring the same trope.

TVTropes weighs in.

There’s a discussion on one of these pages.

Why is the transfeminine serial killer scary and a convention in horror films? Does their gender identity or gender expression subversion of the gender binary contribute to the horror they provoke?

Is it significant that these transgender serial killers are all assigned male at birth and either identify or express themselves as women? What might this suggest about masculinity? About femininity?

What messages do these representations of transgender identity convey?

Do you think these representations of transgender serial killers will remain a prevalent trope in contemporary horror films?

And let’s not forget all the weird little hobbies. Because we can’t be rounded characters without little hobbies to stand in for insanity.

Identifying The Source

You can blame the Hays Code for much of this misinformation. There are three basic principles which shackled movie production.

- No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

- Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

- Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

To the perpetrators of this vile code, anything LGBTQIA+ was not only lowering moral standards, sinful, and violating some law. That meant that gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and trans characters had to be the villains, and frankly they were set up to be seen to die horribly in the movie.

The ironic thing about these shackles was that, ultimately, queercoding served to have the reverse effect to what was intended.

The villains got more attention than the protagonists.

The Present Day

Everywhere the media touches, it seems as if there are concerted efforts by various vested parties with conservative views to force the clock back on all of the progress made by women, people of colour, and the LGBTQIA+ communities for the past fifty years. People are attacking women’s rights, people of colour are being gerrymandered out of politics and denied the vote, and anti-LGBT+ laws are being voted on in a number of countries across the world.

The thing is, those countries have one thing in common.

Us Brits.

If you look at the nations pushing for anti-gay and anti-trans laws, you’ll find that these are nations which had once been part of the British Empire - and, in fact, their unhealthy attitudes towards alternative sexualities stems from a time when we Brits went and imposed our stuck-up, hypocritical, Puritanical moralisations on people we’d conquered with guns, germs, famine, and steel.

You can blame our ancestors for everything that’s going wrong in the world today. But you must also blame the putzes who are making the world a horrible place today, too.

All of this crap really started in the 2010s, but the roots can be found going back to the late 1980s. You can see the seeds being planted by Ronnie Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, in the UK’s Section 28 among other legal atrocities. 2026’s EHRC guidelines, and before that the Cass Report and the recent Supreme Court misjudgment which fixed gender as an immutable binary of male and female in defiance of biology, not to mention the first provlamation of Would-Be Emperor 47 in the White House, have felt like a giant leap backwards. The damage to our communities is severe.

But it is not irreversible.

People took thirty years, from Wolfenden in 1967 to the year 1997, to turn decriminalisation of being gay to its normalisation and representation in media. It took about the same amount of time for corporations to begin to realise how much money was being held by the Pink Pound.

I would like to imagine people of the future looking back on this historical document and acknowledging that all of this has been just a setback, not the end, and that ultimately the Christofascist factions were declawed and defanged, and representations of LGBTQIA+ and POC people ultimately began to climb back to their peak in the 1990s, and ultimately surpassed.

2030 will mark a hundred years since the Hays Code was brought into being. We must make sure nobody tries to set up a new Hays Code for this century, and give them bloody noses if they think they can make queerphobia a thing again.

Archetype And Identity

These are the first two Traits mentioned in the previous post. Archetype is the role your character plays to drive the game along; Identity is something fitting for the game.

What characteristics would you like to exemplify in your Archetype? Examples:- Intimidator (Strength / Intelligence), Seducer (Dexterity / Social), Caregiver (Education / Social), Wise Guy (Intelligence / Education), Diplomat (Education / Social), Champion (Endurance / Social)?

Your Archetype describes what you do in the game when the pressure is on you. Do you defend the defenceless or attack the threat? Do you naturally begin investigating, or step back and offer advice to the team in a leadership role? That is who you are.

And what sort of persona is your Identity?
Examples:- Legbreaker (Strength), Diplomat (Social), Leader (Social), Entertainer (Dexterity / Social(, Scientist (Intelligence / Education)

This is your badge. Your uniform. The word on your curriculum vitae or resume that sums up your skills, knowledge, qualifications and career.

Your Archetype is who you are. Your Identity is your job.

Document Q Continues

‘I’ve already told you where you are,’ your benefactor in green tells you. ‘What I haven’t done so far is tell you who I am.’

She remains seated. ‘I am Doctor Victoria Arran Gooding,’ she says. ‘But you can call me “Doctor” or “Vicky.”’

She glances around. ‘I’m the Director of this Facility,’ she says. ‘We’ve been operational for the last fifteen years.’

She looks ready to answer some of your questions. Here are some of the ones you are likeliest to ask.

‘I can’t tell you what part of the UK you are in. Not yet. Let’s just say that you’re close to where you were stopped.’

‘We can’t let you go just yet. There is something we need to discuss. It concerns your flash drive, that USB stick, and the file it contains.’

‘You are still a little confused. This means that you haven’t opened the flash drive, nor have you even seen the file’s contents. That’s good.’

‘No, actually … here’s the thing. I am going to let you read that file shortly. I’m going to read you in on the secret it contains.’

‘We really can’t let you go until you’ve seen what it was you were so eager to obtain. And you’re going to have to make up your mind on what to do afterwards.’

‘No, you can’t go to your Editor. Not with this.’

‘The reason for all this secrecy is simple. We’re trying to save your life. The knowledge contained in that flash drive can easily get you killed. You saw how easily They destroyed your car. You would be destroyed with far less effort.’

‘And yes, this means your Editor would suffer the same fate. She won’t even see it coming.’

At this point, Vicky gets up, and extends her hand to you. ‘“Who are “They”?” That’s a good question,’ she says, ‘and you deserve a good answer. So let me show you what we’ve been protecting you from. I’m going to show you what we’ve designated as Document Q.’

The story continues in two weeks

The above image comes from 2000 AD, the British comic, and depicts Silver, aka the Baroness Yelena DaSilva, a vampire of some 500 years young brought out of her long torpor and recruited by the humans of an alien-infested Earth.

It’s Vampires Versus Aliens, not to put too fine a point on it.

Also, Baroness DaSilva reminds me sometimes of someone I used to know, who once worked with the Tax Office.

She never had much of a sense of humour, either.

The person I used to know, that is.

Which brings me to this week’s topic - the Undead.

Everybody knows vampires aren’t real. Not, at least, in this world. But the worlds of fiction are alive with them.

Well, not alive as such. Just not … non-existent.

The worlds of fiction include the worlds of tabletop roleplaying. You may, by now, understand that tabletop RPGs are a large part of my life.

Not so much the sitting down with fat, sweaty men fighting endless combat simulations. More the narrative style, where the vampires confront what it is that make them inhuman, and embrace the qualities which make them more like the humans they used to be.

Cue this book cover.

This book turned a lot of heads 35 years ago, back in 1991. It eclipsed a game called Ravenloft which had human D&D characters fighting vampires, and replaced them with vampire player characters.

You know what was big at that time? Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire. That book, and its two sequels, rocked the book world, and spawned so many copycat series, from the writings of Poppy Z Brite with its explicitly-gay themes to Laurell K Hamilton with its ultimate degeneration into BDSM porn.

Stephanie Meyer’s execrable Twilight series would come much, much later. But 1991 was a turning point for gaming and literary fiction, because that was the year that vampires came out of the casket.

Vampire: the Masquerade made it cool once again to be a Goth, and to embrace the whole vampire aesthetic.

It’s time to look at what it is that makes vampires in literature, and other forms of entertainment, so compelling. Let’s look at some of the themes explored.

Eternal Existence

What would it be like to be alive forever, of a sort? Vampire gaming allows you, the player, to experience a state in which death itself is but transitory; temporary. Vampires face the death of their mortal bodies and, somehow, come back … but changed.

If you had the choice, to not make death permanent, would you take it?

Forever Young

Next to eternal existence is the prospect of being eternally young and, of course, beautiful. How you are on death is how you will be, for centuries. Vampires would put the entire cosmetics industry into the history books. If they existed for real, millions would flock to their havens, desperate for one long kiss.

Preternatural Cool

The third thing to come out of vampire literature is the desire to be cool, and never to find oneself going out of fashion somehow. This was the theme of The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. In order to stave off decades of ennui, Lestat had to reinvent himself. He became a rock god, and drew fans from all four corners of the globe.

The All-Night Society

Then there’s the appeal of belonging to a shadowy upper crust of elite beings, lurking among the highest echelons of mortal humans, looking down even on CEOs and Presidents and kings because your undead status gives you so much time to plan your rise to power, compared to the mayfly mortals.

The cruellest, most ruthless human crime boss would bow the knee to the canny vampire with access to resources the humans couldn’t begin to imagine.

Downsides

Of course, there would be downsides to vampire existence …

Eternal Hunger

Like an addiction you cannot shake, your unlife would be centred around human blood, and human life force. A parasitical hunger which consumes, basically symbolising the human drive to gain position at other people’s expense.

Which sounds like crime. Which it could be.

Violation

This one’s a huge red flag. Vampires violate people. They drain them dry, kill them, and then the dead humans come back as more vampires.

Even the taking of blood, breath, life force is not something many humans willingly would allow or consent to.

Vampire feeding is a brutal assault, with sexual overtones lending it to be closer to actual sexual assault in some cases. Hunting without a sexual element is not much better, if the vampire drains too much of the humans’ life force, causing them to sustain life-changing injuries. But the West seems to okay brutality, preferring to hear stories about harrowing injuries rather than about consensual sex.

The Predator Class

The Undead represent, symbolise, the very worst elements of human society. A small group of elites, accountable to no-one but themselves, living life on the blood of millions of people, facing no real consequences for their actions … yeah, we can see what vampires symbolise in this world.

Apotropaics

Vampires in fiction are supposed to be susceptible to certain banes. Needing to sleep in a coffin containing soil from one’s grave; vulnerability to sunlight, garlic and holy water; casting no reflections in the mirror; beheading and staking being really deadly … all these weaknesses come from folklore.

People needed to invent these “cures” for vampirism, and made them popular in fiction, just to give people a feeling of ease if they’d just read of some horrid vampire terrorising some city like Dracula, or a family like Carmilla Karnstein. Like the invention of Kryptonite, the public needed to know that something could stop the otherwise-unstoppable superbeing in the pages of the shocking books they read.

They needed assurance that the monster who came down from the Schloss on the hill at night could, in fact, be stopped, or at least held accountable.

Inescapable Subtext

The vampire story has a subtext, made manifest any time your vampire character comes across as queer-coded. Look at the Poppy Z Brite depictions of vampires, or J Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, or the way Bram Stoker’s Dracula groomed Jonathan Harker while showing off his bisexuality by attacking Lucy Westenra.

Despite their best efforts, Lucy becomes a vampire, and preys on the streets. The parallel with straight fears that people can become LGBTQIA+ is obvious. This part of the story appealed to the irrational hatred of Victorian homophobes. Being gay was illegal back then, and everyone was talking about it, especially since queer people could just walk among the ordinary folks - and straights were in the dark, then as now, as to who was not straight and how they could identify one another.

People back then had a morbid fear of being queer. It terrified them, more than being fed upon. More than turning up naked in a public setting.

Vampires symbolised queer identity, moreso back then as today, What We Do In The Shadows notwithstanding. Vampirism was the fundamental fear that the readers’ latent LGBTQIA+ identity would be found out by the public, and subject to the oppropbrium reserved for witches, mutants, and neurodivergent people.

If they didn’t understand it, they condemned it. And to be honest, the Victorians really didn’t understand much. At all.

At the last minute, a friend of mine reminded me to point out that all of the above applies to women. The horrors of the female lived experience in the nineteenth century and the first seven decades of the twentieth century cannot, and should not, be ignored or dismissed. In fact, women are struggling even more in this third decade of the 21st century, with their rights being eroded by the day, and even straight cis women spearheading the organised drive to push women back into the kitchen and bedroom, with a gag in their mouths.

Transphobia is just the fruiting body of this mycelium.

Loving The Vampire

Vampires are one of three undead species occupying niches within human lore. The other two are zombies and ghosts.

Each type of deathless being brings their own stories to the gaming table, as well as popular fiction. Ghosts (from phantoms to revenants) represent a drive to come back to finish something left incomplete; zombies just represent the Western drive for mass consumption at all cost; and vampires represent the predatory urge to feed on humans, use them, and drain them dry.

Vampires represent the most human of the Undead. They walk among humans, enjoy the same things we do such as art and music, and can pass for human (a topic which hits home, considering the title of my blog). That makes vampires incredibly alluring, attractive, and absolutely, devastatingly, sexy, both for what they represent and for the potential benefits of existence.

They walk among us. But they are not aliens, in the sense of being extraterrestrial. They are young, and ancient, and everything in between. They are cold, and cruel, and make you want them so much.

They make you want to be them.

Imagine if they were real; and books like the one below were more than simple entertainment.

Let’s go back to one of my favourite tabletop roleplaying games, one of the last tabletop games to come out of the old White Wolf studio in the last millennium - Hunter: The Reckoning.

I’m going to look at the game, and disregard the game mechanics - character generation, health, combat skills, numbers numbers numbers. Let’s look at what the game was about.

The Imbued

The Hunters don’t have a proper name for themselves. Some call themselves the chosen, others the imbued. Most don’t know what the hell is happening. Many come across the Hunt on their own, without encountering any others like them.

Absolutely every last one of them begin their Hunt with minds full of questions. Many of them were likely to die with 88% of those questions left unanswered.

Most, if not all, of those questions were answered up front in the Big Orange Core Rulebook. If the players had thought far enough to look in the pages at the back. Most didn’t. So here’s a glimpse into what happened with this game.

And where it all went a bit Pete Tong, to use the ‘90s rhyming slang.

What The Publishers Had Wanted

The basic premise of this idea was “What if the World of Darkness had a legion of Slayers like Buffy The Vampire Slayer from that TV show?”

There had been a game called Exalted which had only recently been released by White Wolf. In that game, characters were heroes from a time before the sinking of Atlantis. These heroes were bestowed with powers which made them seem divine. And they were cast down by The Powers That Be when those heroes let power get to their heads and became little more than the beasts they fought, inflicting more suffering on the ordinary people than the monsters.

The original concept for Hunter: the Reckoning was that a great time of crisis was coming. The Millennium was upon the world, and things were coming to a head. Gateways to Abysses which had been kept locked for millennia were now too weak to keep the old enemies at bay; and they were being flung open, unleashing an ancient darkness on the world once again.

And as a response to that time of crisis, the arcane mechanism which had once activated the heroic lineages of old was being brought out of mothballs and turned back on again, creaking to life and activating the lineage in the blood of ordinary people down on Earth. People who had no idea that their most distant ancestors had even been heroes.

The mechanism was so old, sadly, and the bloodlines so diluted, that the people who were uplifted barely had any control over their gifts, known as edges. So they lived out lives of crippling paranoia, deep-rooted dread and terrifying uncertainty, unable to trust their uncanny abilities yet compelled to confront the strange beings which they alone could see and sense.

The dread and uncertainty were the point. Not the kill count.

What They Ended Up With

The Hunter scene ended up dominated by the Zealots: people who were driven to bring fire and death to the darkness. The publishers had given the players seven different creeds - Merciful, Visionary, and Zealous: and the gamers almost universally chose the Zeal creed of Avenger, leaving alone the other Zeal creeds - Defender and Judge - and completely ignoring the remaining creeds of Innocent, Martyr, Redeemer, and Visionary.

The first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace, had just come out, and lightsabres were back in fashion, so the publishers decided to give the Avenger creed access to an edge called Cleave, which allowed Hunters to turn iron bars into lightsabres. So the game became all about the Avengers.

The Video Games

The video games they released for the game were no better. Grimdark run and gun fantasies, first-person shooters, they just pandered to the violent side of the game. Here are monsters, kill the monsters, watch the cinematic cutscenes.

The Hunters’ Abilities

What made Hunters unique was that they all had certain things in common. Conviction, Second Sight, hunter sign, and edges. Later, when the creedbooks came out, a further advantage was granted to them in the form of creed-specific gifts which the Hunters themselves crafter and bestowed with power for the Hunt.

Conviction

Hunters were driven by the Hunt. Their drive was called Conviction, and it was a source of a kind of energy which they could use to press on when all around them was despair.

Conviction could be spent on their Second Sight, their edges, bestowed upon their gifts, and in general they could gain Conviction if their Virtues led them to success in a mission - a foe brought low, a victim of a supernatural being healed, a glimpse of a Bigger Picture, and so on.

Hunter Sign

All Hunters were instinctively aware of hunter sign, a system of symbols similar to hobo sign but rich in meaning, such as the basic symbol for allies, chosen, imbued:-

Any hunter who imbued on their own could see that sign and understand that others like them had been there and left that mark for more imbued to seek them out.

This sign reads “freedom”:-

And this one signals “hope”:-

Here are the URLs for the above three signs.

Allies, Imbued, Chosen

Freedom

Hope

There are other Hunter signs, some of which - like “Summon” and “Unity” - had an effect on Hunters gathered together by the imbued who wrote them.

Second Sight

Conviction gave all Hunters what is called Second Sight. This gift allowed Hunters to see the truth of the world. Without active Second Sight, the world would look about the same as it had been before the imbuing: something a lot of Hunters probably would look on as a blessing.

Active Second Sight also gave all imbued an additional benefit:- immunity to mind control, emotional control, and illusions. Creatures who used shadows to provide invisibility, or illusions to make them appear to be someone else, would be visible. A supernatural being who lured in people to feed upon, using their powers to disguise their appearance to seem like someone their victims trust, would stand out in start and vivid reality as some bloodsucking beast.

Edges

Here was where most players gravitated towards: the list of powers every creed has. Powers to smite the bad guys, to throw force fields about themselves and the innocents they were protecting, to afflict the supernatural with pain if they tried to feed of humans, and so on. Powers to identify the unnatural, to repel the unnatural, and to thwart the unnatural.

Every creed had these edges, and there was an arcane game mechanic to allocate which powers are assigned to which player, according to their creeds.

Gifts Of The Chosen

These were an afterthought in the creedbooks for each creed. Defenders and Innocents could create tokens which would help defend their loved ones; Avengers could craft signature weapons; and Hermits were compelled to send messages to deserving Hunters explaining their higher purpose, which would just drop in on those Hunters out of nowhere.

The Game Mechanics SUCKED

Let’s talk about how broken the system was.

Your characters were defined by three Hunter Virtues - Mercy, Zeal, and Vision. These seemed to override the core mortal Virtues of Conscience, Courage, and Self-Control. Indeed, these three Virtues seemed to map onto the Hunter Virtues - Mercy and Conscience, Courage and Zeal, Self-Control and Vision.

Your characters had no control over where and when they gained a point in their Hunter Virtue. Any time their Conviction points reached 10, the Storyteller automatically discharged those 10 Conviction Points and added +1 to the appropriate Virtue. And if that Virtue exceeded 6, your character would become an extremist, and suffer a Derangement for each single point of any Virtue over 6. Someone with Vision 7 and Mercy 6 would suffer from three different Derangements.

Never mind that nowadays, people have a far better understanding of how mental health issues arise, and their understanding of neurodivergence is a lot better now than in the ‘90s. If you run the game as written, your character will become a gibbering wreck, saddled with upward of a dozen conflicting mental illnesses.

The system was broken in other ways, too, but this was the most broken of the dysfunctional game mechanics.

I can guarantee that there are players who, to this day, ignored this mechanic, just as they ignored mechanics such as encumbrance and aging.

Creating Hunters

So many players saw the rules for Hunter: the Reckoning, and created some kind of creature who was either Ash from The Evil Dead or Sarah Connor from Terminator. There were so many other ways they could have created a Hunter, and a wide variety of different Archetypes.

The Reforned Junkie - Imbued on their own in a filthy, haunted garret in Amsterdam, at first they thought they thought that they had been dying of an overdose, only to discover that the heroin had been purged from their system and the ghost they’d been talking to was real.

The Jobless Ex-Copper - Having lost their job after the review board had sided with the victim, they found themselves out of work until some dead person stepped out of the shadows and offered them a job. More importantly, they offered them a purpose.

The Escapee - Driven from town to town, always looking back over her shoulder to her former life and her now-deceased abuser of a husband, this ex-housewife met The Devil outside a public park, who gave her perpetual Second Sight, inadvertently making her a Wayward, a somewhat sociopathic Hunter who can look at mass human suffering without flinching, so they can approach the task of stopping evil on a grand scale with a clear head.

A Missed Oppostunity

This game had so much crossover potential. Not just imbued versus ghosts (the default monster species) or imbued versus vampires (the second commonest being species), but conflicts featuring two different kinds of supernatural beings such as vampires and the ghosts they created through botched feedings (and I used to rule that every vampire feeding created a ghost when the victim dies, even years afterwards through natural causes) or other types of beings such as the imbued versus mutant humans (such as people who possessed a psychic power to control machinery, or psychics or sorcerers from the Mage Sorcerer book).

Each type of conflict could bring in skills and talents the Hunters possessed but which players might have considered to be irrelevant, such as Empathy, Occult, Animal Ken. Skills they could have brought to bear to resolve differences peacefully, and even to reveal more about the imbued condition than they had thought. In other words, by solving these problems, they would learn more about themselves - even enough to answer the questions they had been asking since their imbuing.

What I Would Do

If I were given the task of retconning Hunter: the Reckoning from scratch, I think I’d scrape off a lot of the underlying game mechanics, and redo the whole game in a way which would address the freakish edge cases which seemed to crop up with disturbing frequency in game, for all that they were supposed to be rare occurrences.

That is just one of many projects I have on my back burner. But it’d be compelling to put it together, if only to release it to the World of Darkness community as a free product or Pay What You Want.

Document Q continues below. But first, what do characters do in a narrative game?

First of all, you’re not going to design a killer. Whether you are using a roleplaying game such as Cepheus Modern, Cepheus Universal, or any 2D game, your character is not a killer who’s part of some death squad.

There is more to adventuring than just pushing pieces around a randomly-designed board, facing off random obstacles which are little more than index cards stuffed with numbers for you to reduce to zero hit points. Gygax, if he were alive, owes the world an apology for what he did to fantasy.

Your characters are people. You’re there to interact with a world which interacts back with you. Non-player characters respond to you, with affection or with annoyance, or fear or desire - and your decisions can change them.

As designed for 2D games (where you use pairs of ordinary six-sided dice), your characters have six defining characteristics - Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social Acumen (or, more often, Social Standing). These generally tell you how good their raw abilities are: brute muscle, manual and physical dexterity, toughness, smarts, knowledge, and most of all human connection.

A typical character generation process begins where you roll two dice six times, and assign the results to each of the above characteristics. Tradition indicates that you apply each roll’s result in the order above.

Here’s a secret. Sod that.

At best, your random rolls might produce an absolute prodigy, all 12s across the board. At worst - all 2s.

Who needs randomness when you can select your character’s natural talents?

Start by giving each characteristic 6 points, free.

Next, for each characteristic roll 2D as above - and pick the highest number.

Last, choose the characteristics to apply each result to.

Rolling a raw 2D gives you an average of 7 for each characteristic, so why not do that - seven points, minimum, across the board? Your characters can potentially be exceptional, scoring 9 or 10 each time, and a minimum of 7.

Characteristic Modifiers

Higher-than-average characteristics add bonuses to task checks in the game. Characteristics between 7 and 8 offer no bonuses. Characteristics between 8 and 11 add +1. Characteristics of 12 offer +2 bonuses.

For each characteristic of 9 or above, think of a suitable descriptor to highlight how your character stands out as somehow exceptional, if not superlative, as a person.

Examples:-

Strength: Taut musculature, effortless strength, powerfully-built, confident stride.
Dexterity: Lithe, graceful, nimble, agile, dextrous, smooth, flexible, unbearably sexy dancer, moves like a panther.
Endurance: Wiry, solid, shrugging off wounds, tireless, indefatigable, a picture of health.
Intelligence: Keen mind, observant, sensual, smart, problem solver, grace under pressure.
Education: Critical thinker, knowledgeable, encyclopaedic mind, head full of facts, gift for languages.
Social Acumen: Empathic, diplomatic, sense of humour, full dance card, a cool head, never loses their temper, always comes out on top.

Document Q Continues

When you awaken, it’s to cold and silence. The room you emerge into is windowless, with just the bed you’re lying in and a steel framework chair with black leather seat and back.

You realise that you are wearing some sort of jumpsuit. It is an unflattering shade of blue, covering you from neck to toe. You are barefoot, but there is a pair of some sort of slip-on flat shoes the same shade of blue at the foor of the bed. The floor is icy cold, but your new shoes keep your feet warm.

The room smells like a hospital ward. There is sound - the hum of an air conditioning system.

There is no sign of Rex.

You spend several fraught minutes worrying about your canine companion, before it begins to dawn on you that you ought to be worrying about yourself a little, too, given your circumstances.

‘Welcome,’ says a tinny voice from above, ‘to The Facility.’

You see a small wooden box set in the ceiling, with a grille. A very retro-looking PA system. Presumably, the box contains a CCTV camera, staring down at you.

‘We’ve processed your clothes,’ continues the voice, ‘and you will be reunited with some of your personal effects, and of course your clothing, once we let you out of your room … which will be in thirty minutes.’

The PA shuts off with a click. You are left in the silence, wondering what this “Facility” is, where it is, and why they felt the need to bring you to it.

Presently, your stomach growls. It must be hours since you last ate. That hurried cheese and tomato sandwich you ate in the car hadn’t filled you at all.

The door clicks open. The PA snaps back into activity. ‘You may leave the room now,’ says the voice.

You emerge from the chamber into a corridor, with one door at the far end. You hear sounds coming from the far end. Human activity. Conversations, the sound of phones ringing, machinery.

Reaching the end of the corridor, you turn the doorknob. The door is unlocked. It opens outward. You enter the room beyond.

The sparse decor continues in the space you just entered. Form follows function; the room looks like a hospital ward. Doors set in the wall behind you indicate that there may be other corridors, other rooms like the one you had been held in.

Someone emerges from the busy crowd of personnel. Like the others, she is dressed in what look like hospital scrubs, in a fetching shade of green compared to the reds and greys around you.

‘Welcome,’ this person says. ‘Come. Let’s get you fed. Then we’ll talk. There’s … much to discuss.’

Document Q continues in 2 weeks

I’m sharing this blog post, written by Ellipsus guest blogger Heather Sykes. It’s a blog on fantasy worldbuilding, providing hints and tips.

I want to write more about Ellipsus here on my blog.

https://ellipsus.com/blog/writing-fantasy-worlds-tips

Summary

Tip 1: Let your readers live in your world (and make their own choices)

In other words, “What would I do in this world?”
Your worlds should be living things, to interact with and to be interacted with in return.

Tip 2: Use immersion anchors

Create an aspect of the fantasy world which adds depth; something to keep the readers, or players, in that world.
Examples include the Shek-Pvar schools of magic in Columbia Games’ Harnworld, and the multiple parallels of the Luther Arkwright setting.

Tip 3: Multi-dimensional world building is a must

Make your world multi-faceted. There should be many perspectives. Your protagonist offers on perspective - but there could be antagonists out there, and incidental characters, and each of them brings their own dimension, their own facets, to the setting.

Tip 4: Let there be mysteries!

Or at least a mystique. If your fantasy is a romance, at least one of the protagonists must have a little mystique to them - something withheld until you’ve got something else to replace it.

The blog post, over on the Ellipsus site, has more to offer. Go and read it. I’ll be writing my own post on writing fantasies, inspired by a number of different sources. Let’s just say that it’s about time we moved away from chainmail, swords, wizards, dragons, quests, and death squads raiding and looting dark, seedy basement real estate.

I’ve collected a multitude of roleplaying games, each of which has its own systems of magic. Mythras from The Design Mechanism has five in its core rulebook, with psionics as a sixth system in at least one sourcebook (Luther Arkwright, Worlds United), and a seventh system, superpowers, in yet another supplement (Destined).

Ars Magica has an entire class of character whose entire focus is magic. Its successors, Mage: the Ascension and Mage: the Awakening, have their own specialised magical systems, which include ritual (group ceremonial) magic, rote spells, spontaneous magic; and there doesn’t seem to be a single roleplaying game which does not have some sort of magical system.

However, there is something lacking in each and every one of those magical systems. At first, I couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but then it came to me.

Consider the following dialogues.

GM [to Steve]: “Sevrin, you can cast Fireball, but you’re too close. You’re going to catch 3D6 damage from the backwash.”

Joe: “Amalthea casts Smother on Timorov, over there.”

GM: “Amalthea, Timorov is 134 metres away. You have 7 Shaping, and your Smother spell has Intensity of 10. He has SIZ 15, and your Smother spell can affect up to SIZ 30, so that’s good: but you need Magnitude 4 to get through his magic shield brooch, which leaves you with 3 Shaping, and that means your spell’s maximum Range is … your POW is 12, so … 3 Shaping gives you a max range of 5 metres per POW, so your Smother can only reach sixty metres.”

Alexander [to GM]: “That animalistic thug over there has INT 10 and POW 14. Can my Befuddle spell work on him?“

…

I’m sure you can see the problem. If not … Everything is reduced to calculations. Ranges, durations, numbers of targets, damage inflicted, spell Intensity, Magic Points cost.

By the time you’ve finished with the calculations, rolled the dice, and prayed for a critical success to reduce your Magic Points, you haven’t had your character cast a spell. You’ve programmed a computer. You’ve plotted a targeting pattern.

Magic systems in most roleplaying games are lacking the same ingredient.

Mystique.

Merriam-Webster defines mystique as “an air or attitude of mystery and reverence developing around something or someone.” The Cambridge Dictionary defines the term as “a quality of being special in a mysterious and attractive way;” Dictionary.com has this to say - “a framework of doctrines, ideas, beliefs, or the like, constructed around a person or object, endowing the person or object with enhanced value or profound meaning: and an aura of mystery or mystical power surrounding a particular occupation or pursuit”; and the Collins website defines mystique thus: “If there is a mystique about someone or something, they are thought to be special and people do not know much about them.”

Basically, you can boil mystique down to two things.

One, having an air of mystique is incredibly cool;
Two, that cool comes from not knowing much about what makes that thing or person cool. What you could describe as je ne sais quoi.

Now look back again at the magic systems in, say, Mythras, and here’s where their mystique falls apart.

All those calculations concerning Intensity, Range, Duration, Targets and so on assume that you are casting your spell, or using your psionic talent or superpower, in a tactical combat scene.

Roleplaying game systems have been leading you to believe that your spell powers need to be catalogued, codified, and set in stone. Your Folk Magic spell, or superpower, or sorcery spell, can only improve if you put in some more Experience Rolls into Intensity, or Shaping, or into your POW. Every spell or psionic power comes at some sort of internal energy cost - Magic Points, Prana, and so on.

But as I’ve just stated, this is only relevant to a tactical combat scene. Ranges, Durations in combat rounds, Targets only matter if you’re engaging in fighting over a battlemat, pushing miniatures across little hexes or squares like some sort of tedious little wargame.

When you’re casting magic in a narrative game, you’re not even testing the activation skill of your power. You are testing yourself.

Your telepath character playing chess with a non-telepath doesn’t need to test Telepathy skill, measure the power’s Range and Duration, or compute the Psionic Strength points it will cost you to run your power for four hours, poring over the chess master’s mind. All you need to do is concentrate on the effect (sensing your opponent’s subtle trap as she slides that Knight into a position where she can fork both your King and your Queen), and the consequence (you win, but your former friend and defeated opponent accuses you of cheating).

It’s like being a Detective. You’ll know forensic procedures, chain of custody, how to give testimony in court, and how to question a suspect. Your skills don’t matter as much as the impression that you know what you are doing, whether you are turning over papers on the desk of a suspected corrupt CEO or attempting to diplomatically grill a grieving widow for information about her dead husband. What matters is not do you succeed or fail, but more what do you get, what happens, and how you respond to what happens next.

There is even a way of wrapping a mystique about the character. You take away the individual spells or powers that they have, and narrate their propensities, the rumoured powers and abilities they are supposed to have, and let outsiders marvel and wonder at the character without having to list all the spells they are supposed to know.

Examples:-

“She is something else. Have you seen the way she moves across the lobby to get to work? She must know some martial arts moves, or maybe she’s a dancer.”

“That man in the red silk across the court? They say he is knowledgeable in the ways of fire. Candle flames are said to bend towards him in a room, and it was once said that he extinguished a house fire with the snap of his fingers. Saved seven lives that night.”

“I’m not saying that cool, thin girl over there is some sort of psychic, but she did this thing where one minute, the bus was tipping over the edge of the bridge where it had crashed through the guard barrier, and the next thing was, it was like she gestured and the bus tipped back onto the bridge, and let the driver and all those school kids escape through the back door. I dunno if she did that with the power of her mind, or she just knew that the bus was going to tip back, but as far as I’m concerned she’s a hero. I just wish I knew what she looked like behind that mask.”

Suddenly, it no longer matters what spells the character learns. And it certainly no longer matters about parameters such as Range, Duration, or Intensity. What matters is that the character has a rep for being wise in the ways of the spirits, or has some sort of esoteric knowledge or psychic powers, or simply that they “know Kung Fu like Keanu.”

And that means that your character, or the Gamesmaster’s Non-Player Character, can surprise the rest of the table by, well, pulling one out of a hat. Run the game as if Ranges, Durations, and so on do not matter. Let your players create wonders that leave the other players gasping with awe.

Scrub off the numbers. Let them make spellcasting awesome.

Document Q continues below. First, let’s look at those Traits your character has.

Think of them as kind of like traits you find in characters in fiction. Where are they strong; where are they weak; what makes one character likeable, and another one punchable. Who deserves a happy ending, and who deserves to be fed through a woodchipper.

The five Principia Canonica Traits are Archetype, Identity, Strength, Weakness, and Drive.

Archetype

The character’s Archetype describes the role the character plays in the narrative, for example a Caregiver or a Truthseeker.

Identity

The character’s Identity is how the character sees themselves: a Dogged Reporter, a Steadfast Cop, a Meddling Busybody, a Stalwart Fighter, and so on.

Strength

Your character’s greatest asset in the struggle to confront the instability in the story. It could be Too Stubborn To Know When He’s Beaten, or Leaves No Stone Left Unturned.

Weakness

Something about the character that holds them back. When a Weakness is invoked, the character is drawn to confront it, staging a struggle to grow beyond this limitation, such as Too Proud For Her Own Good or Won’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie, or Has To Be Seen To Be Right or even Let Justice Be Done, Though The Heavens Fall.

Drive

Lastly, your Drive is what pushes you through your limitations. Engaging your Drive brings you to face the obstacles and confront them. Examples - Leave No Men Behind, or Family Comes First, or There Must Be A Better Way.

You, The Player

You get to choose your character’s Traits. They can fit the theme of the story being told, or they can be core facets of your persona which you bring from story to story, facing different challenges each time - political intrigue in one, a medical emergency in the next, a daring romance in the next, a murder mystery running throughout the entire story arc.

My character Maven is an example.

Archetype: Nexus of Chaos. Maven stirs up stuff wherever she goes, putting a spoke in the most carefully-laid plans.

Identity: Former soap star with a shady past. The Child of Tuuren, the only survivor of a devastated world.

Strength: Situational awareness. Maven’s OODA loop is always on, thanks to what feels like a lifetime of Adjutant training.

Weakness: Addiction. She is always either on the verge of quitting or freshly quit, and her cravings are seemingly unending.

Drive: Act, don’t react. Maven attracts trouble in some form or another, and she’s not any kind of passive observer - when it comes for her, she faces it head on.

You’ll notice that I haven’t listed any of her advantages - her headcomp, her psychic powers - because ultimately, what matters is that Maven carries mystique around with her. Even when the stories are told in the first person, Maven only lets on hints here and there as to her past, her possible futures - whichever direction she steers her personal light curve towards at any given moment. Whatever trouble she faces, Maven hits it with her personality, her experience, her knowledge. She thinks tactically. She plans strategically.

She puts herself into the situation. Not her technical advantages. Maven is a person, not a collection of powers.

Back to Document Q.

Last week, you were caught in the rain, being led to what looks like a limo. Corporal Benton has commandeered your ride, but three mystery aerial contacts have been picked up, approaching your twenty, fast, in attack formation.

You watch Benton gun your car into motion, throwing up spray from the tyres as he turns around and drives back down the road.

You hardly have time to look at your benefactor before those contacts are upon you, three actinic beams lancing down from bright points far above. For a moment, they circle the cars you are standing next to: but then they move, as if they’d caught a scent, and speed directly towards the distant car.

A huge blaze of orange light emerges from within your vehicle, as it seems to explode from within.

‘My stuff,’ you say, as you watch the bright beams vanish and the three points seem to dance about one another in what looks like a victory dance before speeding off back the way they came.

‘What?’

You look at your benefactor. ‘All my stuff was in that,’ you say. ‘My clothes, toiletries, my ID …’ You glance inside the waiting limo, where Rex is already curled up in the well of the passenger area.

‘At least your dog is okay,’ the wise voice says. Footsteps approach, and a shadow emerges from the darkness into the headlights. It’s Benton.

‘I made it out before they got the car,’ he says, handing you a holdall. ‘I saw this on the passenger seat. Thought it might have been important. I’m sorry I couldn’t save anything in the back.’

You open the holdall. All your journalistic gear is there - microphones and voice recorder, cameras, lenses, rigs, stands. Your purse, containing your ID and press card. ‘Everything important, yeah,’ you say, looking at the burning hulk of what was left of your car, your home, undergoing some bizarre change as you watch. Metal doesn’t dissolve into light like that. As you watch, the vehicle just seems to disintegrate into some sort of dust, scattered across the road, the flames already dissipating.

‘What sort of … of weapon does that?’ you ask. In reply, your benefactor attaches something cool to the side of your neck, just over your shoulder. You try to turn and ask her what she just stuck to your body, but waves of dizziness and lethargy begin to flood your consciousness. In seconds, your consciousness goes dark.

Continued in 2 weeks

Document Q is a modern-era scenario and story. I said that Cepheus Modern aka Cepheus Light would be the system chosen for the setting.

Which left me wondering what system I would choose for the characters.

Enter Principia Canonica from Lightspress Principia.

Let’s recap. Your character has been brought up short on a deserted road in the Northwest of England, in the middle of the night. It’s starting to rain. The rain sprays across the windscreens as you look down the barrel of a gun pointed right at your head just outside the driver’s side windscreen.

The unpleasant-looking weapon is leaving you in no doubt as to what they want you to do.

You and the vehicle are searched. A flash drive is recovered, and shown to you.

‘Do you know how much trouble you are in?’ says the gruff male voice behind the gun. The lights shining in your face are too bright for you to see him as anything more than a silhouette. An armed silhouette.

You begin character generation, not with a race and class, but with a character concept. Dogged journalist; thorough scientist; determined student; inventive engineer; you choose what your character is, which partly determines how they are likely to react when situations arise that the character must respond to.

Principia Canonica characters are designed with five Traits. These are Archetype, Identity, Strength, Weakness, and Drive. Each Trait is rated between 1 and 5. These are the number of dice, traditional d6, that you’ll need to roll when the story reaches a turning point.

Here’s where things get fun. The turning points occur when a character makes a decision or declares that they are going to be using a skill, a Talent, interacting with one of their Connections, or doing something in any form to advance the story somehow.

Success and failure determine who gets to control the changes in the story - but whatever happens, the story changes course whenever a player character makes a choice.

You are taken to one of the vehicles blocking the road. A figure steps out into the beam of the headlights.

‘Hello there,’ says the figure, her voice sultry. ‘I’m afraid we have very little time for introductions right now. You and your pet will come with me. You will give the keys to your car to Corporal Benton - the soldier who persuaded you to come out of your car. Alan will commandeer your vehicle and bring it to our base. You are coming with me.’

You hear a vehicle door opening.

‘I would prefer you to be conscious, with your hands unbound,’ says the voice. ‘We will have to give you a briefing en route.’

You may be asking any number of questions - who is speaking, where you are being taken, what right they have to do this - but they are all dismissed with “All in good time.”

As you are entering the vehicle, surprised to find that it is spacious and comfortable within, you hear another male voice in the front of the vehicle pipe up with a note of tension in their speech.

‘Professor, we’d better hurry. We’ve got incoming. Three signatures, bearing South.’ There’s a pause. ‘Ten kilometres. They are in attack formation.’

So I’m picking the game Cepheus Modern for this run-through, but that’s not all. Because Cepheus Modern derives from Cepheus Light, I’ll also be referring to the parent title.

I’m also going to use Cepheus Light Traits and Non-Random Character Generation for my characters, just because.

Lastly, for the story itself I am going to run with something way out of the Capheus field: Principia Canonica from Lightspress Principia, a core roleplaying experience which successfully funded on Kickstarter on 2026-03-24.

I won’t spoil the flow by writing down each throw and the result that follows. Let’s just say that the story pivots on what the characters do, which amounts to what the players have them do.

Lightspress Principia has an explanation here.

So next week, we’ll pick up the story from the moment the armed men have collected the copy of Document Q. There will be names, and you’ll know what Document Q is.

Recently, I opened a book titled How To Use Romance In Your Game. Interesting book, but something caught my attention.

The book set out a long, stern preamble on ensuring the players’ permission and consent to use romances in your game, focusing on the ethics of romance. It posited that romance was a heavy theme, not to be lightly introduced into your game unless it were somehow lighthearted, a diversion from the usual tabletop themes of slaughtering and murder.

SO

I decided to copy the preamble into this article, and swap out most of the romantic terms with ones relating to combat, bloodshed, and violence.

Preamble, Revised

Before introducing combat into your play group’s campaigns, there are some essentials.

1. Make sure your players are comfortable with combat being in the game. If you are thinking about putting the player characters in any sort of violent scene, you’ll want to know how comfortable they are with the situation. See below for more information on PC massacres.

2. Make sure your players are okay hearing about anything related to violence. In most cases, no one wants to hear details about the violent act and not many GMs want to describe it seriously. Bloodshed as an act should be one of those things that get skipped over. However, some of your players may not want to even think about implied murder. Just because their characters are in an era where killing or casual slaughter may be acceptable, it doesn’t mean the players have to be comfortable with it.

3. Combat is a lighthearted event until it gets ruined. As long as the combat is ongoing, it will be often treated with humor. Fighting is another area often reverted to comedy. If the players or you as the GM do not want people to make light of a situation due to combat or homicide, then you probably shouldn’t introduce it at that time.

4. Stay away from BAD combat or homicidal situations. Obviously, the history of the world is filled with incidences of massacres and genocides. While forced bloodshed can make a good plot for an adventure or two, we’re certain you can figure out how to create it by yourself without us telling you how. No child soldiers, and no kidnappings or forced participation in death squads to ensure a relationship. Not here.

5. Consensual bloodshed without boundaries. Obviously if we were to follow real-world settings as our sole example, there would be religious rules against relationships involving same-sex combat situations starting in the medieval period. This is not the real world and we can rework history as we see fit. Although human society will consider heterosexual combat and bloodshed to be the best way to proliferate, alternative measures and systems of fighting battles in a fantasy world can be introduced without questioning its acceptance. Of course, the GM will decide what to allow or not allow in the privacy of their own game sessions.

6. Above all, have fun. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Get the players’ feedback as to what they want to do and abide by it. If someone’s not having fun, then try something else.

Player-Character Involvement In Combat

Make sure everyone accepts his or her character being involved in a combat or bloodshed before play begins. Some players will totally work their characters’ bloodshed like they have the taste for carnage of the gods, but if you get them “involved in hand-to-hand combat” with someone, they will freak like it is real.

Never force combat; it’s like forcing sex and that’s just icky. If none of the players wants to be directly involved, just use the information in this supplement to develop plots among the non-player characters or, at most, with a relative of one of the player characters. You can always try again later.

I have to say that I am more likely, nowadays, to be gaming solo rather than with a group around a table. Also, I kind of prefer science fiction tabletop roleplaying games to fantasy.

Something else. I also run roleplaying scenarios solo, and then turn them into source material for my fiction blogs. So my gaming table is much more likely to be a writing desk.

Which brings me to today’s topic; magic in roleplaying games.

‘Tis Magic, Magic …

The first tabletop games brought along magic spells which took their cue from Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. Magicians were lifted out of whole cloth from that fantasy book. Bloated, bloviating, pompous little pompadours who lent their names onto individual spells.

Such spells had specific effects. They had ranges. Durations. Set amounts of damage they could cause. They required three things - a verbal component (chant), a somatic component (gestures and bodily movements), and a material component (something which was consumed in the activation of the spell).

And D&D spells were all aimed at causing damage, or aiding the wizard or their party in combat. That’s all. Unless they were for combat, they never appeared in the book.

Looking back at those magic rules, they are the opposite of art: the very essence of banality.

I’ve spent some time trying to think of ways to make magic a source of wonder in roleplaying games - and, incidentally, to make it a source of wonder in my writings, too.

… That Has Ravished Me

Magic is described in Planetary, a comic, as “a loose, lossy signal.” It is also described elsewhere in the same title as “cheat codes for the universe.”

The origin of the term magic seems to derive from an ancient word magos, describing a learned person or priest. There is a possible root origin in the PIE root term magh-, meaning to possess or wield power.

The chief point of magic is that it is knowledge. Through the knowledge you, or at least your character, possesses, it is possible to manipulate the course of events, by applying forces through arcane means to people, places, or things.

Knowledge also translates in Latin to Science. Scire is the Latin for to know.

The Ways And The Means

In one of my stories, and also in an unpublished roleplaying game I have been working on, I have introduced The Ways and The Means as a source of magic. The practitioners of The Ways and The Means study two components - The Ways, such as summoning, banishing, warding, repairing, sending (messages) and so on; and The Means, the tools by which the character imposes their Will, such as sigils, ranging from simple glyphs to full-sized magic circles; cants, chants, songs, tongue twisters, hymns; or poppets - effigies and so on, relying on tiny fragments of the target such as a chip from the corner of a building, or a likeness of a person containing a lock of their hair.

Not every practitioner knows all of The Ways and all of The Means; and most practitioners learn no more than one Means, and perhaps two or three Ways such as Conjuring, Banishing, and Warding. But these Ways and Means lead to a great variety of spellcasters, from magicians summoning storms from the protection of a magic circle (cant, gesture, sigil) to a hearth witch brewing up medicines to cure an ailing child’s nasty cough (libation, banishing, warding).

I’ve playtested The Ways And The Means in a narrative tabletop roleplaying game. The secret is to remove the numbers. Your character’s ability to use a sigil (a magic circle) to draw weather to her (Conjuring) is not restricted to a range of just fifty feet or a duration of one hour at most.

Your character might be effective at Conjuring small things, pulling doves out of a hat, opening a closet to bring forth a blanket, or sterilising a patient’s wound before stitching it up; but the same Ways and Means don’t specify what exactly you might be summoning - anything from a rabbit to a stormcloud is possible, as long as you have at least one Ways and one Means under your belt.

Energy Considerations

Here’s the thing. Your fantasy setting doesn’t have a James Prescott Joule working in the background. He was the scientist who formulated the theory of how energy is propagated. He theorised that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; merely transformed from one form of energy to another, such as potential energy to kinetic energy, and kinetic energy to heat.

Your settings probably don’t have someone like that. So what would your characters know, if nobody’s taught them how energy works?

Your fantasy worlds can have flying sky cities, weather witches, and beings capable of charming audiences of thousands with a voice which cuts through the loudest sounds. Your characters do not need such mechanical roleplaying game contrivances such as spell slots, spell points, energy points, Mana points, Quintessence, Magic Points, Prana, or even Fatigue.

The scope and scale of your magic doesn’t have to have a range measured in feet, a duration measured in units of ten seconds, or to sound like a chemical equation balancing reagents and products in absolute measured detail.

What matters is the desired result, not the visual or other effect brought about by a successful casting. Cool - you have summoned rain. But more importantly, you have used your magic to break a drought. And that is the important thing.

Leverage

A hypnotist friend taught me one of the most important lessons of magic. It’s something he found while practicing real world hypnotism. And the saying he taught me is this.

Little hinges open big doors.

It is not always the biggest effect that has the biggest change. A tiny pebble could start a landslide. A tiny spark can set off a raging forest inferno.

The canniest magician knows how to apply the least amount of effort to create the biggest changes. Sometimes, a magician makes a huge difference with one small but crucial item going missing, or being displaced to the wrong place. Even something simple, such as a discarded banana peel on the ground, if you know what part of the ground to drop it.

Just as they know how to apply the power, they also master the art of knowing when to apply it. Timing is crucial. A small action done early can create a huge effect later.

Magic, you see, is as much a matter of knowing how, when, and why to apply the powers, as how much of the power to apply.

Bringers Of Wonder

You can summarise the sorts of people who play magicians in your fantasy games. Your mages are going to be bright. Inventive. Spontaneous. Joyful. Forensic. Strategic.

Most of all, they are going to be smart.

When there are many different outcomes in a fantasy story, other than murderous combat, your magic users must be the ones your party turns to for answers. Will talk produce better results than swinging swords? Then let’s talk. Will trade soften the blows? Find out what you’ve got in your gear that they want.

The highest expression of magical prowess is understanding what they mean when they say that Knowledge Is Power.

Bringing The Line To Life

The headings above have their origin in Kit Marlowe’s Faustus:-

To practice magic and concealèd arts.
Philosophy is odious and obscure,
Both law and physic are for petty wits,
Divinity is basest of the three—
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.

’Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me!

In the end, magic is a means to make things happen in the story as a result of some form of arcane knowledge possessed by the wielder of the power. However the magic in the story manifests, the duty of the storyteller or Gamesmaster is to make the working feel wonderful, marvellous, and even unique - unrepeatable.

You are the teller of the tale, and your art is diminished if you include crass details such as ranges, durations, a restriction as to targets, such as having to have them clumped together in a circle no larger than ten metres, and so on, just because you decided to use a specific spell from a game core rulebook such as Mythras and that was how you interpreted their rules.

Always remember the magician’s motto: To Know, To Dare, To Will, And To Be Silent. Keep your magic subtle, yet bursting with possibility, and you too will conquer the Universe.

I have always wanted to come back to that modern story I began here.

To recap:-

The date is today. The location - Planet Earth. Britain. Some lonely wintery scene, driving along an all-but-empty motorway. It’s almost Christmas, and the sun set about an hour ago. It’s pouring down, windy, freezing, and you’re driving along this motorway, nothing but your dog in the passenger seat for company.

Oh, and you are on the run. Not from who … from what.

Ahead, an exit ramp looms. You head a beep from your phone. It’s resting on the dashboard. An arrow shines on the inside of the windscreen. You’re to go left, along the exit ramp and off the motorway.

You follow the off-ramp. The road is narrow and dark. Too dark. All the streetlights are broken. Deliberately.

Headlights shine ahead of you. Two vehicles, blocking both lanes of the road. You can’t make out what the vehicles are, other than they are both cars, not vans or lorries. You stop the car. Your dog’s ears prick up. It raises its head.

Shadowy figures emerge from between the vehicles and approach you. You realise that they are armed with actual guns.

A hard, metallic object taps against the driver’s side windscreen. You look down the barrel of a pistol. A masculine voice calmly says “Get out!”

And now, the story continues.

I’m using Cepheus Modern for the characters, but the storytelling will be using Lightspress Principia’s core rulebook Principia Canonica, which was successfully launched on Kickstarter on Tuesday March 24, 2026.

Because the genre of this adventure is based firmly in Mystery, there are two Mystery-themed supplements to look at:- Foundations Of Mystery, RPG plot hooks and scenarios, and Modern Archetypes: Mystery, character profiles for running as player characters or antagonists, or to fit into supporting roles. On Clue And Consequence is also useful.

Foundational Philosophy

The foundational philosophy of Principia Canonica is this. Story begins with an instability already present. This instability cannot be allowed to stand. Events are already in motion, and the characters’ first actions can direct that action. Even if they do nothing or refuse, their indecision has a consequence, as events take an undesired turn which comes back to face them.

Document Q

Your dog growls at the uncouth man pounding the grip of his gun on your glass. The barrel of the gun points at the dog, as if to send a warning to you.

‘Don’t you dare shoot Rex!’

The gun pivots to your face. ‘Then get out of the car, Miss.’ The voice is neutral, but firm.

You open the door. The wielder of the gun could have opened it at any time, but he was making very clear that this was something you had to do.

‘Turn around,’ said the firm voice. ‘Hands on the roof of the car. Legs spread apart.’ You feel his foot kick your legs apart, forcing you to stand with a wide stance, leaning against the car.

‘Sit, Rex,’ you say, as you see shadowy figures emerge from outside the cone of light from your car headlights. You catch glimpses of khaki and dull metal. More guns, this time what look like assault rifles.

‘Keep staring ahead of you,’ says the voice. ‘You can turn when I tell you. Right now, I am going to have to cuff you.’

Sure enough, you feel hands yank your arms behind your back. There is the zip of a zip tie, binding your wrists in place.

‘Now you can turn,’ says the voice. You turn, but briefly you notice something unusual.

Rex is not growling. Rather, he is sitting up on the driver’s seat, his tail wagging.

‘Tell me,’ says the voice. ‘Where have you hidden Document Q?’

And now you recognise who the voice belongs to …

To be continued

I like consistency. My blogs draw in larger crowds when they know there’ll be a new post, regular as clock, same time on a Wednesday.

I also like projecting a consistent theme on this blog. In this case, it’s about tabletop roleplaying games.

My first tabletop game was Traveller, the original one by GDW, Game Designers Workshop. Not the monster currently owned by Mongoose Publishing. I’m sorry, but when a company’s business model goes down the path they have (which, incidentally looks to be the same as Hasbro), there comes a time when you realise you’re attempting to justify the Sunk Cost logical fallacy, and it’s time to walk away.

My blog is going to be concentrating on tabletop. More to the point, I’m going to focus on dramatic storytelling through the medium of tabletop.

For far too long, tabletop roleplaying has been hobbled. When people think of a tabletop RPG, they think of just one game, and you can guess what it is. That’s a game, and a format, which has been done to death. It’s just a verbal video game. No imagination or creativity at all. Just endless, repetitive, combat encounters where the end result is always the death of whatever foes the players encounter.

Narrative storytelling, where the adventure is framed as an evolving story, is a more dynamic interpretation of roleplaying. Your characters are fictional people in a setting, reacting as people do - as you do - when a situation emerges which you have to confront.

The systems I have been growing into provide a more dynamic framework to adventure roleplaying. Here, the plot is not fixed, but pivots with the decisions you make. Your characters are in charge of stopping something, or steering it, but the situation is underway as the story begins; and you must respond to the situation which cannot be allowed to continue unchallenged.

I will be guiding you through this, noting all the pivot points, the changed courses of the story, via Document Q, a setting I began a short time ago. At the time of writing this, I can’t imagine how this ongoing story will end - only that it has already begun.

Which brings us back to consistency, and having a regular message to give you, same time and day each week. I look forward to leading you through my blog, each Wednesday, and seeing where Document Q will take us all next.

It was probably a tongue-in-cheek article, but all sorts of gamers wanted to pitch in with their ideas. You can probably guess what a lot of the comments looked like, but I wanted something with a little more depth to it.

The title of this blog reads “romance,” though the reposted comment below focuses on erotica. I can happily retool any possible tabletop game to cover romance in general - covering Platonic relationships, friendships, and emotional and spiritual intimacy as well as the usual physical intimacy.

What matters is the connection, not the activity - and certainly not points on a character sheet.

Anyways, the comment begins just below the pic of the lesbians.

There are two kinds of erotica: genre erotica, and literary.

Literary erotica focuses chiefly on frustration and ennui: the characters are always bored with their lot, and get off on the frustration they feel at not being able to escape their miserable condition.

But genre erotica can range from the near-literary, all dark themes and the negotiated power dynamics between the dom(s) and sub(s), through to the light-hearted bawdiness of a “Confessions Of A [insert trade here]” where the protagonist goes from suburban household to household like a bee pollinating a meadow of freshly-opened wildflowers.

The mechanics of your game would have to put numbers to the traits your characters have. You are not going to be focusing on combat styles here - no weapons skills, no tactics and strategy, nothing about Hit Points and injuries. In erotica, blood is remarkably absent (which is why, I guess, people frown upon it).

In the game you’re setting up, your focus will be on the social skills, and whether the scene ends in an erotic encounter or helps set one up down the line. Think of skills such as Deceit, Persuade, Influence, Sing, Dance, Seduction (some of these skills are from Traveller, some from Mythras). Mythras has Passions, a woefully-underused resource which you can purloin and use for your own game. File off the serial numbers. Call them “Desires,” “Longings,” or whatever.

At this point, I’m putting up a couple of links for you to pursue, at your leisure.

There already is a tabletop roleplaying game, Principia Canonica, which focuses on story and narrative-style roleplaying.

One of the more recent publications, Longbourn, is a story bible of social pursuits for serious stakes set in the Regency world of Jane Austen. Play it straight, with your heroines pursuing marriage just so they can have a roof over their head; or run your games at the table like old-fashioned bodice-rippers, with athletic young men serenading their women from beneath balconies or even climbing trellises to get to their willing paramours.

If you want a game mechanic for building desire, then look at Reactions tables in some games I’ve seen. A person’s reactions to the protagonist can be like a thermometer, ranging from bitter cold to kind of lukewarm with the occasional lip bite, to full-on raging passion and the NPC chasing you around the bedroom begging for you to take them. Perhaps you could create something like that; a mechanism to build up anticipation to the point where they reach the consent threshold and reluctance becomes impassioned need.

Once you get the basic core mechanics in place, the random generator becomes irrelevant. Draw cards, roll dice, use a random number generator app on your phone; you only need to roll if you lack two out of three of the following:- Time, Talent, Tools.

Rather than rolling difficulty, and whether or not they succeed in each task, it’s all about the pressure to achieve the outcome you want, rather than something less desirable, and the consequences of your character’s decisions and actions to sway the flow of the game narrative.

Your character could be stoking a longing through playful flirtation, and make a check under pressure - he and his chosen are in a glass hotel elevator, people are watching, and he makes a proposition - his hotel room, now.

This is not a matter of success or not; the outcome will turn the course of the story either way, whether he gets a slap across the face, a punch in the face, or a passionate kiss from his deeply-aroused target with “Thought you’d never ask!” emerging from their lips as they surge into his arms.

And whatever happens next …

Good hunting.

I’ve been describing how the Lightspress Principia’s writer-in-chief loves Jane Austen. Yes, that Jane Austen. And Pride & Prejudice is well-favoured by the publisher.

So this book came out this week (the week beginning 2026-04-06). It is a story bible for the Pride & Prejudice setting.

And I’m now betting some of you are wondering why the hell this is important.

Well. Let’s see.

Genteel Drama

First of all, this book does not have a single combat scene. Not one. No swordfights, gunfire, or heavy weapons. Not even something as uncouth as a wrestling match, Unarmed melee skill competing against Unarmed melee skill.

Nobody has stats for Hit Points, weapons skills, or any kind of combat abilities.

Every conflict in this supplement is purely social: the characters’ choice of actions determines what others do around them.

For example, your character could be one of the personas from the book (whose Traits are outlined, from Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to Mr Collins) or your own original character (perhaps a person hired by Netherfield to go around making all of the introductions, equipped with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the entire guest list, thanks Memory Palace).

But in this story setting, what they say and do, or not, changes everything around them. A cold word at the wrong time could cause an awkward silence to fall in the ballroom; a refused invitation would certainly spread a tsunami of gossip around the circles the Darby and Bennet families circulate in.

There are stakes, and they are unequal; Mr Darcy has his eyes set on Elizabeth, and what’s at stake for him is his standing and reputation, because as a husband to the Estate he would have land, a title, and his star would rise. And on the other hand, the Bennets are fighting for the roof over their heads.

Most of all, everything about this story is about pressure, and agency, and consequences. Pressure, from a need to retain something which could be taken away from you with one fatal mistake; agency, in that you are responsible for what your characters do; and consequences good and bad, ranging from a happily-ever-after straight out of the Austen novel, to the dismal failure of having to relocate to squalid lodgings in Bath with your reputation and standing in society erased and abolished.

Confession

I was not a huge fan of period dramas when I began reading this book. I bought a Penguin Pride & Prejudice clothbound hardcover on the impassioned rhetoric of the Lightspress writer, and dug into it.

And then I bought Longbourn. And read it in a single setting.

The Purpose Of Longbourn

As the blurb for the book states, It’s the test run, the proof-of-concept, the format that future Canonica releases are going to take. So this book will set the tone for future supplements, stories, and settings.

Playing With The Settings

That’s not to say you can’t take the contents of this book and play with the rules and mechanics. Nothing is stopping you from taking some of the basic premises of Longbourn and setting them in Ancient Rome, or Florence at a time when Niccolo Machiavelli was still writing The Prince.

Set the scene as intended, right where Jane Austen placed her tale, only turn up the heat. Have Darcy lose his mind and serenade Elizabeth beneath her bedroom window after initially failing to secure her hand. Have him climb out of a pond, wearing a white shirt which goes see-through, just like the telly. Have him throw caution to the wind and climb the trellis to her room.

“Oh, I say …”

Or make every encounter in the story turn steamy and erotic, a Gothic romance or a real bodice-ripper; something which would have given the readers of the original book fits.

Or head up to 1920s Long Island, and enact the story in the setting of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Even bring the story up to date in 2026 London, where social media replaces the wagging tongues and whispered gossip, and all the characters are trans.

Just The Beginning

Lightspress Principia already has legacy story bibles for a bunch of other novels: Dracula, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, The Sea Hawk, Night of The Living Dead, Captain Blood. But success with this book will encourage Lightspress Principia to press ahead with story bibles for other original settings. Who knows what imaginative writings will spring forth?

You may be familiar with the concept of tabletop roleplaying. More likely as not, you will have heard of Dungeons & Dragons, and probably all your thoughts of tabletop are coloured by the D20 experience.

You are also probably aware that I’ve been harping on about the games produced by one publisher in particular - Lightspress Principia, whose website is here.

Last month (March 24, 2026, to be precise) they successfully funded a new tabletop roleplaying core rulebook, Principia Canonica. You can get it from a number of sources - they explain where it’s available here - and it’s a real change from more traditional roleplaying systems, whether it be D&D, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Mythras or the World of Darkness.

Inadequacies of Traditional Style

The closest fit to narrative roleplaying is the World of Darkness, long touted as a “Storyteller system.” You can play a vampire, a werewolf, a mage, or a Hunter - a mortal gifted with a certain edge they can use against the supernatural, rather like the Winchesters from that TV show, or like that cop from Grimm. Or the investigators from Fringe, maybe.

But if you follow the WoD Discord, you’ll find that the same discussions are going on there as on all the other gaming servers.

Mechanics.

“What if a werewolf attacked a ghost? Don’t their claws do agg damage?” “What if a vampire attacked a mage? What Spheres protect against being drained of their life force?” “Can I use Entropy 4 to attack a dragon on the Astral?”

The Mythras server, likewise, is full of the same questions. “Can XYZ’s magic power overcome ABC’s immunity to weapons?” “Can we get somebody to enchant Wrack (a sorcery spell) into a wand so we can kill beings with it?”

It’s all the same, every single time. All they want to do is quibble over the fine point of game mechanics, and how much damage a given weapon or attack can cause in combat.

Stories written in a traditional tabletop session all seem to run into one another. Your players send their characters into a situation, they face an endless stream of monsters who fight in pitched deadly combat, there is no such thing as quarter or mercy, and in the end the survivors get to look all the dead monsters’ pockets and walk away with treasures.

And that’s it. No story beyond hack ‘n’ slash.

What is lacking is dynamism. Failure or success alike, the characters’ decisions shape what follows. The characters’ actions and choices are noticed. Other people make decisions. The story pivots. The characters are faced with a new decision, and once again their actions - or inaction - determine the future shape of the story.

Beginning With Instability

Every story begins with something unstable. Not only does it impact on the player characters from the getgo: the instability is not something they can ignore or let go.

The instability must always impact on the characters. There is always something at stake. A cult holds an open day, and the lead player’s partner joins it. A random person is attacked in the street late at night, and the police are baffled by what look like animal claw and bite marks on the dead body, but there were no sightings of wild animals in the area last night … the night of the full Moon.

In my ongoing story, Document Q has been stolen from the secure archive where it had been stored. Who stole the document: what does it contain: and where does your player character and their dog Rex come into it, to the point that men are threatening your player character with a pistol?

This is where Principia Canonica comes to the fore. The stories always begin with an instability; it is in progress when the characters appear on the scene for the first time; the instability cannot be put back in the bottle; and it could harm the player characters somehow, often deeply, if they do nothing about it.

Narrative roleplaying offers the chance to play stories which have meaning and purpose, for high stakes, in circumstances where the players have agency throughout, and nothing stays static as the game progresses.

You feel as if you are participating in something real, with deep meaning, and that success and victory are goals you really want to set and strive to achieve. Before that victory sets off the next story, of course …

Staying on the topic of books. Continuing the discussion from The Habit Of Reading earlier.

Reading is a habit. Like smoking, maybe drugs. Reading - whether we’re talking actual books, PDFs, epubs, MOBIs, AZW3, CBR - is an act that takes you out of yourself.

I first began reading at a very early age. I’ve mentioned my school days, walking around with my uniform pockets stuffed full of books. I was the only student in school with this habit.

And yet, I was never called “bookworm” or “nerd” by the others. I guess they were holding back on that.

You learn situational awareness very quickly, when you’re walking around with your nose buried in a book. I think I amazed my peers by dodging them in corridors, not bumping into walls or closed doors, without looking up.

Nowadays, I guess everybody’s learned this skill, but with phones.

The characters in the books became dearer friends to me than my flesh and blood peers. I was riveted by Pip in Great Expectations, by Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and by Gil The ARM, a future detective in Larry Niven’s Flatlander stories. James H Schmitz’ Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee were compelling, and they are both an inspiration for my character Maven.

Apart from the fiction, I studied poetry, science, mathematics, astronomy, biology, physics, and most of all chemistry. Honestly, no topic was off limits to me. Give me a book, and I would soak up its contents like a sponge.

It was only after I’d left school that the likes of Tony Buzan turned up, offering kids the tools of mind mapping, speed reading, and powerful memory retention techniques. Honestly, school was - and is - crying out for such tools. My memory is good; but a memory palace, combined with speed reading, would have made it as sharp as a scalpel.

And there were books I never got into, because they were unavailable: Laozi’s DaoDeJing, Sunzi’s Art of War, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Seneca’s Letters From A Stoic. People genuinely did not know that these books existed.

Good job they’d never heard of Anton Szandor LaVey’s The Satanic Bible either, I guess. Nor Robert Anton Wilson and his Illuminatus! Trilogy or The Illuminati Papers, because some books would have broken their minds as much as Lovecraft’s dreaded (and fictional) Necronomicon once broke the minds of the characters in his stories who read from that dread tome.

And I always look back on the books which were pivotal to my life. Lyall Watson’s Dreams Of Dragons; Surely You’re Joking, Mister Feynman!; and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. These books opened my mind to the true vastness of the universe, and the infinite possibilities open to us by simple dint of the fact that we are alive to see it and wonder what our reality means.

The books I have read have each contributed to the being who is sitting here, typing these words. Dead people imprisoned their thoughts on fragile paper and, latterly, electronic media. Other people pick up those books and files, open their eyes, let words enter their brain, and let the dead speak again as if they are still alive. Philosophers a thousand years dead, authors of period dramas and weird science fiction adventures, and scientists who only passed a single generation ago, find new life in the minds of readers.

My mind brings their thoughts … their voices … to life.

As much as the books I chose to read changed me, made me bigger than the tiny child in short trousers, I like to think I’m performing a service to those voices between the pages. As long as I continue to read, the dead stay alive and influential in the modern world. And I think we could do with some of those philosophies - Stoicism, Taoism, Buddhism - in this day and age.

If, somehow, you got through all of this, here’s where I bring everything together. All the levers of influence and persuasion: Scarcity, Reciprocation, Authority, Social Proof, Commitment & Consistency, Liking, and Unity.

All the things I ever did, I brought together into a single lesson. Hypnosis works because people experience its effects every single day. You can’t understand hypnosis, any more than a fish can understand what wet is.

Hypnokink

I got into hypnokink a while ago. i found that there were people who were so eager to engage in the fantasy of some hypnotist coming along and trancing them. They mostly have one kink in common: they want to submit to hypnosis.

As you do.

I think it’s the whole business of having the hypnotist put his influence on you, letting you drift in and out of consciousness as the hypnotic trance deepens, watching as your mind glitches, stalls, for a moment: the first hypnotic magic moment which opens the door to the next, deeper moment, when you catch your mind drifting, and wonder where you were for that long moment of mental silence.

And hearing the words “That’s right,” and realising that you had been doing a good thing, and giving your mind permission to glitch some more, drift off into the void for a deeper moment.

And each time your mind wanders, it’s like a little moment where you tried to catch the exact moment you fell asleep, something you can’t really do without falling asleep - or, in this case. slip into a trance, and this time stay there.

And tthis is something you feel you can do, because your hypnotist is actually giving you something, and with that gift there is an obligation to respond, by doing what they want of you, which is to release your conscious mind to that extent, that’s right, and just drop away into unconsciousness while you’ve been following your attention to wherever I have been pointing it.

And this is something you need to do, because if it’s hard to slip into trance, you can’t imagine a world where you couldn’t drop, let go, sink. You can’t think to imagine it.

And this is something lots of people do - drop into stillness, relaxation, trance. People do it all the time. And it’s so good to like this state, because it’s not hard work, and all you have to do is let go.

That’s right. Like that. And further down. Just there, and push beyond the limit of your conscious mind, to a place where your conscious cannot go.

And you can tell me what is there, when the part of you that remains once your conscious has gone comes back here to say hello.

Because I am now talking to your unconscious mind, and you can understand my instructions.

So all you really need to do is to listen, because I have one instruction for you, and then you will come back into the room all on your own, and you’ll have no memory of having been in a trance at all after this, but you will be feeling wonderful, even if you can’t remember how you got to feel so good, and you’ll tell me in the comments how wonderful you are feeling.

And here’s the instruction for you. Whenever I tell you to go back into a trance, your conscious will once again shut down, you will drop into a deep trance - deeper than this - and you’ll be ready to receive instructions, from me and only from me.

That is all. You can signal your acceptance of this instruction by posting a heart emoji in the comments. Once you do this, you’ll be free to remain drifting in a deep trance for another five minutes, and you’ll come back in the room entirely on your own.

I do hope you have been enjoying this look at Cialdini’s Influence. Next week, I’m going to take a deep dive into another book - this time, by another author.

I’ll tell you which author, and which book, some time during this week.