The Adventurers, the Orphans, and the Gems, Recap 1/24/21

 The Adventurers, the Orphans, and the Gems

The team spent the last week preparing for their upcoming adventure; reaching out to a local home for orphaned children and requesting to take in a child or two around the age of seven or eight. They also did a little shopping. 

They received two orphans; a boy and a girl, twins, named Pongo and Perdita. The teams fed them a quality filling meal and informed them that they would be learning the way of the adventurer. The twins seemed less interested than the group had hoped. They the group honestly wasn’t sure how long the twins would be around for. 

Leaving their strong hold the group ventured to the local tavern. It was discovered through this venture that no one had seen the hired men who had gone with them into the dungeon the week prior. The group had hoped that the men had found their own way out after disappearing over the edge of the underground stream.

They loudly announced to all listening, who would not make eye contact with them, that they intended to take their orphans into the dungeon for vocational training AND to find their former hired men who were missing. 

But first, they set off to meet with Xylarthan, traveling underneath the bar, through the dungeons, and into his tower. 

Xylarthan offered little information in regards to the grand cathedral of the dungeon or the broken vial the group had collected. He did tell them that the vial was very old. 

He had more information though about Grishknack, the supposed Vampire ruler of the now named Klargarsar. 

Grishknack (the vampire part was an unsubstantiated rumor so status unknown) was the ruler of the tower and the town before Raglam, when the town was known as Grishknack. He is believed to be dead, killed by Raglam and his followers, but it is possible that he only disappeared and is still somewhere, waiting.

The group, with some answers, promised to visit again soon, and slipped back into the dungeon. They made their way along the corridor to the fountain covered in angels, and remembering it’s healing powers for those of Lawful Good status, Sven, with the aid of Theodora filled a flask of the water to take with the party. They hoped it would help to heal Sven or the orphans if their was an incident or any sort.

Turning back around they followed the corridor back to the west and past the corridor to the tower. They walked through the circular room and came to the door at the other end, finding, of course, a corridor. 

The team opted to go south where the corridor swiftly (after 10 feet) turned off to the west and almost immediately were confronted with a “couple of dudes” which actually meant five kobolds, who were unhappy with company. They asked our adventurers for their treasure. The group played off the traditional, “We’re broke as a joke” routine. 

Finally they offered two of Embers apples, Sven explaining that they were magic, giving the consumer magically advanced strength. The Kobolds were intrigued. Theodora sweetened the pot with the offer of adding a dagger to the bounty; so they could cut the two apples and share them easier. 

The deal was struck. However the group had to turn around as the Kobolds were pissed when they began following them down the passage way.

And so they returned east and turned back to head north. And then west further down the corridor. Making what they would find out was a square. Before they discovered this though they entered the room in the center of the passages. The center held a pit of unknown depth. 

Ember was the only one interested in leaning over the edge and as she did a tentacle came out of the hole, grasping for her, thankfully missing. 

The party got out of theirs as fast as fucking possible as other tentacle began coming up to join their compatriot. The door was rapidly spiked closed.

Continuing south our adventurers found a door, once opened they realized they were back to the naturally hewed rock corridor that would lead them back to the three doomed room, which lead back to Nupo’s basement. 

So they turned around and set off east, then north, and followed the corridor until finally reaching the Tower magic sewage run off stream that they had been looking for.

Ember and Ves loaded onto the raft that the group had bought, brought, and dragged through the dungeon up until this point and off they went!

Sven, loaded up with Theodora and the orphan children, scared and crying after their short time in the dungeon, waited a moment longer.

As their raft rode the rapids of the sewage stream, Ves became dislodged, losing the lantern to the waters, and nearby drowning. Ember, who managed to stay on the raft attempted to help them, by using a grappling hook, managing to connect with the stone bridge above, and grab Ves before they disappeared over the edge that the hired men had been lost to the week before. 

At this time Sven and his passengers splashed over the edge and launched themselves, thanks to the Pegasus’ incredible strength, onto the banks. 

Theodora using her Infra-vision, was able to spot Ves and Ember gripping precariously to the rope and lit a torch, guiding Sven to save their friends. Sven, using his teeth, pulled their rope and the two adventurers to safety. They were wet and fairly pissed. 

The orphans were still fucking crying so Theodora attempted to calm them and fed them a snack.

The team opted to follow the path of their lost hired men, because they are good people who actually want to help, sometimes. And save their crumbling reputations. 

Through the west door of the slug room there was a a vestibule and then another room. Which, of course, had more fucking Kobolds, who took Sven a little too seriously when he asked if they had seen any dead people. It turned out, they WANTED to see dead people and the team would do. 

Ember was lanced by a spear. And the group escaped through the only other door on the north wall as the assholes cackled behind them.

The travelled along another corridor, damp, before being confronted by a fungus wall to the north, a fungus covered and possibly moving corridor to the west, and a door to the east.

They opted for the door.

Inside was a dedicated corpse in an ancient robe on a throne. Beside him were two hovering gems, a red and a green. Ember riffled his pockets. Theodora examined his hollow face.

The team, led by Ember, decided to take the gems and be prepared to run. The first was knocked from its position and picked up in a cloak. The second was grabbed by the orphan, Perdita, who refused to hand it over and swallowed it. 

The girl made a run for it. Ember threatened to kill her. Her brother all but bit off Theodora’s ear before she could stop him and fled. 

The girl was let go and the two were put to sleep by Theordora, Ember collected them, while still threatening to disembowel the girl. But instead they were hog-tied together and thrown over Sven’s back. The team was getting that fucking jewel back one way or another.

After that, they opted to just leave, and find out what the jewels were and maybe lock up the orphans for life. 

The Kobolds were gone, the group travelled back through the slug room, the north, and back to the well. Theodora levitated Sven up the passage as he held the rest of the party. They exited through Nupo’s basement. 

Nupo’s isn’t even surprised anymore. He almost just seems disappointed.

The orphans awoke. The group fed them on their straw bed. But nothing was over. They would get that jewel. And they were definitely going to need to speak to Xylarthan again.

- Theodora

I published QAnon Cyberpunk with Boomer Characteristics

I am republishing an article I put on medium this Morning.  I am also putting it up here because I haven't been working on anything else and I'm proud of it:

Cyberpunk with Boomer Characteristics

    With only a few more days until the inauguration of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., therе seems to be no more room for QAnon, no more cracks in the future of the consensus model of reality of the future for its ecstatic mental paroxysms to slip through, to feed off. A lot of people have consigned QAnon to the dustbin of history. I would love to join them. I also think QAnon is dying, but in the same way that Pizzagate died. There will be a reconstitution and a reformation.  QAnon is an aesthetic practice, and a ritualistic information processing methodology that can be easily transformed and reapplied. As others have pointed QAnon is also a LARP or some sort of augmented reality game. The purpose of this article is to nail down exactly what kind of LARP it is and to discuss what aspects are transferable. I can state categorically that QAnon is a Christian millennialist Shadowrun LARP. There, you can stop reading. Although, I will spend the rest of this screed explaining what that means and how it came about.

Millennialist Boomerism and Cyberpunk
    I am not going to trace the history of Qanon from Clancyesque surrealism to apocalyptic millennialist prophecy in any detail. Other people are much more coherent at that and have done masterful jobs showing the way that Anons imagine themselves to be playing spymaster. Those narratives and aesthetics gave birth to the movement and are responsible for some of its key plot points (i.e., Q is a government intelligence officer; the military is inherently good and the potential savior of the American people, and so on). I have a lot of nostalgia for this era and the almost baroque level of ornamentation heaped on to their bizarre extrapolations from the minutiae of Hillary Clinton’s life. This era focused on pictures of politicians who may or may not (but definitely are) wearing ankle monitors, strings of numbers that might be GPS data. The explanations and exegeses have ornate winding conspiratorial lyricism almost like an art nouveau vine (perhaps I was wrong to refer to the baroque; I think art nouveau is a better metaphor for their ramblings). These reveries were clearly in the security state thriller genre. With the Cold War gone and the War on Terror (somehow lacks the same appeal) however the paranoia was directed solely at domestic targets and internal political enemies.
    At this point in early QAnon the explicit narrative is pure security state thriller tropes. Q’s posts are descriptions of future covert state actions against Donald Trump’s political enemies. The difference is anonymous 4chan users and later 8chan users have taken the role of the security analysts.  It is this democratization of security work that begins to incorporate elements of Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk can be traces at least as far back as  Bruce Bethke’s story, Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk  constructs a dialectically opposed reality to the one found in Tom Clancy novels and Cold War saber rattling. The world of Cyberpunk is one where the old guard is out of touch and not highly competent operatives. The protagonists are teenagers who enjoy sowing chaos through computer hacking with no aim or ideology. They are seemingly motivated by a motiveless malignancy or a compulsion to delinquency. However, the idea of the renegade hacker has entered into the trope blender that is QAnon. The result is QAnon’s merger of the Right's fetishization of the strong father figure found in the statist fantasies of Tom Clancy with the Cyberpunk tropes of the 1980’s.
    Of course, QAnon is not the first movement to integrate the fantasy of the rogue computer hacker into the fantasy of the uber-competent undercover government operative. QAnon’s innovation is the refusal to integrate these two things into a coherent narrative. The Government is at once a bastion of good and  a satanic pedophile ring. Anons are simultaneously anti-government hackers and loyal patriots. We can listen to an individual Anon’s justifications for how these contradictions are resolved, but any individual Anon’s explanation or ‘head canon’ cannot be understood to be the official narrative. The resolutions to the contradiction are individual; it is only the contradictions that are universal. It is here that QAnon pushes itself into Phillip K. Dick territory. However, we cannot follow them there yet. First we must discuss how the praxis of QAnon is informed by their non-synthesis of statist spycraft fiction and  libertarian cyberpunk fiction.
    Ironically the plot of the short story, Cyberpunk, is of little use here. It is more instructive on the reality of the Qanon arc than its internal symbolism and praxis. It tells the story of a protagonist, who has contempt for adults seemingly unable understand all the sophisticated stuff that he can do on a computer, and ends when his dalliances on the computer are shown to be incapable of keeping him from being sent to military school. In the end the virtual world of cyberspace is no match for the coercive power of meat-space.

Surrealism in Rebellion and Bootlicking
    The QAnon aesthetic is much more in line with the early work of William Gibson. A Q drop has similar narrative contrivances to Neuromancer. The narrator has a way of making the read feel like an insider being addressed by another insider. It creates an intimacy based on the illusion of a shared lexicon and knowledge base, while teaching that lexicon and knowledge to the reader. It makes the reader feel smart and cool:

Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data (William Gibson, Neuromancer).

See, very cool. You feel like a hip insider being informed by another hip insider of the doings of third hip insider. Neuromancer creates a conceptual framework for playing around on the internet while pretending you are doing something important. It also establishes the main plot outline of QAnon. There are people, Anons, sometimes known as “bakers,” who take posts/“drops”/“crumbs” on 8chan, or earlier on 4chan, and interpret them in a way that tells the story of a secret government operation.
This process is analogous to what a ‘decker’ does in Neuromancer. There is a mission from a shadowy employer. The protagonist goes on a computer and does things on the internet that allow them to extract secret information. The secret information slowly paints a bigger picture of a reality that is only discoverable through further interaction with internet. The nature of the secret becomes increasingly bizarre until it is revealed that there is a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence pulling the strings and suggestions of extra-terrestrial involvement.
     The QAnon ‘consensual hallucination’ is that they are also engaged in this process of discovery at the behest of actors in the U.S. government. This is The LARP;  it feels like an ‘almost permanent adrenaline high.’ There is the ecstasy of decoding a post. There is the fear response from obsessing over cannibal pedophiles. There is the reassurance that there are good guys in control that comes from the more boomer-oriented, Clancyesque roots of the conspiracy theory. There is the feeling of superiority that comes from having secret knowledge, which is perhaps the uniting thread between QAnon's literary antecedents. I am sure I could go on, but the point is that these feelings coalesce into a kind of ecstasy.
    I said the LARP was a Shadowrun LARP because it does not just incorporate aspects of spycraft and cyberpunk; it is also fundamentally relies on a belief in the supernatural. Shadowrun is the roleplaying game that united these two things. In Shadowrun you could be a shaman or a hacker. People pretending to be Shaman’s and hackers had to work together to complete missions. QAnon is a movement that has room for a guy named Praying Medic and a guy that claims to be communicating with himself from the future via a quantum computer. Shadowrun pioneered that integration. QAnon has replaced the Shamanistic magic of Shadowrun with the divine magic of prayer. Other than that (and the absence of other races of humanoid from the core canon) the praxis of Anons follows a Shadowrun adventure: a the mysterious patron gives you a mission. Then you move to a location while shooting stuff. At the location, you log onto a computer and do computer hacker stuff. As you repeat this process, you uncover a larger conspiracy plot.
    Qanon has adopted and adapted this process with one notable exception.    Until recently, the part about going outside and committing crimes was downplayed. Anons were never told to do anything in the real world except perhaps buy merchandise and contribute to crowdfunding campaigns. In fact, they were encouraged to simply ”enjoy the show.” The job of the Anon was to bear witness to a secret war using investigative acumen and a computer. Anons are actually engaged in a mixture of a mixture of googling and free association. As the predictions of the Q and the Anons started to fail tension developed between Anon’s image of themselves as ‘independent researchers’ and the continued failure of their research to produce any results that coincided with objective reality.  This tension resolved itself by incorporating spiritualism. Once QAnon incorporated fantasy tropes, it became too compelling and fun to collapse. Like Shadowrun, it was a place where incongruous fantasies could coexist in a sort of mélange or potpourri. Anon’s were now engaged in spiritual warfare. Anons conclusions, like, “Hillary Clinton will be executed” or, “their will be mass arrests” began to take on the qualities of prophesies or supplications to a higher power. More and more you would see Anons say things like, “God is in control.” QAnon began to resemble a priesthood. The LARP became one were cyber priests prayed and spoke prophecy into being over Facebook and Twitter.

WWG1WGA and Mercerism
I am skipping over a lot of the whackier aspects of QAnon. The whackier parts-the clones and stuff- have roots in mental illness and Philip K. Dick. I know, the whole thing has its roots in mental illness. It’s a “schizoid embolism”, a “consensual hallucination.” I would never call it a cult; it’s not that organized. It is more of  a gnostic Christian practice. It is a real-world analog to Mercerism from, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but dumber. Just read this; let it wash over your mind:

The man, Wilbur Mercer, plodded ahead, and, as he clutched the handles, John Isidore gradually experienced a waning of the living room in which he stood; the dilapidated furniture and walls ebbed out and he ceased to experience them at all. He found himself, instead, as always before, entering into the landscape of drab hill, drab sky. And at the same time he no longer witnessed the climb of the elderly man. His own feet now scraped, sought purchase, among the familiar loose stones; he felt the same old painful, irregular roughness beneath his feet and once again smelled the acrid haze of the sky - not Earth's sky but that of some place alien, distant, and yet, by means of the empathy box, instantly available. He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging - accompanied by mental and spiritual identification - with Wilbur Mercer had reoccurred. As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the colony planets. He experienced them, the others, incorporated the babble of their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their many individual existences. They - and he - cared about one thing; this fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on the hill, the climb, the need to ascend. Step by step it evolved, so slowly as to be nearly imperceptible. But it was there. Higher, he thought as stones rattled downward under his feet. Today we are higher than yesterday, and tomorrow - he, the compound figure of Wilbur Mercer, glanced up to view the ascent ahead. Impossible to make out the end. Too far. But it would come (William K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep).

There, that’s QAnon.  “Where We Go One We Go All” is their motto. The purpose of the gematria, the praying, all of it is to achieve unity with a higher purpose. Not to win. Not to actually get the pedophiles. It is to join with people through this entity known as Q and bear witness to his deed through this arcane process of decoding these cryptic missives. Once you understand them you have in a way made yourself one with his consciousness and joined with him. There is a larger war, a nebulous spiritual war that occurs secretly behind the scenes. Only traces of it appear in our reality as codes in music videos or popular movies. Our reality is a veil, and behind that veil is Q and Trump and the white hats. Your job as an Anon is to bear witness and in bearing witness you meld with Q and Trump and all of the white hats. You also join with your fellow Anons into this one entity that exists to fight spiritual evil.
    This profoundly religious experience is not going to be debunked. It must be robbed of its transformative power. Once QAnon can no longer provide spiritual ecstasy, it will be replaced or reformed into something that can continue to provide that experience. Falling into QAnon belief is a process that begins with feeling alienated by where your country is headed, and then it provides you with comfort, excitement and intrigue. Finally, once you are hooked, it provides you with ecstatic religious experience. It is as intoxicating and nourishing as Mercerism is. It acknowledges the evil of the world without asking Anons to understand or truly confront it. Or as in, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, “A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put another way, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever he saw fit.” This is what makes Mercerism and QAnon so resilient. The evil is nebulous. The shared reality is the reality of the experience of believing in QAnon. It is a form of Gnosticism.
    QAnon is world of intrigue and divinity that invites participation and shared world-building. It purports to give people, through prayer, the power to purge evil from the U.S. Government. This formula is compelling and not going anywhere. The new version of QAnon may take some time to constitute itself after Biden’s inauguration but it will be back if it ever even goes away.

1/17/2021 Summary - Sexy Long Beard and the Way to Level 3

 Sexy Long Beard and the Way to Level 3

Theodora, experiencing an epic hangover from a night at the tavern with Sven is pretty hungover and out of it for the first half hour of exploring and has almost no memory of what was said or went down. She knows that due to not having the Feather Fall spell the adventuring team opted to enter through Nupo’s basement. By the time she had really come to herself, processing a greasy breakfast and an ale, that the group were already in a corridor previously unexplored. There were three new hired men; X, Y, and Z. As well as “original” hired men; Adonis, Dinkle, and Ernie.

This was the corridor running parallel to the one just to the west where Ember had fallen through a trap door/hole. There was some confusion as to spacing and how this corridor fit into the dungeon they had previously mapped but things seemed to come together over time. 

There was a door into a further corridor and around this point Lorna Doone felt ill and had to return to the surface. She took with her the ghost of hired man Ernie, in hopes of helping them both at the infirmary. 

The rest of the party continued onward finding a door in the left wall where Ember heard a grinding sound which reminded the group of the gargoyles they had previously encountered, so they skipped the room and continued on. The corridor ultimately terminated in another door, which again the group pussed out on opening, instead choosing to try a corridor in the east wall.

However, as they turned, heading back, there was the sound of a small, barely intelligible voice following them.

Ember and Ves were down the corridor, heading east, as Sven and Theodora turned back to see a little, skinny man, wearing nothing but his own very long hair, behind them. He had long hair, and an exceptionally long beard. It covered private areas but little else. Both were understandably nervous so Sven turned on the Chainmail Chick charm. It worked. The man was enchanted.

He had clearly been in the dungeon for a very long time without human contact. But he agreed to join the group and lead them to the third level through the twisted maze of corridors, if he could ride upon Sven’s back. Theodora, understanding the need to get deeper in the dungeon and feeling compassion for the strangle little man, scooted back and made way. 

He claimed to no longer know or remember his name, as he had lived in the dungeon for so long, but Sven gifted him with the name “Sexy Long Beard” with his excessive charm.

Sexy Long Beard only remembered the vampire leader of Clargarsar, Grishknock. The group tried to explain that where was no vampire in the tour, but Sexy Long Beard could not comprehend this fact it seemed.

He was a strange little man but a good guide as the group moved through the dungeon. They took the corridor in the east wall, twisting with it, and eventually returning to the room with the spiral staircase, the gargoyles, and what was likely the dead body of Ernie, but no one looked long enough or hard enough to know.

Note: Sexy Long Beard explained that the Well was the fastest way to the third level of the dungeon, but AGAIN due to the lack of Feather Fall is was a difficult route to take with a large Pegasus. So the group chose what was a longer route.

They travelled through the north door in the spiral staircase room, narrowly escaping the gargoyles thanks to a quickly slammed door and the Hold Portal spell and travelled along a winding dirt and stone passage way that twisted and turned, clearly hewn from he very stone of the dungeon. Theodora recognized the passage and tried to find and use whatever maps and memories she had of the space from earlier adventuring.

The group continued on with shocking little intervention. There were a few Kobolds distracted by apples. They twist and turned, Sexy Long Beard cackling about the corridors which lead into corridors. Until they came to an area, which was clearly under the old tower. Beneath it sewage ran, not traditional sewage, more like magic run off sewage. 

Sexy Long Beard was the first to throw himself in and be whisked away. The rest of the group followed behind with some serious trepidation. They were dragged along on the least fun water ride of their life eventually falling into a quickly running stream. Sven and Theodora leapt from the waters, following the surprisingly lithe Sexy Long Beard. Ves and Ember jumped out after them. The hired men had far more issues.

Adonis, Dinkle, X, and Y, were swept away, unable to escape the torrent of water and washed over another waterfall and out of view, only their screams to be heard. Z was the only one to escape. He immediately wished to look for his fellows but was stopped buy the group and convinced to stay with them.

Theodora immediately recognized the room as she had previously been part of a battle against a giant slug in that room and found an idol. In fact the bridge one of her compatriots had built with magic was still there, across the stream.

The team chose to cross said bridge and go through the southward door.

Behind the door was a corridor (surprise). And while the party occasionally got distracted, Sexy Long Beard reminded them that the third level was slow close, just to the south. So they continued and after like 140 feet they entered a thirty by thirty room with a door on the opposite wall. Through the door was an intersection, leading west, east and south, and again they went south. 

This FINALLY lead to a stairwell that meandered, twisting and turning, until depositing the group on the third level!

They found themselves in a room, massive and cavernous, similar to a church of some sort. The room was so large that Sven, with Theodora on his back, could fly above.

There was an apse with a pit and offering bowl. There was artwork of people falling from heaven and an inscription to do with a child, tithing, and offering, and submitting. It reminded Theodora of the inscription on the massive elf sculpture to do with glory and sacrifice. But alas the group realized they had no children to sacrifice, terrifying the hired man, and moved to explore more. The hired man at this time ran for his life...


(It’s so hard to find good help.)

As the did this Ember offered a jewel - nothing. Some blood -nada. 

The south corridor, which was huge, had niches with cherub statues. Heads with Wings. And their faces were disgusted.

So the group travelled East. The found a room on the south wall, it smelled like death and decay. In the center was a person in a robe but they were mummified, decayed, but clutched a vellum scroll, it was a map of the forests above group. The team opted to save it for later.


They exited the room from the opposite side and entered another massive cathedral like room. The apse in this one was more football shaved and held a Dias with a body upon it. The body was only bones and armor at that point and looked as though it had been dropped from an immense height. Sven and Theodora fly upward but determined it could not have come from even the ceiling to cause such damage. It was a mystery. 

Ember rifled his pockets.

Gold (625 pieces) and 4 gems were recovered and taken. At this time it was decided to head back and due to their companion Lorna Doone being in the infirmary, the group opted to return to the surface to meet backup with her rather than spend the night in the small room of death.

Sexy Long Beard had at this point vanished. The group briefly mourned his loss. Especially Theodora who had found the old coot amusing and helpful. Even while others questioned him. She hoped they would find him (alive) again soon.

The return journey was unremarkable thanks to their handy maps. The group returned through Nupo’s basement and vowed to have the Feather Fall spell for the following day of adventuring for a quick return to the third level!