RAT MOUNTS THE CAT
It was Lasha who opened the gate, and Lasha who led the prisoners to safety, and Lasha who rang the bell to tell the city that we were finally, finally free. And at dusk we sat atop the west wall, watching the sunset together, and she fell asleep on my shoulder.
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Another lino plate down.
A quarter of the way into the carving I cursed my past self for sketching in so many edges. Texture felt necessary—but by the time I finished the table was full of tiny triangle polymer blocks and my back was frozen stiff.
Overall, though: I think this one works really well?
Scale is off: cat skull too big, rat too small. But by then I didn’t want to change anything. That the composition suggests a human skull was not something I planned for. It just happened that way? Thank you pencil hand and the artful universe for this gift!
This is probably the most goth-y / metal-ish thing I’ve made? Memento mori, motherfuckers!
Linocut 9 of 12.
AROWANA TORMENTS THE RAT
Prince Ghas would be a tyrant. This was plain to see. He was spoilt and a scold; he enjoyed beating Lasha the chambermaid’s daughter just to see what shapes her bruises would make.
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Another linocut plate. I was fairly negative all the time I worked on this: the lino material was kind of powdery; I’d made mistakes in the sketching; the fish looks derpy; the composition is too empty at the bottom; there’s not enough detail in the rat; my cuts aren’t even or precise enough.
Our fifteen-year-old neighbour Lisa had come over to make linocuts, too. She made a rabbit and a Welsh dragon. She was very tolerant of my constant bellyaching.
“You got to be positive,” she said. “It looks good, and you’ll be happy when it’s done.”
And while I’m still not one-hundred-percent happy with it—yeah, I’m happy with my derpy fish.
Linocut 8 of 12.
Three Objects
Sketching has been good at breaking up the misery of staring at a manuscript and being stuck. At least with the drawing I’m roadblocked by my lack of skill rather than my lack of ideas.
There are things from an adventure I am currently writing for Colin Le Sueur’s We Deal In Lead. It began as a homage to Wisit Sasanatieng’s tomyamgong western Fa Thalai Chon / Tears Of The Black Tiger.
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WIDOW GON’S PALANQUIN
A broad teak throne: canopied, curtained, cushioned. Stinks of tobacco.
Its bearers: the captive brothers Khol. Every night Lady Sao Rai visits their garage, selects a brother, and fucks him in her grandmother’s palanquin.
The Khols are too afraid to refuse her.
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The Widow is matriarch of House Gon. It will be her fiftieth birthday, soon. An elaborate fete is planned.
Captives are found across the sea, created through poverty, criminal sentences, or legal abduction. By Admiralty law, a captive must go free once they earn their owner their original price, a hundred times over.
In practice, few owners obey.
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It should be obvious what captives are. I ding-donged with myself about the nomenclature, here.
A simple reason for avoiding the word “slave” is because most people think “transatlantic slave trade” as soon as you say it. If nothing else I want to avoid the association because it is inaccurate.
On the other hand: annoying to have to decenter Southeast Asia in this way! The equivalent of having to say “chai tea” when I should be able to say “tea”, because that is what the word means to me!
(I strain against this specific problem often.)
Finally I decided “captive” was good, after all. This kind of legalistic euphemism (“Oh, they aren’t slaves, they are indentured servants.”) is exactly in character for rich assholes bending language to assuage their consciences.
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HOUSEHOLD PSYCHOPHONE
Listening room: settees; shelf of wax-cylinder records; a podium on which sits a psychophone.
Pop a cylinder into the psychophone, point its antenna at a servant wearing the receiving brooch, listen to them sing in an alto entirely not their own.
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Psychophones have been ruinous to local performers. Once-celebrated local singers have been reduced to glorified loudspeakers: vessels for the voices of famous chanteuses from across the Ocean.
This home entertainment system requires at least two to operate:
- One servant (or more commonly a servitor) to turn the crank;
- One servant to serve as a receiver-singer.
A receiver-singer’s health eventually suffers. When you have somebody else’s voice (and soul) forced into you over and over, and you begin to lose your own …
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This one was troublesome. Felt like production design. Appliance design.
Had several goals:
- The core mechanism has to look like it makes sense, to its own internal logic. No greebling; every bit needs to look like it has a purpose.
- Lots of ornamentation. This is a luxury device belonging to aristocrats from a rococo Indochinese-inspired society. It needs to be a jewelbox.
- Genteel normalisation of vicious magic. The needle made of bone; the antenna that is basically a massive needle pointed at your head—but disguised as a pretty bird.
The receiver-brooch is something I discovered while sketching. Seems gameable? Also, in the spirit of point 3: the brooch has a pin you stick in your forehead.
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GHOST WATER
Auw Yin Yan, the Sea of Sorrows—of Sighs.
Imagine bodies in a mass grave the size of a country. Imagine them luminescent, in motion. Pulled by the moon, waved by the wind, clawing at the quay.
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Always forms into human shapes: when poured into a bowl, ghost water sits as a balled fist.
Like saltwater in most respects. The Sea teems with marine life, though these are cunning and cruel in human ways. Humans cannot swim ghost water. Do not fall in.
Ghosts wear the outfits and injuries they had at death. Rarely, one will crawl onto land, eyes open, a hungry ghast.
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Yeah, so: the wider campaign setting for this adventure is defined by the Sea of Sorrows. It has whales and islands and pirates. It is filled with ghosts instead of water.
I saw the Sea in my mind as a vast Escher-esque tangle of interlocking ghost-bodies.
A wave would be bodies flinging themselves on a beach; their arms and hands dragging on the sand as they pull back into the surf.
I drew a way simpler visual. And the ghost’s hair is cheating: it already looks like water.
Still: very pleased with this sketch. Gentle, sort of sweet, quietly creepy. Also it is a modest bailing bucket, which contrasts with the material excess of the palanquin and psychophone.
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Three Clerks
Last week I tweaked my back. It hurt. A lot. As I recovered, I found that sketching with pen and pencil was less strenuous than writing on keyboard. So that’s what I did.
Sketched characters from an adventure I am currently writing for Colin Le Sueur’s We Deal In Lead. It began as a homage to Wisit Sasanatieng’s tomyamgong western Fa Thalai Chon / Tears Of The Black Tiger.
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SHIN SUL SHAP, SHRINE CLERK
4 Grit 10 STR 10 DEX 10 HRT
Switch (d4)
Face hidden by a broad-brimmed bonnet and veil. Patrols the lines of pilgrims; like a schoolmarm she thwacks anybody chit-chatting. Piety should be silent!
A waif snatches a lead token from her pouch, and bolts. A chase ensues. He begs your help. If Sul Shap finds him, she will sell him to captive takers.
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Sul Shap is a clerk at the Shrine To The Headless Sun: a bare plaza; a marble pavilion; a golden man, with an ever-burning flame where his head should be.
The Headless Sun is patron saint of the Admiralty, whose laws now govern both Ocean and Sea. He was its founder. The kings of old captured and beheaded him. He overthrew them anyway.
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References for Sul Shap were basically Buddhist nun robes (mainly for the volume of fabric), plus an European bonnet.
Initially I’d imagined a conventional broad-brim hat—ie: her veil would be a cylinder around her whole head. But as I sketched I thought the bonnet made a more interesting shape? Also its rear was an opportunity to create a crest / halo of sun-rays. Religious iconography!
Alms bowl, because giving is a virtue. But the Headless Sun values ego-death, not asceticism—so colourful beads and gold amulets and pouches full of lead tokens (money).
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RIS SHAY NAM, RECORDS CLERK
2 Grit 10 STR 10 DEX 10 HRT
Swung typewriter (d4)
In a wheelbarrow, pulled by a servitor, typewriter balanced on her belly, pockets filled with banana fritters. Greasy fingerprints on any document she works on.
Shay Nam thinks herself a moral soul. Will side with abolitionists and revolutionaries, with justice—until her own skin is at risk.
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Shay Nam works at the Hibiscus Court. Princess Khur San, distancing herself from the old order, surrendered this palace to bureaucrats.
Clerks have filled its once-airy halls with shelves. By sympathetic sorcery, all contracts in the province manifest copies here. Rumour has it that this magic works both ways.
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This was my first sketch. In pain and bored I just started drawing.
No references, and it shows? Skirt and stockings and boots because these were the easiest for me to do. In my mind Shay Nam was an archetypal overweight NEET. Here she looks to be a sassy layabout. I like her better, now!
Also: a servitor is an empty body. Created when you ritually touch a shrine-stone to the Headless Sun—your soul is obliterated. What is left behind is mindless, hence the harness and reins.
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KHAN YUL MIN, COURT CLERK
4 Grit 1 DEF 10 STR 10 DEX 10 HRT
Sabre (d8)
A university grad and former marine. But his townhouse sits below Rose Hill, on Merchant’s Row, beneath the old families’ notice.
Yul Min means to change this. He has his eye on the Widow Gon. He will hire ruffians to waylay her palanquin—then swoop in, to rescue her. Elaborate theatre.
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Yul Min, like all these characters, live on the Sea of Sorrows, whose waters are literally the souls of the dead.
Roses always bleach within sight of it; to retain their colour they must be shipped in glass, then kept in arboreta—never once sharing air with the Sea.
Those who can afford red-rose gardens tend them on the south end of the city, where streets begin to climb Mount Go, in compounds walled like fortresses.
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Drew Yul Min last night. Had tabs open for “Thai traditional clothing” & “military uniforms 18th century” & “krabi” & “Vajiralongkorn”.
Given my inspiration, I think the referencing of Mainland Southeast Asian material culture is appropriate. Maybe a little to obvious, though? Ie: the visual forms haven’t been composted well, into new and more imaginative shapes …
Still: very pleased with the proportions and details.
I liked how the hamsa-esque icon of the Headless Sun developed over the course of these sketches. I would not have discovered it, otherwise; it’s one of those details, too small for words.
Drawing is an intrinsic part of the writing process, I guess!
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The Fairwind Jongleurs
Some context:
Sao Rai is a society lady. She fancies herself a progressive libertine. Her name is ancient; her inheritance obscene. She is about to host a fete for her fifty-year-old grandmother, the Widow Gon.
For entertainment at the party, she has engaged the Fairwind Jongleurs, a sea-folk troupe. The sea-folk are a nomadic maritime people—admired for their “tragic and noble savagery”.
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THE FAIRWIND JONGLEURS
“They were wasted in the playhouse where I found them. Look. Such passion, such intensity. Look at his eyes. Look how she dances. Such frenzy!”
Sao Rai doesn’t know that these sea-folk knew her grandfather. Lord Gon burned their flotilla. They are here to pay him in kind.
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MASTER STARRY
6 Grit 10 STR 10 DEX 14 HRT
Rifle, as club (d6)
Casts etched bone and sea glass, reads the pattern, speaks your fortune: “You are the diving egret. On the sixth, beware flashing mail.”
His stare is cold. His gun does not fire; he has eaten its powder for years. He is a bomb. When he swallows a lit match, he dies like a fireworks factory exploding.
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CHEER CHARITY’S CHILD
6 Grit 10 STR 14 DEX 10 HRT
Fire darts (d6)
Tall as a twelve-year-old, marbled with burn scars. Her voice is husky laughter. Speaking, may manifest an obedient fire, the size of her body.
She juggles the flame. Shreds it into bird and fish and arrowhead shapes. These go where she can see. She imagines her audience, seared.
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PATIENCE STARRY’S CHILD
6 Grit 14 STR 10 DEX 10 HRT
Kick (d4)
Plump and tattooed. Her three daughters play drums, bells, clackers. She stamps, jumps, contorts. She only wears a loincloth; she jiggles and dangles.
Prudes gasp and turn away. Those who watch cannot stop watching—not until she stops dancing. Hypnotic hexes are hidden in the ink of her skin.
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Let the House of Gon fall.
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( Image sources:
http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2018/3/26/the-furniture-the-age-of-innocence-and-the-living-museum.html
https://naturelands.wordpress.com/2013/06/04/the-most-beautiful-woman-of-gilded-age-well-allow-me-to-differ/
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-c641-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Josephine_Giraldelli,_a_woman_impervious_to_fire._Reproducti_Wellcome_V0007101ER.jpg
https://www.daytonartinstitute.org/exhibits/jean-leon-gerome-dance-of-the-almeh/
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/09/photos-wildfires-burn-through-californias-wine-country/616519/ )
STATEMENT REGARDING A THOUSAND THOUSAND ISLANDS
Due to a disagreement over ownership, Munkao and I have severed ties. I have no further involvement with Centaur Games. I consider A Thousand Thousand Islands (ATTI) ended, as a project.
ATTI was built as a collaboration between Munkao and myself.
I named the project, and was the driving force behind its identity as a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG). In September 2022, following the success of our Kickstarter campaign, I asked that my role be formally recognised as an equal business partner in the project. Munkao disagreed. After multiple rounds of negotiation, we have been unable to come to terms, and my trust has been exhausted.
I assert my moral and artistic rights as co-creator of ATTI.
I do not agree with any republication of past ATTI works or new works published under the ATTI name. Anything of the kind is done without my involvement.
I have not been remunerated for my contributions to ATTI since April 2023. I will receive nothing from the sales of ATTI works going forward.
I remain proud of what I did for ATTI—its achievements as a TTRPG setting; its cultural importance as a Malaysian / Southeast Asian work.
I am heartbroken.
Zedeck Siew
Port Dickson, Malaysia
10 July 2023
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To the many, many people who supported ATTI: I sincerely apologise if this dampens your enjoyment of the works. Especially the recently-completed Reach of the Roach God. It has certainly dampened mine.
For the past ten months, I have felt empty and foolish and humiliated. But now it is time to move on. I would like to make new things, new art, new games.
To my friends, colleagues and fellow-travelers in the TTRPG community: from my hearts of hearts, I thank you. I am glad to see you as my people, and am grateful you would continue to have me as one of your own.
Tone Is Bullshit
Terrifying.
“Bridewell”, the Curse-of-Strahd-but-good adventure that Nova is currently writing and playtesting, features:
- unsettling puppet people;
- druids who practice bloody sacrifice, Wicker Man style; and
- child-brutalising werewolves.
It also features Padru, a forest god shaped like a giant cuddly red panda.
10/10, full marks, no notes. When I encountered Padru during playtests, I was instantly charmed. It was a moment of wonderful relief, a ray of sunshine through cloud cover. In that moment I saw what the fog-ridden, werewolf-infested forest could be. Hope and tragedy.
If Padru didn’t look cuddly—if she was all thorny and dark like a death metal album cover—she would’ve been predictably, boringly in genre, and I would not have cared about her at all.
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Tone is bullshit.
The film review I dislike the most is the kind of review that docks points for “tonal inconsistency”:
“The tone of this movie is all over the place, the characters quip too much, breaks the mood, is this comedy?”
Why be boring? Why not be both?
I wonder whether this has anything to do with being in my context, growing up with horror comedy movies from Hong Kong and Malay-language cinema like “Zombi Kampung Pisang” and “Geong Si Sin Sang”. But terrifying monsters are very much A Real Thing, where I live—so entertainment needs the relief of laughter. Maybe this is just personal aesthetic preference.
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In tabletop game design, especially for games that emulate genre (the horror RPG, the noir RPG, the dark fantasy RPG), there is a strong inclination to go:
It is important to design systems and mechanics that set up consistent tone and mood.
Respectfully: I disagree.
Mood rarely survives contact with players. Unless:
- players / the GM are theatrically skilled; AND
- your table is strict about enforcing a social contract of The Mood We Are Trying To Create For Each Other.
Gods know I’m ass at both the above. And I am willing to bet that a fair slice of TTRPG players are like me, if we aren’t actually the majority.
The thing I consider more important than tone, that never breaks, is meaningful worldbuilding. Concrete details that feel true. Characters and geography that responds in living ways.
Padru is concrete. Our characters could touch her fur. Her soft autumnal red in a drab, monochrome landscape has purpose: she is designed to offer a glimpse of what the forest used to be.
Tone is bullshit. Contrast is where it’s at.
Showing me a full reality outside horror makes the horror hit harder.
Hang Tuah’s Footprint
On Friday Sharon and a pair of friends (Marc and Carolyn) and I hiked up and down the Tanjung Tuan Forest Reserve, to see the shrine / keramat dedicated to Hang Tuah’s footprint.
Hang Tuah is the archetypal Malay hero:
- learned (he spoke a dozen languages before he hit puberty);
- worldly (he embarked on diplomatic missions, as distant as the Ottoman Empire);
- loyal to a fault (he slew his bosom brother at the behest of the sultan, a jealous, cowardly man).
Arguably the Hikayat Hang Tuah—the text which most thoroughly recounts Hang Tuah’s deeds—was commissioned by royalty precisely to reify their position and provide subjects with a model for feudal obeisance (hence Tuah’s blind obedience).
He was also a hero with demigodly powers.
Maybe he was able to leap far and fly? Perhaps his martial arts were just that powerful. The site in Tanjung Tuan is reputedly where Tuah alighted, on one of his journey, thereby indenting the rock with his footprint.
It has been a venerated site for a long while:
“Some come to ask for children or partners, others come with chickens, to repay their good fortune,” he told BH.
Ishak laughed as he recounted his youth, where he and his village friends would wait for visitors to leave, before rounding up the chickens they’d left there.
According to him, visitors left live chickens as gifts for the spirit or saint they worshipped, following a taboo against slaughtering animals at the site.
When Sharon visited the site last, she saw the paved altar covered with food offerings and incense; fabrics girding surrounding trees and the lip of the nearby well; the paths swept clean, kept clear of trash.
Hang Tuah’s footprint is not a shrine any more.
The sign reads:
The practice of veneration / superstition
YOU WILL BE PUNISHED
Fine of RM2,000.00
Or
Jail of 18 months
Or
Both
Section 69 of the (Melaka State) Syariah Offences Enactment 1991
Thank You
For NOT practicing veneration / superstition in the state of Melaka
Now the paved altar is carpeted with leaves. The stone is bare. The trunks nude. There’s is an air of ruin. Trash is strewn on the path.
The well is naked, and silent, and green. Left to muck and pond skaters.
Carolyn remarked that it felt like violence had been done here.
I agree. A heritage, a culture, sprung up organically. A hero, wrestled by time and need away from the aristocracy to hear and serve the prayers of common folk, a trade in gifts and respect—
Once again repossessed and demolished by power. The state as uncaring cultural landlord.
We did what we could. Previous visitors, folks who still had respect for the site, had left small scarves behind, tucked into the ridges of the bark.
Sharon left a good-morning towel there, with the other cloths. I think this towel was an art object created by hrftype, a design studio; they are responsible for the text on it. “Cayalah!” is a Malaysian exclamation:
“You better believe it!”
HOW I START WRITING A TTRPG ADVENTURE
It always seems to start with a piece of prose fiction—as a way to set mood and feel out vibe and set up scaffolds of theme, of detail.
It’s typically some species of folktale, because I usually do fantasy.
But I’m working on something different, this time around. Wildly different, you might say.
Am finally chasing my dream of paying tribute to the first Thai film I saw in a cinema: the epic tom-yam-gong-cowboy melodrama Tears Of The Black Tiger.
( Image source )
Also: Colin Le Sueur / By Odin’s Beard RPG ’s We Deal In Lead is a cool weird west TTRPG!
AN OFFERING OF MUSIC FOR THE GOD-IN-PIECES
All my #dungeon23 entries are done in pen and pencil in a 12cm-by-21cm notebook that cost RM12 from a local stationery shop.
It is astonishing and humbling and heart-filling to know that such small things can spawn music.
This is a instrumental track by Loot The Body, inspired by the God-In-Pieces.
Thank you. Thank you.
