Jon Cogburn's Blog

If these were planes, where would the unseelie reside?

This is the Gall set of phrenological regions. He thought humans and animals had the first 19, but only humans had the final eight.

1. The instinct of reproduction (located in the cerebellum).
2. The love of one's offspring.
3. Affection and friendship.
4. The instinct of self-defense and courage; the tendency to get into fights.
5. The carnivorous instinct; the tendency to murder.
6. Guile; acuteness; cleverness.
7. The feeling of property; the instinct of stocking up on food (in animals); covetousness; the tendency to steal.
8. Pride; arrogance; haughtiness; love of authority; loftiness.
9. Vanity; ambition; love of glory (a quality "beneficent for the individual and for society").
10. Circumspection; forethought.
11. The memory of things; the memory of facts; educability; perfectibility.
12. The sense of places; of space proportions.
13. The memory of people; the sense of people.
14. The memory of words.
15. The sense of language; of speech.
16. The sense of colours.
17. The sense of sounds; the gift of music.
18. The sense of connectedness between numbers.
19. The sense of mechanics, of construction; the talent for architecture.
20. Comparative sagacity.
21. The sense of metaphysics.
22. The sense of satire; the sense of witticism.
23. The poetical talent.
24. Kindness; benevolence; gentleness; compassion; sensitivity; moral sense.
25. The faculty to imitate; the mimic.
26. The organ of religion.
27. The firmness of purpose; constancy; perseverance; obstinacy.

Actually, the problem is that most interesting monsters that can be represented in terms of this mythology are best represented as mixtures of the above.

Sorry if this is obscure. The challenge is to design worlds where discredited psychological theories are not only true, but implicated in the way magic works. This is a steampunk trope.

Anyhow, the next trick would be to flatten the map and make the distance between regions (the extent to which they are contiguous, or the amount of distinct regions that have to be traversed to get from one region to the next) relevant. Then for example, the unseelie fey could inhabit a set of connected spaces (hopefully keeping the topology the same as Gall's picture of the human skull). Unfortunately, all of the actual maps I've found have all 37 regions, adding the ten that were Spurzheim's contribution to the pseudo-science. That's too many planes.

Maybe we should just use Freud instead.

posting lite

Posting for the next few days will be light. I'm working my butt off to get a serviceable paper on the change in the alignment system from  Edition 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons to 4th Edition before the reading group starts.

I love it when philosophy has non-trivial consequences for stuff like this. If I'm right then the unassailable force of reason is going to lead to another revision in the system. Actually, the fact that this is every gamer's fantasy means it almost certainly won't, any more than my philosophically proven ideas for storylines are of any interest to the good people at World Wrestling Entertainmnet. That's fine, I'm just interested in getting closer to Truth anyhow.

I do, however, have a subset of good friends who ask me why I waste my time on such things. Now that I have tenure they bug me less about it I guess on the assumption that the point of tenure is to waste your time (and I write just as much philosophy that is not about popular culture in any case).

But it's not a waste of time! Norman Malcolm wrote that one of the most embarrassing moments in his life is when he and Wittgenstein saw a newspaper with a story about British attempts to kill Hitler. Malcolm said something to the effect of, "That can't be true. It's not in the British spirit to do something like that." Wittgenstein responded that he was filled with despair that someone who knew as much philosophy as Malcolm could say something like that (and it is to Malcolm's immense credit that he left the story for posterity).

Philosophy is supposed to creep out of the narrow confines of whatever dialectic in which you find yourself. It's supposed to creep up from whatever you are passionate about. And that does not just mean using it to have witty conversations. That doesn't just mean being less likely to say incredibly stupid things. It means getting it on paper, getting it reviewed, and rewriting it.

I hereby get off my soapbox. So know that refuting this will not knock me over.

Fascinating issue concerning the metaphysics of D & D magic

Billy Bryan started a great thread about the mechanics of magic over at Chronicles of the Known World.

Please read and contribute.

We Hobbits are a Merry Folk

Neal Hebert's creation of archeological artifacts from the fantasy realm of our D & D game (one here, and more to come) made me think about the different ways such artifacts can be interpreted, given their role in the world in question.

In this regard, David Brin is my hero.

Among other things,this brilliant, hilarious, and thought-provoking essay reads The Lord of the Rings trilogy as if it really were a published history book in the world it describes. It's an essay I return to again and again. Mark Silcox and I discussed it in one of our papers and in our book. Here's the brilliant beginning (about the actual world, not Middle Earth).

It's only been two hundred years or so -- an eyeblink -- that 'scientific enlightenment' began waging its rebellion against the nearly-universal pattern called feudalism, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every culture that developed both metallurgy and agriculture. Wherever human beings acquired both plows and swords, gangs of large men picked up the latter and took other men's women and wheat. (Sexist language is meaningfully accurate here; those cultures had no word for "sexism," it was simply assumed.)

They then proceeded to announce rules and 'traditions' ensuring that their sons would inherit everything.

Please, try to find even one exception. You won't succeed. Putting aside cultural superficialities, on every continent society quickly shaped itself into a pyramid, with a few well-armed bullies at the top... accompanied by some fast talking guys with painted faces or spangled cloaks who curried favor by weaving stories to explain why the bullies should remain on top.

He then discusses how Enlightenment is the only way everyone else manages to successfully rebel against the bullies, but then how Romanticism ends up rebelling against the rebellion. Some of his article discusses how Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are typical romantics in this regard. But the article really, really shines when it bids us to think of what the real Middle Earth must have been like.

. . . .enlightenment can never completely replace older modes of thinking. The need for stirring, illogical tales and images runs deep within us all. (Some of us earn a good living that way.) Without romance, we'd be sorry creatures, indeed.

Still, scientific/progressive society has been known to listen to its critics, and not just now and then. Name one feudal society whose leaders did that.

Were any orcs or 'dark men' offered coalition positions in King Aragorn's cabinet, at the end of the Ring War? Was Mordor given a benign Marshall Plan?

I think not.

. . . .things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information got routinely squelched. And that's in every kingdom, mind you. Go ahead, name one where it didn't happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even as his body was cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)

My point? Well, LOTR is obviously an account written after the Ring War ended, long ago. Right? An account created by the victors.

So how do we know that Sauron really did have red glowing eyes?

Isn't some of that over-the-top description just the sort of thing that royal families used to promote, casting exaggerated aspersions on their vanquished foes and despoiling their monuments, reinforcing their own divine right to rule?

. . . .Next time you re-read LOTR, count the number of examples. . . .cases where powerful beings are vastly uglier than anybody with that kind of power would allow themselves to be. Why? How does being grotesquely ugly help you govern an empire?

. . . .Ask yourself - "How would Sauron have described the situation?"

And then -- "What might 'really' have happened?"

Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy. This clearcut and undeniable fact. Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.

Hm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil dark lord"?

Or might they instead have thought they were the 'good guys', with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elves and their Numenorean colonialist human lackeys?

Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the Ring War -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and movie-makers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle-Earther! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return... bringing more rings.

I think that one can make the point even stronger a Brin is missing what really went on with the elves.

There were elves working for Sauron, but LOTR calls them 'hobgoblins,' saying that they were elves that had been corrupted into a different species. Again, this is clearly part of the whitewash for Aragorn's genocide. Ask yourself what really went on with the elves supposedly going peacefully West at the end, and in reference to the good (i.e. non-hobgoblin) elves, just think of how Native Americans are romanticized in weird ways in movies like Dances With Wolves.

In any case, it's a fantastically entertaining essay with a lot of wisdom. The whole thing is on-line if you follow the link above.

new frontiers in depraved nerddom

Our D & D game has its own blog now.

an evening of making index cards

Well this is slightly painful.

Wizards of the Coast (the company that bought the company that invented Dungeons and Dragons) has sent a cease and desist letter to Ryan Paddock.

Paddock's website (which was here) allowed players to easily print out index cards with their character's spells and special abilities. Having such cards greatly facilitates D & D playing.

I was going to print out some for my first level cleric today for Neal, Skylar, Billy, Chris, and my geekfest tomorrow night. But it was not to be.

For a definition of "dump stat" see here.