My Life as a Drowid, 6: Pap, Sap and Dunce Caps

"a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial, a denial"

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit

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(some BG3 spoilers included)

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The voice is struck dumb. The invader, the deceiver, the manipulator, the spy, the liar, the presumptuous filth claiming beneficence while trampling the boundaries of self has retreated to take its place by its erstwhile master. I only regret that I shall have to end its miserable well-deserved punishment of a life in absolute slavery. In its place, we have birthed an arguably greater monstrosity from the chained heir. This one at least claims it will submit in turn after our enemy's fall. Should it forget this request, I shall forcibly remind it. Now, only the last battle remains.

Behind me stretch scattered aftershocks of an ambling and oft discordant adventure: great foes felled, lairs laid waste whether in forest, fortress, temple or beneath the waves. Yet now I find my mind turning to the multitudes passed by in every town, to the captives and predators, to the aides and collaborators, and no less to my own companions and allies. Were any among them worthy of respect? Or even of attention?

Child of darkness, did not (by your own admission) your own sins in service to Shar bind you to your sordid little cult far more securely than your convenient change of heart? I let you make your own choice beneath the Shadowlands, and it was yours and no more than that. And your life's course for years before was yours and no more than that.

Should I in turn see any value in a pompous pigeon but the heritage she herself struts and boasts at every turn? Be your immortal blood your sole quality, aasimar, let it serve loftier ambitions than baring your flesh beneath the diluting light of the moon's dull gaze.

I'd held hope for the gith when she spurned her corpse-goddess, only to hear her reiterate her worship of a new overlord. Does your knee even un-bend, planeswalker, or does it merely pivot?

I tore down down the mummified master of a horde of rotting abominations hungry for the flesh of innocents. What use, then, to leave the horde in place?

A singing devil. Now I've seen everything.

Should I have spared the musclebrained Rashemi lummox? One does not bring a butter-knife to a battle of razor wits.

Child after child toddles across my path, each with a new complaint more tedious than the last. Am I shirking my druidic caretaker duties on this campaign merely that I might play nursemaid to domesticated monkeys? Has the overworld no labor to which nimble little hands may attend, if only to keep nimble little feet out from under my foot?

Rabble, babble and rotted brains. I have zombies a-plenty without imitators to clutter the ranks.

When this is over, I walk on alone.

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Personally I'm big on world-building but let's admit I'm weird, only quasi-human, a wer-wolfe. Ask most fans of plot-heavy, story-based cRPGs about their favorite memories in the genre and they'll cite characters instead. And hey, I'll gladly join in. My favorites like Planescape: Torment, V:tM-Bloodlines or Tyranny all feature some very memorable NPCs or companions in addition to large casts of believable extras and bit players properly fitted into well-defined social milieus. Even Baldur's Gate 2, which set the heretofore standard, was rightly applauded for the individual traits displayed by its large roster, even if they weren't all very thoroughly fleshed out. T:ToN, NWN2 and especially MotB, Kingmaker and Path of the Righteous, DA:O, AoD or Colony Ship, Vagrus, KC:D, the first PoE, even lower-quality writing like V:tM- Redemption, I could go on and on (have in fact gone on and on) about RPGs which, aside from their other faults or strengths, manage to convey something memorable either by character arcs or cultural development.

So for now let's skip "what" and ask: who or where is worth remembering from BG3?

 

Astarion for his snarking and his story's climax, maybe Minthara for wasted potential, and the hag, certainly, as a good old-fashioned cackling villain owning her cruelty in a myriad ways, developing the mindset, yeah, whoever wrote her did well. The Shadowlands, mildly, if only it had dwelled more on its inhabitants' adaptations to the curse and less on sapphic saviors with no other personality traits.

Aside from that, can you tell me the difference between Balduran culture vs. Elturan as portrayed in your 200+ hours of adventuring? Between a small village and the big city? Between tieflings and dwarves? Between merchants and mystics? Between adorable Shadowheart's sad, needy little girl mannerisms with her ingratiating voicing and any other sadistic thug trying to pull a last-minute redemption and blame the system for everything?

You can skip either individual characterization or world-building but not both, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I can barely name any character or location in any of Larian's games I've ever given a shit about. It was, in fact, one of my earliest complaints, back when I'd only played two of their titles partway, that the company appears incapable of anything but the most overused, lowest common denominator, generic fairytale/RPG filler material, jumbled together with no attention to constancy or consistency. I ask again as I did before: "tell me how anyone thinks they can build an immersive interactive experience around crap like this:"

 

Many adventures I'd hoped I might pursue in a fantasy world, but taking orders from Dumbo ain't one. I'd never really considered the dividing line between "whimsical" and "goofy" but surely it sits only a few pixels away from the line between telling a joke and being a joke. Does anything ruin a story's charm quite like the feel that the writers themselves don't give a shit and are just tacking on random gimmicks in hopes of looking creative to the uninformed and unimaginative via "LOLrandom" filler? One or two such digressions are usually cute, even necessary. Hell, I'd be the first to complain if we went back to nothing but box-filled warehouses and hippie elves. But when you're constantly jumping from ogres to fairies to dragons to dungeons to box-filled warehouses to talking cows to steambots to steamboats to curses to mad scientists to hippie elves to devils to talking pigeons to sex scenes to cauldrons to peasants to kings to talking cats to fuck-it-all-let's-throw-in-a-circus, you've created less a rich tapestry than a nonsensical jumble of loose threads on the floor which you're hoping I'll mistake for a rug. And then fall through into a vast pit of indifference.* I do understand a game this size cannot all remain interconnected, but you could've at least attempted thematic coherence beyond adolescent rebellion. Even Dragon Age managed that, despite being fundamentally at least as trite a pile of cliches as D&D.

But even taken individually, most encounters skew decisively toward infantile moralism. Pretty and nice things are good. Ugly and unpleasant things are bad. The power of friendship trumps any objective considerations. If nothing else, giving Raphael his very own Disney villain theme song should clue you into this M-rated game gunning for customers with a mental age of twelve, and please don't try to pretend that infantilism doesn't also extend to your RP choice in there. Saving the nice little woman from the big mean man is also the strategically sound option to gain a quite powerful healbot on your way out - which is to say you're being bribed to pad your ego by playing the hero instead of being made to choose.

 

On that note, nothing says infantilism like actual infants. Where most games avoid children to avoid making extra character models, BG3 both capitalizes on that lack and tries to get its money's worth with a sizeable passel of Artful Dodgers, Oliver Twists and Baker Street Irregulars. I actually liked quite a few: the wannabe resurrector whom you can coach into zombifying her brother's corpse by mistake, the bored son of a comedian, or the little goblin whom you can taunt about its parents deserving to die only for it to reply "Well, yeah - they was nasty old geezers - wanted to cut 'em a raggedy new smile myself some days." I'll even put in a special good word for Vanra, the little girl you pull out of the hag's belly:

Until that point, it works per the usual fairytale motif: beat up some ugly monster, rescue the pretty young damsel, then if you're not in a rush wait until she hits puberty before fucking her. I was pleasantly surprised though to pass by her mother's house later and hear a few lines of dialogue between the two, struggling to re-acclimate to mundane life an understandably shellshocked kid unable to form sentences and afraid to even go outside. It instantly brought to mind Picard's breather episode after ST:TNG's famous Borg two-parter, a welcome logical follow-up, an unusual hint of awareness from purveyors of mass entertainment that dramatic/traumatic/destructive events are not neatly fixed by an episodic reset or a happily ever after.

Plus, yes, heartwarming to boot. I wish those two the best.

 

But, again, whoever wrote the hag-related quests was rather more insightful or inspired than the rest. For the most part, the kneebiters in BG3 look cute and draw audience sympathy as they would in any sitcom or action movie. And that's about all they do. Some game designers have derided D&D's LCGE alignments as too limiting and simplistic, but Larian evidently dodged even such basic questions for a far more primitive, simpleminded metric of favor and disfavor: cuteness.

- unless it's masculinity in service to a woman, then it's "alpha"

Some juxtapositions are quite blatant (grumbling, bearded old necromancer vs. his cooing young healer daughter, giant-nosed hag vs. curly young mother-to-be, etc.) but various gradations of neoteny play into most of your quests. Even in a rare gender-flipped example such as animal cruelty at the kennels, the good male had to be a beardless halfling to look childlike next to the mean girl:

Shadowheart supplies the most consistent example. I'm normally a sucker for the broken little girl routine, but she over-played it even by my tastes. Her dialogues so single-mindedly pushed the idea of her being a victim (while ignoring what by her own admission were her own numerous victims) that by Act 2 I'd lost interest in her personal quest, and the fact that she defaults to "good" if left up to her own devices when faced with the Nightsong made me despair of her providing any cogent assessment of Sharran worship, instead rehashing some trite little fable about purity of heart. By that point Minthara was replacing her in my line-up anyway, so when her quest came up again in Act 3 I surrendered her to her fellow cultists.

An evil action to have taken, sure. I mean, I assume they'll torture her to death. Or, since I know for a fact from my BG2 Diviner's companion roster that Viconia already owns a Vest of Human Flesh +5, maybe she needs the shorts of half-elf flesh to go with it. *shrug*

But what I did not expect was "disapproves" penalties from every one of my companions**, including Minthara of all people! Because how could a drow matriarch possibly approve of my own drow sacrificing one of our hated half-breed surface cousins to yet a third drow?!?

The real kicker's that if you do hand Shadowheart over, the Daughter of Darkness quest bugs out and doesn't even complete properly. The devs apparently thought it unthinkable that anyone would side against adorable, emo little Shadowheart, who's guilty as sin of more than her share of standard Sharran crimes anyway, including my own tilted windmill of brainwashing. Her against Viconia. Against dignified, stalwart Viconia. Who soloed Jon Irenicus for me with two casts of a third-level spell. And, in-character, I'm surrendering one cleric to get a whole cult on my side?

Take her! Do you want fries with that?

 

At least Astarion fucking owns his evil nature.

 

Another recurring issue is the perennial anti-intellectualism of pop-culture, and to bridge the two, let's bring up this bitch:

 

"A tower full of trinkets" is the accusation hurled by every superstitious, inbred hick in history at ivory towers, ignorant of the nuanced analysis and systematic contextualization necessary to construct and utilize those "trinkets" - plus, Highlander Urkel over there has a throne made out of books! You seriously expect me to side against a guy with a book throne? Not to mention she's twice the pompous twit he is. So yeah, sure as Shadowheart's now a pair of lederhosen, Aylin's a nine volt battery. Distasteful her enslavement may be, but centuries of personal and public intellectual pursuit (foppish, but still) where that idiot jock would only spend her time dancing naked on moonlit hilltops... well, the juxtaposition greatly helps settle my conscience. (edit: yet of course the choice between them is presented as starkly as any cartoon mad scientist strapping a beautiful young damsel to a laser table; no thanks)

While I did not pursue Gale's quest past the meeting with the goddess, I saw much the same attitude in the ensuing dialogue at camp, where most dialogue options push you to talk Gale out of his ambitions, argue to remain slaves to the gods (or remain passive) even though he is absolutely right:

And, what, no dialogue option for a Lolth-sworn drow, despite Lolth's whole schtick being overthrowing at least part of the reigning pantheon? I should be high-fiving Gale by this point.

Extra point deduction for the line about "our time together" somehow presented as counter-argument to his ambitions - especially as I never romanced him.

 

For a more down to earth example try Mystic Carrion's quest. As he wasn't actually advancing knowledge but only playing spirit medium to a few rich clients, I did halfheartedly decide to end his saprophytic existence. At which point I'd assumed the rest of his undead would either join and die in the fight or somehow drop re-dead... not that his operation would just be taken over by some random street-trash ghoul, leaving a mansion full of ravening flesh-eaters to continue plaguing the city. How is this a good ending, when you've only eliminated the intellectual side of the problem? Well, you can't go wrong with beating up a nerd, I guess.

 

In summary: spoon-fed morality, cuteness, romance and beating up nerds. Themes thoroughly tailored to the mass market, which is to say to overemotional, instinct-driven, cretinous apes, whether typified by the cliched giant brain antagonist or by the fixation on mating rituals.

It was annoying enough finding persistent romance dialogues in every companion's scripts, even indulged in a couple of sex scenes, but I had not expected to be taken to task for not settling down by a damn corpse. Unsurprisingly Larian did not include the reply I would actually voice to such a question: that love is an evolutionary adaptation by which individuals are induced toward surrendering labor and self-sacrifice via emotional manipulation, that it is a form of mental control, brainwashing, slavery, and especially in this campaign we've already got more than enough of that going around.

 

And perhaps the saddest part? Larian really is better than this. Hints flit here and there that the writers knew damn well what tedious platitudes they were spewing.

But such moments, sad to say, come sparingly.

 

 

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* -and given this blog's meandering nature and lack of audience, I should know.

** Easily cheated btw; just leave your other companions at camp when you hand Shadowheart over. There's no fighting involved anyway. Also, in retrospect, given I jokingly blamed Viconia (and Korgan) for my chaotic neutral diviner falling into chaotic evil by the end of BG2... and now Viconia's tempted yet another of my characters to evil acts... maaayybe she really is a bad influence?

One sup on a time, there was a bathroom scale.

Splish-splash, we're all taking a bath

"like the water's flow under December's snow"

Longfellow - The Skeleton in Armor (1841)

Dunno whatcher talkin' 'bout Hank, Christmastime's t-shirt weather.

I'd like to remind everyone of a concept increasingly fading from our lexicon: the spring thaw.

This photo was not taken this year.

Y'see kids, you wouldn't know it from looking out the window but at temperate latitudes it was heretofore considered normal for snow to gradually accumulate for weeks at a time over the winter months, especially in upland regions, thawing or sublimating only gradually or partially in late winter and then finally melt altogether sometime in late February or early March when the temperature decisively rose. The resulting meltwater flooding caused occasional problems, but as it turns out, temperatures just above freezing don't help evaporation much either, so what we're getting now with fewer sub-zero days every year is longer and longer months of repeated freezing and thawing and miserable slushy, deformable ground wreaking havoc on infrastructure. Previously, wide, flat sinks like you see above managed the springtime overflow (and were in no small measure supported by it) plus ecosystems have adapted to winter ground cover, as exemplified by the now extensively studied snowshoe hare example. The bunnies don a white coat during winter months to blend against snow. With snow lasting less and less every year, instead of being camouflaged, now they pop out against the scenery like brilliant little lightbulbs, drawing the eye of every fox, hawk, raccoon and coyote like an all-you-can-eat corn dog buffet to a redneck.

Stop posing heroically just because you've finally admitted reality exists. The evidence for global warming was never difficult to understand. It didn't take long for timelapses of melting glaciers to pile up. Any advanced calculations were done for you. Hell, I was bugging my relatives and did a junior year high school science class presentation about it back in the late nineties. It was already old news. For my entire lifetime, you've been able to read evidence not only from atmospheric physics and dwindling albedo estimates, but chemical analyses of soil, ice, air and water samples, biological analyses of wildlife geographic ranges shifting uphill and northwards to deal with warming habitats, hell, even social corroboration. One of the saddest moments came in 2005-ish? when a delegation from (I believe?) Vanuatu addressed the United Nations, meekly begging hat in hand for some measures against rising waves because quite a few of their islands are atolls merely a hand's breadth above sea level, and they're already getting washed away millimeters by millimeters every year. We all knew they'd be ignored. And they've been sounding the same alarm ever since. And they've been ignored.

 

I suppose what I'm really getting at is that the next elected official feeding convenient lies to the degenerate braindead hordes of hillbilly refuse which have denied global warming for a hundred years based on fairy tales about divine providence and are STILL denying it even as it's sloshing against our boots in the middle of January deserves to be held face-down in one of those puddles above until it stops kicking.

Once upon a tine, there was a flat.

Four Lights, Two Sexes, Zero Gods

"Sacrifice to the cause

Turn your code into law

Compensate to validate the loss

To take a thief and nail him to a cross"

 

KMFDM - Anarchy

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"In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be equestrian..."

H.G. Wells - The Research Magnificent

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"One does not have to be unusually astute to see that when an obscure woman's charges of sexual harassment have the potential to topple the president of the United States, a major redistribution of 'power' has taken place."

Daphne Patai - Heterophobia (1998) (during the Lewinsky scandal) 

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"Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth."

 

George Orwell - The Prevention of Literature

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"You’re bitching about those kids over some friendly fornication - but do you know what I’m worried about?"
"What?"
"Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Think it over."

 

Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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Last year my inbox treated me to this Kafkaesque little routine courtesy of our overlords at Google:

"Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Pillars of Immersion" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://werwolfesden.blogspot.com/2016/10/pillars-of-immersion.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it"

 

You may notice the obviously bot-generated message neglected to point out my guilt. What exactly was the "sensitive content" which warranted censuring and censoring? You'll find nothing on that page but some fairly milquetoast praise of Pillars of Eternity's graphic design, a cartoon skeleton and a weak offhand joke about young Earth creationism. One can't damn well "adhere" to so slippery a prozess, but then what would be the point of ruling fairly and failing to fabricate criminality? Of course, if you'd like the hypocritical icing on that cake, note Google was at that very time arguing it should not be censored by the countries in which its users reside (to wit: all of the countries) but only by whatever tax shelter it bases its regional mailbox headquarters in - in its case Ireland. Was it Ireland then which objected to my praise of crossbow cranks? Or was it California (where Google seats its main power) which objected to my appreciation for rancid zombies? Heaven knows SoCal of all places would never traffic in tales of living dead...

 

Google (likely by automation) soft-censored a random page based on flagging by what (for all I know) could very well in turn have been another crawler bot programmed to do exactly that: flag random pages. The mere possibility that someone somewhere may have taken umbrage at something is enough to justify a conviction. Pretext is result.

 

"We've come to expect never to be offended. What you say is offensive to me" mocked Richard Dawkins during his 2008 tour for The God Delusion "I'm offended by some things. I'm offended by chewing gum. I'm offended by backwards-pointing baseball hats. But I don't try to get a version of the blasphemy law passed to prevent people chewing gum or reversing their cap. So what if I'm offended? So what if my feelings are hurt? Does that give me the right to prevent others from expressing their opinions?"

 

At the time, he was responding to religious uproar over his insistence on discussing religion like any other topic, refusing irrational faith the moral umbrella it so unjustifiably claims. Three years ago Dawkins was instead rescinded his 1996 award by the American Humanist Association, for daring to discuss other topics like any other topics, refusing other brands of irrationality the moral umbrella they so unjustifiably claim. The self-appointed arbiters of humanism are a bit fuzzier on justifying their own support for racist theories (be honest, if "black identity" had been proposed by David Duke, it would be reviled instead of applauded*) or the frankly supernatural precept that females can outright become males or vice-versa by the thaumaturgy of contemporary cosmetic surgery and hormone shots. No weighing of rational arguments was needed. The unilateral pretext of social activism was enough to do what they wanted all along and strike down a colossus bestriding their all too narrow little world of favor-currying - and by such reflected importance elevate their own increasingly farcical organization's status.

 

Last year, after recovering from his near-fatal stabbing by a Muslim terrorist, Salman Rushdie redirected his warning of the threat on free speech also to the dubiously secular historical, sociopolitical and antiscientific revisionism now running rampant in the United States. Sam Harris, J.K. Rowling, John Cleese, Stephen Fry, etc., our culture is now littered with famous left-wing examples unpersoned by rainbow-headed social activists, convicted on one or more counts of intellectual integrity. Desmond Morris might've been the canary in this particular coal mine come to think of it, raked over the coals by feminists from forty years ago for daring to include women in the human race.

 

In 2021 I called upon Samuel Beckett to elucidate the hollow spectacle of mob rule which had gripped most American cities the previous year, as only a master of the absurd could hope to explain the George Floyd riots' pretense of social "justice" by torching your aunt's Honda Civic and braining random bystanders in the streets - as well as the degenerate dregs of academia who lent that millions-strong Peste a transobscurent lacquer of erudite legitimacy by postmodern fabrications. So in that spirit, let me recommend another absurdist on the topic of our current kulturkampf.

 

Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros could be seen as an extroverted version of Kafka's Metamorphosis, its viewpoint character watching helplessly as his society loses its mind, as his every friend and coworker willingly give themselves over to a bestial transformation. A formerly vibrant intellectual landscape is effaced under a single banner of group identity. Once critical, analytical individual minds are lost in the herd. Sound familiar? Rhinoceros aimed its frustration more narrowly than Godot at the intelligentsia, but the various fascist logicians, apologists and theologians throughout 1930s Europe could themselves not have existed but for widespread support among the rabble looking for a pretext to murder their neighbours. And that is what Women's Studies, African-American Studies, Hollywood's gay mafia and the rest of the now endless dogmatic host of celluloid censors or academic millstones supply, much as phrenology and social "darwinism" did a hundred and fifty years ago, or the apologists for Stalinism or for Nazism. They market that all-important perceived legitimacy, casus belli, the pretext to attack. The contagious hordes of our degenerate Peste and their "daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto" of academic and media circles are in fact forced to endlessly legitimize each other. Who else would?

 

Here's the thing though: the same capacity for reason which criticizes nationalism, corporatism, Christianity or the nuclear family will also criticize matriarchal communes, Islam, overpopulation and political correctness. The same skepticism which let me call bullshit on Wiccans or "compassionate conservatives"** twenty years ago protects me from Scientology and PETA. You can argue about whether Stalin was a communist or a fascist, anti-religious or set himself up as a demigod, but to the tens of millions he murdered, to the hundreds of millions he enslaved, it all ended up the same anyway. Stalin was first and foremost the most ardent Stalinist, and all philosophy he preached to the masses served only as pretext for powermongering. And anyone capable of calling into question his justifications had to go. Rhinoceros is particularly apt to remind us of an immutable early step in the rise of any dictatorship: smash the schools, smash the papers. The free press, universities, academia, the fourth estate, the intelligentsia, call it what you will, but it all serves as an unending font of inconvenient critique which any would-be tyrant must muzzle, leash, curb, neuter or put down for fear it might give the masses the wrong idea - that is to say, any idea. The rich and powerful will do this by any means at their disposal, by any pretext.

Do you not understand this?

THE RICH DON'T CARE!

They don't care which big lie they spout to seize power. You think the multibillionaire investors astroturfing your non-profit organization or gutting universities by turning them over from professors to ever more bloated administrations give a flying fuck about your personal pronouns, about your petty, narcissistic little word games? Or which magic sky-daddy you worship? All they care about is an unthinking workforce willing to be worked to death or marched onto the battlefield as cannon fodder.

If they can't do it by nationalistic fervor, they'll do it by proletarian fervor.

If they can't do it by christianity, they'll do it by hinduism.

If they can't do it by promises of a kingdom of god, they'll do it by woke utopianism.

If they can't do it by antisemitism, they'll do it by pro-semitism.

If they can't do it by white power, they'll do it by black power.

If they can't do it by religious sexual puritanism, they'll do it by feminist sexual puritanism.

It does not matter whether they force you to say that Lazarus rose from the dead or you'll be reincarnated as a cow or biological sex is a social construct or extraterrestrials are playing ping-pong at Roswell or JFK was assassinated by Atlantean Keebler Elves. They need to exterminate thought, instill absolute obedience. Anyone who criticizes nonsense must go, anyone who does not simply jump on the bandwagon, worship the fad, toe the line mindlessly at every opportunity must be deplatformed, censored, exiled. Remember the punchline of Aristides' anecdote is not only that he signed his own ostrakon, but that he was asked to do so by someone who knew nothing about him and only wanted to take a swipe at someone nicknamed "the just".

 

Oh yes, they always have a reason. Europeans in 1800/1900/1930 didn't attack Jews "just because" they woke up one morning with that idea. They had reasons, oh yes, those jews were foreign subversives, they were sapping the vital force of the mother/fatherland, they purveyed immorality and decadence, they drank baby blood, they had a million reasons! With zero analysis. Religious reactionaries aren't beating homosexuals to death just because they're bored and have nothing else to do. Oh, they've always had reasons, those gays were all disease-carrying pederasts, didn't you hear? And besides, God hates fags! Didn't you hear!?! "Why do you always make me hit you" the domestic abuser shouts. "Stop hitting yourself" the schoolyard bully shouts. A woman can't harm a man, she's only turning his patriarchal aggression against him. The designated enemy is always a threat, always blamed for the violence.

And of course "minority" groups only want to censor hate speech. Never mind that any group with the power to dictate both public opinion and intitutional access is not marginalized. They're under threat! You are harming some random narcissistic bitch by denying her an invented honorific like the royal "they"; you are an enemy of the public. Google's guidelines state "we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages" got that? Google is THREATENED by the notion that men and women are not identical. Google is THREATENED by da lawd's name taken in vain. Google is THREATENED by cartoon skeletons. Google is THREATENED by old cranks. Google is RANCID about the word threatened. If any bystanders get caught in the algorithmic censorship crossfire, well, those are acceptable losses. Pay no attention to the side-effect of fomenting a culture in which those momentarily in power can now silence any voice of dissent, choreograph the ostracism of any individual at any time for any reason or no reason at all; all it takes is the claim that someone, somewhere, is offended by your existence, and you're gone - so ya'd better keep yer head down, keep yer yap shut, keep yer noggin void of any unsanctioned thoughts.

That automated censorship is even considered an option sounds the death knell of free thought. Any hate speech law is by its nature a thought crime law. It hinges on perceived motivation or the parties' implied relative moral standing, very much in the same vein as blasphemy or lese-majeste. Social activist naivete works on the presumption that you will always control the narrative, that you personally will always stand in judgment of others (being after all perennially "on the right side of history") but you won't. History's wheel has trampled greater rabblerousing powermongers than you (ask the Jacobins, ask the Leninists, ask the Templars and Huguenots) and will not slow its roll no matter how many knights say "ni" or "zee" at it. Having served your purpose in justifying censorship and repression by your hollow sophistry, having built the pyre, you will be of no further use to the rich and will take your place upon it.

 

After all, rhinoceros burn as readily as do monkeys.

 

 

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* An apocalyptic streak akin to Christian Zionism runs through all modern "minority" identity politics angles in that White Nationalists, White Supremacists and the like seem to love hearing the very targets of their hatred validate their fractionalist worldview and hasten race wars.

 

** In that context, isn't it funny to see the American Humanists adopt the "compassionate" rhetoric in their very subtitle? Smokescreens block vision from both directions, it turns out.

P.S.: Believe it or not, the joke in my title was accidental. I don't even indulge. I do indulge in ST:TNG, but if you didn't get the reference: There. Are. Four. Lights!

Once upon a time, their was a husbandman.

This Blog Needs an Enema

Assuming anyone ever skims over these months, I wonder if you've figured out yet that I'm temporizing with these onceuponatime posts because I want to devote more time to fiction writing? I mean, some won't be posted here anyway, but I do want to get the brain uploading story written before it gets obsoleted by real-life brain uploading.

 

Also when I started this damn thing was only supposed to last a couple of months, so not only did I never set up my categories carefully but I made myself a few notes. Drafts with only a topic line. And then I got distracted, and got more ideas which I got distracted from, and the half dozen original topic lines turned into twenty, and I kept assuming I'd get around to them eventually, except I keep reading and playing new stuff and the world keeps spinning and the twenty subjects turned into forty and I thought oh man, this is getting ridiculous, but I'll work through my backlog soon except I took so long that some became outdated but I thought of ways to work them into new topics and sometimes I didn't and the subject lines kept piling up and my fiction ideas have been getting nowhere because I keep getting distracted by the more easily-written blog and I've got all these old posts at the end of which I said I'd continue some other time and I lost track of them all, until I got to sixty which I thought was absurd until I hit eighty unwritten drafts and I thought enough is enough I am polishing these off right now or deleting them because most of them are useless bar napkin brain farts anyway, except now I'm closing in on a hundred and AAARGH someone save me from myself!

...

Hold on, that just gave me this really amazing idea...

No!

Nnnooooooooooooo!

Once upon a time, there woes a poor peasant.

My Life as a Drowid, 5: - and a dagger up your strat

The hour grows late. Our winding trail closes in upon itself, the doom scribed by our adventure's inception now calling as with audible voice for its own consummation. Be the planes perverse as some would have it, hold this as proof: that plans should demand so much yet yield so little. What forgotten temples were ground asunder to supply mortar for this?

Murder's child and blood's father, tyranny's toys and hope's martyr, let the hammer not falter. Each temple to ambitions years or centuries in the conniving shatters and rolls along its fellows, but who shall scatter fresh seeds among this rubble? Does the path of the chain-smasher not itself stretch unbroken, link by link past the brink of forgotten free fall, until its rattle knots meaning into an inescapable mantra?

But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!

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Some spoilers for various specific fights and quests in BG3 up to late Act 3 follow.

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Would you like to see the exact moment, early on, when I realized I couldn't hate Baldur's Gate 3?

"they kitties can walk anywhere" indeed

In Act 1, upon having barely stepped into the Shattered Sanctum, intent on burglarizing what I could to buy more gear before getting into fights, I noticed a crack in a wall. So, on an exploratory whim, I burned a shapeshifting charge on cat form and found it allowed me to bypass an ogre guard... and discovered an abandoned temple with a floor puzzle. Curiouser and curiouser. So I solved it, and down I went, and found myself in the Underdark. An entire new zone, a level or two beyond where I should be. But my path onwards was blocked by a minotaur... until I saw, to my delight, that my tiny cat form could not only squeeze through designated shortcuts but through the bars of otherwise locked prison cells. Breaking into prison for safety? Yes, please.

After whittling the guard down with the always useful Halo of Spores I teleported my group in to explore and loot the underdark's easier encounters before tackling harder ones topside.

Want to see the exact moment when I realized I couldn't love BG3?

I carefully set up the gnomes' prison break in Act 2 by sneaking up through the rafters to steal the proverbial tunnelin' spoon and toss it to them, then quietly assassinated the closest patrolling guard, dropped down into the cage and opened it for the rest of my party as we all made a break for the exit. Did it work? No. Because the alarm will sound regardless, at which point the gnomes STOP ESCAPING and the game forces you to fight, regardless of the fact you're already at the damn boats two turns before the first guard arrives.

Apparently it is possible to escape by stealth if your party leaves by another route, but damned if discovering my last hour of gameplay was invalidated didn't put me in a mood to kill everything in sight.

 

BG3 shows not only staggering scope but attention to detail, with almost every quest and every fight offering more than one solution. I've found my druidic crowd control in demand quite a few times, whether it's mummies, grunts or puppies

 

deceptively simple utility items like arrows of darkness can deny enemies useful positioning

and knockbacks into bottomless pits, whether via arrows of roaring thunder or simple shoving, are weighed into many otherwise potentially unwinnable fights like Orin or your first encounter with the hag

 

I was especially gratified to discover lugging a couple jugs of water around all this time yielded a solution to opening the vault door for the Stone Lord quest. Call Lightning, after several levels of being left by the wayside, made short work of Gortash's defensive machinery. Us has helped open doors for an invisible Astarion so he doesn't break his spell, and even humble little Scratch the plucky rescue dog was instrumental in defeating Sarevok, repeatedly "helping" me back up to force Sarevok to run back and forth eating opportunity attacks from Minthara and arrows from Astarion while he downed me ten times over. Even opening fights can usually take more than one route, and once you reach the city proper, rooftop access bypasses several locked doors (e.g. the newspaper or the fireworks shop)

 

Surprisingly often, dialogues even acknowledge you taking alternate routes, like Helsik chiding you for stealing from her or the hag support group all having diferent lines if you kill the hag before meeting them - which I did, stumbling into her lair by accident while exploring some random cellar. But the sheer number of mechanics end up tripping over each other. Sometimes it's direct.

Clearing Hope's prison annoyed me, as the enemies are deliberately given knockbacks to insta-gib you with falling damage, and surprised me when I tried pulling them to a choke point by flying beneath the floating platforms instead. But, as it turns out, the same positioning-aware algorithm leaves them loathe to surrender their initial advantage, meaning they're counterintuitively (for wardens) less disposed to patrol or investigate invisible enemies. So I just had Astarion solo the entire room, potshot by potshot - and it took fewer reloads too.

Again: those useful little arrows of darkness, this time defensive.

An act earlier in the temple of Shar, luring merregons out of their reinforced position proved more effective than I'd even anticipated, as they're programmed to send down one scout at a time.

Which scout I promptly bumrushed, round by round, while ducking behind pillars in the displacer beast's room. And then there were none. Too often you lose track of the line between legitimate strategy and just cheesing a fight. For the uninitiated, in the screenshot opening this post, an ambush is programmed to teleport in before you reach that fallen column bridge, with the challenge being to kill its leader. Okay. So reload, turn invisible and climb up to spawn-camp the leader. Hurray... strategy? I guess? Inasmuch as reloading may be termed strategic?

Quite often the problem comes from Larian not advertising WHICH routes are potentially available. (Compare to Iron Tower's games, Age of Decadence or Colony Ship: often infuriatingly convoluted and difficult, but at least you have some notion of whether TALK or HIT or SNEAK or SABOTAGE is supposed to be viable.) I've complained about this earlier in this series, but I don't agree with the interpretation of "adventure" as blindly stumbling forward on gut instinct and presumed storytelling conventions.

 

The same holds for wandering around otherwise pleasingly gigantic locales pixel-hunting for chat bubbles or highlightable terrain interactions when you're really only looking for one specific quest step advancement. Rogues are exceptionally well integrated into BG3 (especially compared to older fare like NWN2 where Neeshka got one token stealth mission) but even here it's rarely clear what you should be roguing. After blowing up Gortash's mechano-man army I found Wyrm's Rock fortress' bridge drawn up on the Rivington side. Fine, be that way. I decided to sneak Astarion back in from the cliffs to find the mechanism lowering the drawbridge once again... which mechanism, far as I can tell, does not exist. Instead you can reactivate the teleporter inside to TP your party in. Instead of an elegant, in-character and medieval-appropriate solution, you're forced into abusing Larian's idiotic obsession with constant and therefore cheapened teleportation. Other times, what looks to be a stealth mission is hamfistedly negated by GM decree.

 

Umberlee's temple has an area off-limits to riff-raff. Fine, send Astarion in again (vampires: a thousand uses and counting) except it turns out the priestess has infinite DC stealth detection with her back turned for no particular reason and without needing to cast anything. Fine. Supreme Sneak invisibility works... until you loot one pile of chests, at which point the goddess herself tells you off and turns the entire temple hostile, with extra fish-folk icing on top. Soooo... what was the point of that then? Not that the ambush isn't easily discernible for anyone with the slightest bit of metagaming experience, as the devs would only put a pool of water there (with no other objects in the room) for the fish monsters to jump out at you. It's like seeing those different colored wall patches in old cartoons: you know just where Wile E. Coyote's gonna flatten his nose. (And yeah, you can cheese this one too - just teleport out before closing the chest. Don't forget to blast the wall in the back beforehand.)

 

Lastly, let's not forget the times when the developers just got lazy and threw in a generic "fuck you":

Tacticianing the shit out of rolling those dice

Honestly, for enabling different class abilities and spells and quest solutions, BG3 leaves any of its older competitors in the dust, and I can't but congratulate them for it from the bottom of my sneaky cat form to the top of my body-slamming owlbear, from my deepest sporulation to my loftiest super-cooled ice storm. In this respect at least they've more than earned their accolades and skyrocketed sales figures.

But if you've played it (especially on higher difficulty) be honest: you've spent your avatar's every step mashing the quick-save button. As countless reddit threads will attest, this is overwhelmingly not because of "difficulty" in the sense of meaningful, interactable challenge rewarding preparation and foresight, but because the otherwise welcome tangle of options also blindsides you with red herrings or an order of operations you couldn't be expected to know without seeing the equation's answer.

Which is to say: reload.

While some blame lies in poor communication and deliberately abusing reloads to pad "hours played" advertisements, it's also another example of just how little experience the industry as a whole has in letting players drive the action, in designing any gameplay beyond hitting the thing in front of you.

Where's that drawbridge winch, Larian? Where is it?!?

Once upon a patch time, there was app rinse.

Bloodsport

"There are no victories

In all our histories

Without love"

 

Sting - Mad About You

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"Only a few days ago Carlos Suomi's plans for his future would definitely have included Athena. But that was before he had seen her so avidly viewing men killing each other."

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Planet
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"And die young"

Kill Hannah - Kennedy

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"this sexual excitement, this love story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet for you—and all full of learning.... We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life."

[...]

"Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free

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As one of my quirks, much as I love the symbolism of lycanthropy I consume little to no werewolf-themed entertainment. Most often wolfmen are treated as muscleheaded speed bumps for the hero on his way to the mad scientist boss fight, and if the main alternative's those idiotic romance novels with brutishly virile werewolf lovers, count me out. I shall remain a myth of one. Terrible acting aside, I do tolerate some of the older werewolf flicks which played up the shock and awe of the transformation itself (instead of the sheer bulk of the finished product) even though most of their special effects were hardly up to the task. Let's (pun intended) face it: Lon Chaney Jr. looked more like an overgrown gerbil than a canid.

The 2010 remake of The Wolfman kept the flat-faced "Jojo the dog-faced boy" look out of apt deference to the classic. Sadly, it also not only kept the romance subplot filler but ramped it up to disturbingly Freudian levels. It is occasionally joked that the new Larry Talbot apparently has a sexist streak, since during his dozens-strong rampage he never attacks a single woman - even as he gorily dismembers man after man after man. However, nobody mentions the plot rewrite's Oedipal undertones, overtones and all too obvious tones.

- the first werewolf is now his father instead of a random gypsy

- the father now killed the hero's mother, who was not even mentioned in the original

- the love interest is his brother's widow instead of some chick from town engaged to an extra

- instead of killing off the first werewolf and then focusing on Lawrence's tribulations, it's now reserved for a boss fight

- instead of being killed by his father, the protagonist is now killed by the love interest

Which all yields the effect of killing your father while mackin' on your sister in law, all so you can placidly submit to her executing you for being bad, insistently witnessed by images of the hero's sainted, martyred mother. Why not have Benicio del Toro gouge his own eyes out just to drive it all home?

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I found myself wondering: whatever happened to softcore cable porn? You remember (assuming you're over thirty) those cheesy late night movies or series with B-grade acting and D-grade scripts you'd sit through for a chance of seeing a few minutes' worth of nipple. Sure, the internet largely obsoleted them, but I found it hard to believe they'd dissappeared altogether. So I looked for a few and got my answer: they've been repurposed for female audiences.

First off, men are always wrong and in the wrong and wrongheaded and doing it wrong, this being an absolute requirement of "romance" that all-pervasive female paraphilia.

Second, more abs and shoulders than nipples.

Third, the new breed of softcore porn always involves a lord's mansion, a luxuriously appointed condominium with a hundred-kilo chandelier, a penthouse with an infinity pool, high-powered boardroom meetings and exclusive clubs, and most importantly conflict, conflict, conflict! If guys aren't stabbing and shooting and punching and firing each other for your entertainment, how else are you supposed to jill off?!? With a handful of diamonds, obviously.

Compare that to the deliberately and explicitly mundane male sexual fantasies: cheerleaders, nurses or the soccer mom across the street doing yoga by her window. The girl next door routine sells great. The guy next door is not even a routine. He barely even exists from the female point of view, except as a punching bag for Prince Charming.

 

When I was growing up, feminists couldn't stop wailing about violence in porn - all the throwing her onto the bed and insulting her and pulling her hair and slapping her. Clear evidence of patriarchal terror, right? Point one: it was the '90s, alright? Every genre, every field, every medium was dark, grim, angry and dramatic. Hell, comedy was George Carlin. So you might think, obviously feminist pressure must've worked to make porn less violent, right? But was it violent before? After all, porn's always been around, and you can look at the rather prolific '70s for example, or go all the way back to pre-electric days, and overwhelmingly the story's always pretty much what it is now. The hot girl next door (or the maid, or the saucy flapper, or the soiled dove) is open for a fuck. So she fucks. Done. No karate required.

 

So what actually happened in the '80s, '90s and into the early 2000s? Well, it was decreed that porn had to be made for women, because it was unfair for anything to be made for men, regardless of the fact that women's porn (i.e. romance) had been its own highly profitable field since before modern entertainment industries were invented, and never criminalized like blue movies or skin mags. So by decree (and porn company hopes of breaking into the new female market) suddenly porn no longer required sex but drama, and conflict, and huge muscular men with waist-long hair, and opportunities for those men to display manliness. As has so often been the case, feminism created the problem it later used as justification in attacking men. They only abandoned the issue when the market for "porn for women" failed to grow beyond an initial blip, when it turned out women don't get aroused nearly so much by sex on screen as by seeing men tear each other to bloody shreds in thrillers.

 

How many Fifty Shades of Gray do you need to admit that the conflation of sex with power and violence is not primarily a male but a female instinct?

 

How many series like Taken center on portraying a superior male going on a rampage against other men in the interest of a woman? How many ogres must Prince Charming / Daddy Warbucks slaughter before he is acknowledged as a worthy provider and protector for the females of his tribe?

I might note Ayn Rand had her hero more or less rape the heroine in every version of the one single plot she wrote, and you'll reply wait, hold on, that chick was just nuts all around, you can't give her as example. But then I'll point you to the murderous denouement of The Wolfman where the romantic predator looms over the damsel's prostrate form in a scene so thickly suggesting rape you might find yourself exclaiming "cut the foreplay and stick it in already!"

 

When I was about seven years old, during a new year's party, one of the girls asked: who're you gonna marry? While most of us were either stumped or stammered out random answers so as not to look stumped, another girl immediately blurted out: Jesus! And she didn't mean in the habitual sense. Attagirl, A., shoot right for the top. (Sorry though, I hear he's married to his job.)

As I don't indulge in slashfic, I was amused at this tidbit from TVTropes about the inarguably female-dominated slashfic field and female-marketed boy-boy erotic stories:

"In many (but not all) communities, the ordering of the names is used to indicate a power relationship, and who exactly is the dominant member."

Females codify power games like males codify which hole's gettin' porked.

 

Here I'd like to remind you of Christopher Lee's astute assessment of his long-running role as Dracula:

"Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic — so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic."

Those Hammer Horror themed romance novels I mentioned at the start? They don't consider the supernatural element nearly enough by itself. It can't be just any werewolf ravishing the audience surrogate damsel. It has to be the ALPHA werewolf, a corporate CEO werewolf or the motherfuckin' prince! of! werewolves! Presumably he's gotta rip out a few throats (paternal or not) to win her before boning down. Seriously, if you've never tried, search Amazon for "alpha romance" or somesuch phrase

Aptly noted by Terrible Writing Advice in #45 "Alpha Heroes"

You might laugh at the first page of identical covers until noticing it's just the start of "over 60,000 results" (it's over 9000!) at which point, even assuming a hefty number of false and duplicate hits, it just gets depressing.

 

Neither is this anything new. While the original Wolfman movie wasn't quite the Oedipal head-trip its remake was, it still required the fair damsel to be courted by the lord of the manor. After his death in the end she still gets to keep her plan B utility male and the moral high ground to boot.

 

Do you wonder why humanity has not outgrown its sexual psychoses? It's because you've always scapegoated men while deliberately ignoring the market demand for combo sex/power/violence so glaringly pervading every bookshelf and marquee around you, the driving force behind the drama that is life: female mate choice.

Once high up on a time, there was a princess.

Classes & Cogitations, 7: Wizzin'

Like other core classes, the wizard suffers from undue overlap with later additions to the D&D-inspired RPG roster, but additionally must contend with the proper division of magic in whatever setting he happens to inhabit. D&D at least established the basic arcane / divine split early on (even if that line often lacks clear definition) but in other game universes like for example The Elder Scrolls where everyone's an all-purpose greatsword-swingin' battlemage, discerning schools of magic inevitably ends up as inconsequential fluff.

Let's reiterate that magic should not be demeaned by using it to punch stuff. Punchin' stuff is what actual punching is for. Also maces, axes and a dagger up your strap. Magic missiles water down both magic and missiles. By extension, the distinction between elemental magic (fire bolt, frost bolt, lightning bolt... rock... bolt? Rock.) used by so many games should really be done away with, as should basing magic around elemental resistances. It's been done to death, separating ice from fire never made much physics sense to begin with, and calling different colored magic missiles different spells shows about as much roleplaying depth as food coloring on a saltine would culinary depth. I'm not saying a big flashy nuke every once in a while doesn't have its place, but wizards should not be primary damage dealers. Move from "fireball" more toward "heat metal" - but then how should the various magic schools look?

 

Sure, in 1975 the wizard definition could be "all of the magicses" but now not only many spell but core class features overlap with later additions.

If you have witches, they're the ones who should be conjuring familiars.

If you have warlocks, they're the ones who should be conjuring demons.

If you have druids/shamans, they're the ones who should be conjuring animals.

If wizards are the nerds, shift them more toward animated suits of armour, alchemy, magical inscriptions, tomes and scrolls and general Saruman craftiness. "Fireball" should be a barrel of black powder, a flask of greek fire or a dragon's tonsils, and subject to ingredient availability.

 

So downplay or maybe conflate Evocation, Conjuration, and to a lesser extent Enchantment/Transmutation since they're witch/warlock/shaman fable staples.

Necromancy, on the other hand, is a pretty classic mad scientist field, though of course it depends on the setting's interpretation of life/death divine magic. Golems, homunculi, Frankensteiny creations in general remain sorely underexplored as playable gimmicks at least in video games so far. 

Illusion so obviously links real-world "magic" stage acts to fantasy for-realsies magic that it should remain a wizardly staple (see Gandalf throwing his voice in The Hobbit) but for the love of crap, downplay the mind control! If it were up to me I wouldn't keep sorcerers in the game at all, but if you do, then the charisma-based spellcasting class should more heavily emphasize hypnosis. For wizards, think smoke and mirrors, holograms and ventriloquism instead!

 

Abjuration's an interesting case, and suits my support caster preference, but the more defensive a wizard's spellcasting gets, the more he starts looking like a cheap knock-off unarmored cleric who can't heal and thinks "mace" is a can of pepper spray. Specific effects like protection from arrows or stone to flesh fall within the precept of wizardly erudition, but the more generic AC/HP boosts should mostly be left to more combat-oriented casters. Planar binding and its like see very litle use in cRPGs, but largely for poor campaign writing. As a basic observation, letting wizards buff up their base stats and equipment with magic (as exemplified by Dragon Age: Origins' arcane warrior) is every bit as fraught a proposition as a fighter with dragon breath.

Divination though takes the cake for potentially amazing yet unused effects. Why not put various spins on predicting enemy moves, whether it's spells, called shots, AoE locations, dodges, incoming adds, terrain changes, really, anything? For a bonus, pair this with some limited form of quickened or reactive spells for any specifically interacting effect: if you divine a fireball, you get a reaction on protection from energy; if you divine an incoming crit, get a reactive flare or displacement. Why not tie divination to seeing enemy stats? Why not divine quest objectives via chicken entrails? Why not a spell to hear conversations in other rooms (clairaudience, they have that in tabletop) or magical radar (claivoyance, auspex, anyone?) with dialogue bonuses from that information going forward, or a substitute spell for barbarian/ranger tracking (which is also ignored in cRPGs, see #5 in this series) or discovering extra crafting ingredients, or sharing divining power with an ally to alter one dice roll a round at will, or predicting which way enemies will walk or turn to help a thief while sneaking, or fuck it, anything at all beyond Deckard Cain the Elder identifyin' geegaws!

Then you still must address confusion as to the types of magic in any particular setting. Does your fantasy world have divine and arcane and maybe natural magic? Does a certain type of magic (e.g. raising a zombie) require communion with otherworldly entities or is it merely manipulating inert matter? Is disease microbial or a curse? Does traveling between worlds require a pact with the fairies and a mushroom ring? Is magic inherent in all life or all matter in animist fashion, or is it a force pulled from a source or is it a property of a select few gifted individuals? Can spirits come back from the dead? Do they reincarnate or merely wander the halls of Mandos (or Elysian fields) until the end of time?

Any character might stumble into such quandaries in a fantasy world, but when designing a class centered on deliberately, consciously and quantitatively manipulating the laws of the natural and supernatural, those questions become prerequisites. Questions like "does Melf's acid arrow contain actual, liquid acid I can catch in a pickle jar?" are not mere trivialities to a wizard, but the very essence of his trade.