Esoteric Writings and Reference

Month: October 2023

Latter Days of the House of Theophania, Ch 2

~~
The pair rowed their pack-laden boat down the River Elid in the dead of night. They had found the dead assassins’ ship, half sunk in the sea, a short walk from the ruins of Unkah. It had been another day of searching to find the longboat which had been rowed to shore and then set adrift when its owners perished, then another day to portage it across the sounds before they could find a low bank to the waterway. Then 2 days rowing inland, following the trail of the thief. Despite inhabiting the body of an old, frail, shaman, Ophius bones were filled with unholy power, and they pulled the oars longer and harder than Theophania could.
The single blue-lava lantern hoisted at the stern cast long shadows to the far bank of the sandy river. Thia gulped nervously as she spotted first the half-gnawed carcass of some unidentifiable creature, and then the fatbodied crocodile that had apparently caught it. She muttered a swear, then picked up the oars and pushed again.
It would be a long night.
~~

Night had fallen, and the heat fled the desert.

The thief’s hireling had sitting bolt upright for hours. His bind were relatively loose – he had room to turn around, sway, wriggle and writhe, had he really wanted to – the problem was that he had quite a bit too much room. Tall, sturdy trees were rare in this part of the world, and Thia had made do by throwing a rope around a cactus. A poisonous hesporic cactus, with spines 8 inches long and dripping with shiny toxic sludge. The polite thing to do would have been to put up a board behind him, but, again, trees were rare and good lumber was expensive in this part of the world.

The hireling was beginning to shiver. He didn’t like what that did to the buffer of air behind him.

Ten yards away, the queen and the reanimate made camp, watching the captured curmudgeon out of the corner of their eyes. Ophius fed bits of dry brush to a small fire. Thia picked weevils out of their hardtack. Ophius raised an eyebrow. “Too rich for you, your highness?”

Thia made a face. “I’m royalty, not a monk. I don’t need to eat weevils if I don’t want to.” She then bit into a bug-beset biscuit, as if to make a point. “Bleh.” She made another face, picked a weevil out of the remainder, and tossed it into the simmering stew-pot with the others. She stood up, rummaged through some packs, and pulled out a broad, evil-looking knife.

“Fresh meat today!” she called out, and stalked out ominously away from the fire and towards the bound prisoner.

He squirmed uncomfortably.

Thia raised her knife and brought it down savagely, over and over. There was a squeal, a squawk, some tears and wet squelching. Onion and trapped magpie followed the tack into the pot. Thia pointed the bloody knife at the prisoner.

“Imagine what I could do to you with this.” She laughed, and patted him on the head, shoving a weevil-filled square of hard tack into his mouth.
~~

The Paragon Watchlist

Editors note:
This scathing diatribe was originally published on 9/26/23 in the Rising Winds Circle of Paragons group. It was in response to the growing trend in that group described in the first sentence.

In the last, I don’t know, year or so, people have started using the word “watchlist” to describe people who should be on a list to be watched for nearly being Paragon-level. The problem is that “nearly” spans a broad expanse, and people have used it to mean everything from “they would already be a Paragon if I were Monarch” to “this new person has picked a favorite class”, which is a range that includes just about everybody. For this reason, I am presenting a new, more specific, list of words, based off the respective degrees of separation to Paragon-ness.

1P – Paragon: Absolutely there; no discussion necessary. Already a Paragon-in-waiting for recognition.
2N – Near Peer: One step away, could be proven in the next event. Probably just has one weakness that needs to be improved, or just needs one opportunity to confirm they’re there.
3D – Developing Power: Definitely not there, but has shown consistency and dedication. Every event is a meaningful opportunity to track their progress. Will likely achieve Paragon in an intermediate time frame.
4R – Relevant Player: Relatively novice player. Has established a propensity for the class. Probably in need of guidance. May pursue paragonhood, but has not yet necessarily established dedication.
Now, the point isn’t that you need to be arbitrarily categorizing every single player into one of these groups – and, by all the stars that ever shone, I will weep and wail if you start referring to this as a tier list or using it like an isekai power ranking scheme. The point is to be armed with a vocabulary so you can identify considerations and describe people, when necessary, with words more precise than “watchlist”.
You will also notice that this isn’t a rubric, and doesn’t describe any of the specific characteristics or behaviors that define Paragon-ness. The characteristics of Paragon-ness are for you to decide; this identifies only how you should be comparing the closeness of a person’s actual characteristics and the ideal characteristics of a theoretical Paragon. And stop saying “watchlist”.

Latter Days of the House of Theophania, Ch1

Ch 1

~~~

The pair stood before the ruins of Unkah.

The walls had long been torn down, and the foundations worn down by aeons of sand and wind. The tombs were now hollow, treasures long stripped, as no guardians remained to protect their offerings. The Sphinxes, charged with duty by old gods, had fled with their charges, when the valley of queens was stripped of their aforementioned, and the people followed the rains. Nor the golems formed from earth and desert clay and imbued with the breath of life by the desert rabbi, which had fallen still and mute, their joints locked with the ever-biting sand until their bodies were worn to dust and carried away by the ever-tearing wind.

It would have been a testament to a great city reclaimed by nature after millennia of uninhabitance, if not for the stench of blood and cloud of flies. They had followed the assassins’ trail here across the sea of sand, and the new lanterns still sitting on vintage plinths like tiny lighthouses confirmed they had made the right guess. The cobalt-blue flames contained therein, bright like the lava of Karuulm and visible even in daylight, confirmed the identity of their quarry. The darts, venom-coated from the fang of a great zul-serpent of the poison waste, littered the ground like playground mulch.

Already dark from the grave, Ophius’s skin was growing even darker after a week in the harsh sun. It was taking a faint purplish cast, like the vintage of deep red wine – evidently some relic of blood blighted by the rite of anastasis that had summoned their spirit back into materium.

“I didn’t have a very long rest.”

Theophania stopped scanning the ruins and looked down at her companion. “Fifteen years. Longer than mortals get.”

Once upon a time, Ophius towered over the girl, and could have picked her up and carried her like a sack over their back. If Ophius was bothered by the fact that she seemed to have sprung up in the blink of an eye, it didn’t show. “When you’ve lived as long as long I have, you’ll wish you had more than fifteen years to sleep. Where did you even get this body?” If Ophius resented the new form they were inhabiting, it showed a little.

“My great-grandfather’s court shaman. Bellerophon the Majestic, holder of the Sacred Mirror of Devirt’Noc, Heir to the Holy Rings of, uh, I don’t remember. I was with you when you had to harvest new flesh after your old burnt out. You were always saying only strong bones could carry your power, not just any meat vessel would do. Thought I’d keep it in the family when I needed you again.” Thia shrugged.

“And why me?”

“Don’t you ever get tired of asking that?”

“Don’t repeat my own words back to me.” Ophius glared.

Thia grinned, impishly. “I took your words to heart. Went home after you died. Reclaimed the throne, like you said I should. Sealed the Dragon-God away, like the fortune-tellers said I must. And no, I wouldn’t really have trusted anyone else to do it, just like you said.”

“And why me? Didn’t trust anyone else? Your cultmates who helped raise me? Your underlings who are back home running the kingdom now?”

Thia exhaled shortly. “Trust? Maybe only when I’m watching them, and in view of the palace. Rely on? A little. He wasn’t working alone. Someone let him to steal what he was looking for, without raising alarm before someone noticed it was missing, and I didn’t have time to try to figure out who. I could trust a stranger, or someone I know for sure wasn’t involved.”

“Because I was dead.”

“Because you were dead.”

~~~

Latter Days of the House of Theophania, Prologue

Latter Days of the House of Theophania

Prologue

It was a common misconception that the spookiest part of Kingstown was deep in the old catacombs. Surrounded by bones of long dead lords and saints, far from the light of the sun and the open sky, dripping with the blood and dread power of forgotten sorcerers and the arcane artifacts with which they were interred, the dark and closing walls of bone beneath the earth could give a layperson the idea that some grotesque animatronic of bone and dead flesh wielding a rusty iron battle axe could turn around any corner and rip their head off.

They were mistaken.

It was up, at the edge of the woods: a copse beside the Royal Healer-Herbalists’ magic garden, at the bend of the river Mardu. Under the burning light of the sun and the silver light of the full moon. Where the hawk moths fluttered so thick in the air it seemed like you were drowning in a sea of eyes, and the phosphorescence of the blood beetles that carpeted the broad-leaf elephant ears so thick on the ground that it looked like a parade of Fae at the midsummer lantern festival. It was not the loose undead raised by errant necromantic power that threatened, but the wild and untamed Bigfoot, Manticore, and dread beasts of the woods that had lingered since the dawn of time that threatened to step out from behind a tree at any moment. It was the scarecrows and totems, the curse-markers planted every few hundred feet, the silently spoke that it was not just rumors, scary stories for children, imagined unlikely horrors; but real threats, so real that the Shamanic wing of the Palace Guard had sought talismans and fetishes to ward off their predation.

It was here, in the autumn twilight, that the small procession stood. Many masked and hooded figures stood in a circle around a damaged tombstone. The tombstone bore a badly weathered epitath, and all that could be read now was “Carry on my w…”. One figure carried an intricately carved stick, festooned in runes and pentacles, channels of energy, and planted it onto what might have once been a burial cairn. Despite the hard-packed earth and stone, the wood sank in easily without resistance. One carried an ancient, basilisk-jaw-visor helmet, which gleamed beyond what the sinking sun should allow, and placed it atop the post. One carried a deck of prophecy-cards, a set far more ornate than the sort you would expect from a common itinerant fortune-teller separating superstitious villagers from their coin. A gold-inlaid card was drawn, 0 The Fool, and it was wedged behind the plume-holder of the helmet.

Offerings were placed before the helmet: a cooked anglerfish and Karamjan deep-sea octopus, fetched directly from the distant sea and conveyed by fast horses in an ice-chilled chest; two glass flasks, one of a hearty yellow potion, brewed from ingredients taken from the Healer-Herbalists’ garden, and the other a blighted purple ichor, stopped and sealed with lead, drawn from dark pools in the northern wilderness; a twisted bracelet of hemp and brightly-dyed linen, worn and crudely woven as if by an anxious teenager.

The leader of the group, having been muttering continuously while her compatriots prepared the ritual, pushed her hood back. The gold and gems of her crown glimmered in twilight. Queen Theophania, first of her name, chanted to a final crescendo and pointed a ring-studded finger. The stone of the cairn buckled upward in a shower of dust. A hand, then another hand, rose from the dirt, and with a loud crack the very earth split open where the helmet had been placed. The prepared wooden totem had morphed, somehow both slowly and suddenly, and beneath the notice of mortal perception, into a living head, perched atop bony shoulders and emaciated chest of a dark figure that pushed its way out of its tomb.

The naked, androgynous, creature stepped out of the pit, dripping with dirt and worms and all sorts of unwholesome things. It stretched and twisted, as if working actual rust off of abandoned iron machinery, and then spread its arms. One of the cultists stepped forward with a crimson velvet cloak to drape upon it.

The raised being worked its jaws, and rasped out in a grating, wheezing whisper, “….ssss Thiiiaaa…”

Theophania stepped forward and embraced her old companion. “Welcome back Ophius. We have work to do.”

Simple Boffer Tournament Organization

Simple Tournament Formats

Sometimes you need to run a tournament – I’m looking at you, first-time Champion of a Shire. See my previous article for an broad overview on types of tournaments. Herein, I will explain some relevant basic vocabulary, and then a few strategies for running tournaments that require minimal logistics and planning experience.

 

Vocabulary

Bouts vs Eliminations

A single instance of two fighters hitting each other a bunch is a bout. We usually describe it as “Best X of Y”, e.g. “best 2 out of 3”, meaning, we fight until someone has won twice, and simultaneous kills count as nothing – winner of 2 advances. That is a whole bout. It is normal for most bracket-based tournaments to be best-2-of-3 for most bouts, and best-3-of-5 of final for the final 1 or 2 rounds. An X-elimination format means you must be defeated in X bouts to be eliminated from the entire tournament.

Reeves, Heralds, Marshals, Bean Counters

A Reeve (Amtgard), Herald (Belegarth/Dagorhir), or Marshal (SCA) is a referee who (1) knows the rules, (2) can stand next to a fight and go “no, you got hit there, you died”, and (3) often wears yellow or carries a long striped stick. Those titles are largely interchangeable, though I will often default to Reeve. A bean counter is someone who does not necessarily actually judge fights, but records results of bouts on paper and does addition.

Rings

A ring is a spot where people fight a bout. You probably will not actually mark a ring on the ground, nor have hard boundaries to the fighting zone. It may not even stay in the same place (but it’s helpful if it does). Each ring should have a reeve or set of reeves that control the fight and report the score to the tournament organizer. The number of rings is usually the bottleneck to tournament seed – two rings means twice as many fights as one ring.

Seeding

When it is known that a number of entrants are of high skill, common practice is to strategically place them on a constructed bracket. In other words, they are “seeded” at specific intervals in the list. Places with advanced history may calculate “seed points” based on previous tournament performance, or just consider previous wins at the same annual tournament. Places which can remember scaling awards for fighting prowess (Amtgard) can also simply count the people with the biggest number. Different tournament formats will do different things to seeded players.

Easy Formats

Other common formats, such as Texas Two-Step or Swiss, have logistical or administrative challenges that require significant setup or organizer effort. Traditional brackets are the easiest to administer.

Seeded Single Elimination

Structured brackets function by putting two players in a bout, and one player leaves. Each round eliminates half the players. For this reason, fully structured brackets must be of a power of two size, e.g. 8 or 16 starting slots. A tournament with a different number of entrants (most tournaments) must use  bracket of the next larger size, and fill the remaining slots with “byes”. When an player’s opponent is a bye, the player automatically “wins” and proceeds to the next round. Generally, byes should be assigned either randomly (if the overall seed assignment is random) or to the top seeded players, i.e. treated as if the bye is a lowest seed.

Fully Seeded

Usually, seeding is for placing high-skill players at specified points in a tournament bracket. If all of your players are of a specific known level – which is usually the case during the second stage of a tournament where the first stage creates the seeding – you can seed the entire bracket.

Fully seeded, 8 person bracket

Fully seeded, 8 person bracket

Partially Seeded

Many times, however, you only know that a few players are far ahead of the others. You can partially seed a bracket by placing the few high-skill players as per normal seed rules, then just filling up the rest of the bracket with the rest of the names in no particular order.

8 person bracket, partially seeded with 3 top players

8 person bracket, partially seeded with 3 top players

In this case, 3 of the players were known to be higher skill than the other 5, so they were seeded into the bracket far from each other according to normal seed rules. Then, the other 5 players were arbitrarily assigned seed spots.

Arbitrarily Seeded

If you don’t wish to seed any players by number – either to simply avoid the emotional/administrative labor of ranking players by skill, or because the whole field is of roughly equal skill or simply unknown to you – you can simply fill in all the boxes with names. Even though the seeding is arbitrary and pseudorandom, it is useful because everyone’s names and the bouts are written down from the start. You have created an instructional guide for yourself – just call up the next pair of names when a ring is open. Players can wander off and mingle between fights, and you won’t lose track of who still needs to fight whom.

8 person, arbitrarily seeded bracket with no clear outliers.

8 person, arbitrarily seeded bracket with no clear outliers.

Notice that I filled in the same names in a different pattern than above. It is good to not fill in the names the same way if you are running multiple brackets with the same group of people in one day. It is more interesting for the players to not fight the same people in the same order every time.

Unseeded Single Elimination

You can also opt to not do any seeding at all. Rather than fully diagramming out the progress of the tournament from start to finish, you will virtually create the structure of a bracket in your mind. The advantage of this strategy is that you do not need to do any upfront administration: counting players, drawing a bracket on paper, getting everyone’s names, etc. It also allows you to easily ignore players who leave partway, or choosing exactly who gets a bye in a round. The disadvantage of this format is that it requires you to keep all the players in place, and it is much more difficult to track intermediate results.

Instruct the entrants to stand in a line, and stay in line (the head of the line is in front of the tournament organizer). Simply grab the two players at the front of the line, and send them to the next available ring. Winner goes back to the end of the line. Loser leaves. Repeat until the line is empty. If your tournament requires you to track placements, such as 1st through 3rd, you will need to stop the line when there are 4 people remaining, and explicitly set up, record, and direct the players. Usually, the number of rings will reduce so more reeves can watch the fewer, but more important fights. 

Overhead view of unseeded single bracket. Players A-H (red) are lined up before tournament organizer (green) O, who directs them to one of two rings with reeves (blue) R1 and R2. Bracket below shows the equivalent bracket being approximated by the queue.

Overhead view of unseeded single bracket. Players A-H (red) are lined up before tournament organizer (green) O, who directs them to one of two rings with reeves (blue) R1 and R2. Bracket below shows the equivalent bracket being approximated by the queue.

Essentially, this creates a bracket that goes straight down the line, with byes assigned to players at the end of the line at the end of every round.

Double Elimination

A double-elimination tournament is like a single-elimination tournament except players have to be eliminated twice. The advantage of this is that everybody gets to fight at least twice. The disadvantage is that you now have to organize twice as many fights and think harder half way through. You should construct the actual bracket when running a double-elimination tournament, because there is much more to keep track of than a single-elimination tournament. It is possible, but not recommended, to skip writing it all down by making your players stand in two lines.

In this format, the “winners bracket” (the standard bracket everyone starts in) is accompanied by the “losers bracket”. Losing a bout in the winners bracket sends you to the losers bracket. Losing a bout in the losers bracket sends you out of the tournament. Losing a bout in the later rounds of the winners bracket essentially seeds you forward directly into the later rounds of the losers bracket.

Most of the way through the tournament, you will have your tentative 1st place “no losses” winner of the winners bracket. This person will stand by. Shortly thereafter, you will have your tentative 2nd place “1 loss” winner of the losers bracket (as well as your 3rd and 4th, who were the last people eliminated from the losers bracket). These two people will fight the final round for real first place. The tentative 1st, who has not lost a bout yet, enters this fight “with Advantage”; they must be defeated twice to be knocked down to real 2nd place. Crucially, this means the tentative 2nd may face a player they have already lost to. They are not knocked out despite the previous loss, but have the opportunity to challenge for 1st place by winning two bouts.

Example of double-elimination bracket with 8 starting players. Players who lose in the winners bracket (upper, names in red) are knocked down to the losers bracket (lower, names colored according to round).

Example of double-elimination bracket with 8 starting players. Players who lose in the winners bracket (upper, names in red) are knocked down to the losers bracket (lower, names colored according to round).

Rounds of the winners bracket must be played before the corresponding round of the losers bracket. Losers of round #R of the winners bracket are seeded into round #R of the losers bracket. It is best to alternate rounds – play round 1 of the winners bracket, then round 1 of losers bracket, then round 2 of the winners bracket, then round 2 of the losers bracket…and so forth. This method minimizes the amount of time players must sit around waiting for the losers bracket to start – players eliminated from early rounds of the losers bracket know that they may safely leave.

It is possible to run a double-elimination tournament without writing the brackets out. Similar to an unseeded single-elimination tournament, you must simply have losers of the winners line stand on the other side of the field, forming a losers line. This is not recommended, because it is much easier to make mistakes, requires keeping everyone standing in place, and players must stand around for a long time waiting for the second stage to begin.

Running the Tournament

Now that the theory of simple tournaments has been explained, I will describe the practical steps of running a tournament.

Early Prep (1 week to 1 hour before)

  1. Announce tournament rules and categories (e.g. Facebook post)
  2. Recruit reeves – 2 per ring is ideal (one on each side of the fight), 1 works in a pinch. If there are 8 or fewer entrants, 1 ring is sufficient. Usually, at least 2 rings is ideal. Rarely is it practically useful to have more than 4 rings; the field gets too widespread to manage.

Stage (last hour)

  1. Confirm location is suitable. Clear terrain, or move if necessary. Decide where you will stand, where rings will be, and where players can wait between bouts.
  2. Confirm reeves are ready and willing.
  3. Recruit entrants; put out a notepad and demand players sign up. It is around this time that you need to make a decision on tournament format, if you were holding multiple options depending on the number of players.
  4. Make a firm decision on start time and repeatedly announce it to the crowd. They will forget.

Start (10 minutes before)

  1. Close signups. Count entrants. Draw your bracket and assign seeds, if applicable.
  2. Call fighters to the field. Remind them what the format of the tournament is, and the order of categories, if applicable.
  3. Introduce your reeves; call their names and have them raise their hands. Introduce your rings; say the name and point to the spot. Either way, you need to name locations so when you go “First two fighters, go to Rachel!” or “Alice and Beth, you’re fighting in ring 1!”, they know where you are telling them to go.
  4. Tell them where to stand in line, if applicable.

Repetition

  1. Call the next 2 fighters to the open ring. Repeat if there are multiple open rings.
  2. When no open rings are left, call the next 2 fighters up as “on deck”.
  3. Look at your paper to make sure you’re not missing anything.
  4. When a bout ends, the reeve(s) of that ring should announce the results. “Alice defeats Beth” is the ideal way to do it; “Her” points, “I won” fighter keeps walking, “Alice.”, etc., can all be ambiguous. Explicitly stating the winner and the loser reminds you exactly which bout that was and whose names go where on your paper, or who you need to call upon to give instructions or ask clarifying questions. Record results (on paper or by sending people to the appropriate line).
  5. Repeat from step 1 until the lines are empty or your paper is full. As players run out in the last 2 rounds or so, winners of bouts will be thrown directly into another fight. It would be courteous to give them a short break in between bouts.

Wind down

  1. If that’s the only set, announce results.
  2. If there’s more sets – call a 5 to 10 minute break. Get water, do math, eat a pickle, etc. Announce time and category of next set.
  3. Look at your paper to make sure you’re not missing anything.
  4. Repeat Repetition section.
  5. At the end of the last category, do whatever multi-category victory-point math is necessary to determine overall placements. 4|2|1|0.5 points for 1st|2nd|3rd|4th place would be normal. Announce results. Remember to write it down so you can post it on the internet later.

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