Fresh Apocrypha for the Given World: Lexicon v0.51a

TL;DR: Released v0.51a of the Lexicon of the Vastlands. 90+ pages of weird apocrypha from my fantascience world-setting.

“We have accounted the humans, now we shall account the beasts. We shall account them traditionally, as posited by the Builders of the Garden Path: the embodied, the unbodied, the unspirited, and the erbarial. And we shall account them mechanically, as proposed by the Linear Taxonomonks in the twelve kingdoms of life.”

The biomancer made the signs of deafness and blindness, then ringed the air above his fleshy head, that the Builders’ mindeaters should be abjured.

“Be clear, pupils: our treasured craft, the sculpting of flesh, is no butchery. It is art-science, the discovery of the true MKR’s design within the body organic. The MKR, I say, not the idiote Builders, nor the encensé Lords. Thus, these categories, whether of the deathless ones or our mortal peers, they are but scrawl-maps of an ill-grasped reality that is total only in the All-Mind of the MKR. When we learn a creature, become one with its codes and conducts, its stones and sinews, its being and becoming, then we approach the MKR and let the MKR’s Truth flood into our fallen, failing world.”

The biomancer peered at the lead-lined ceiling again, muttering another abjuration against the everywhere-possible Eyes of the Builders.

“This is why the Ministry, those many-faced guardians of the Lie, object to our studies. Not because we traffic in life and death, not because we study and alter, no. Because we allow the blood and bones of Truth to be seen in this world again. Because we libate and liberate the MKR itself, unmediated.”

Dozens of pupils gazed at the biomancer, ears and other stranger organs focused, too, all safe in their jars, connected by crystal wires to owners ensconced in their sarcotrephs, safe from the Path’s wandering angels.

“Recall, the Path, the Garden Path, the soma sema of Humanity, is the prison of our possibilities. It constrains us, it keeps us small, even as it promises to make us great, to make us free, to make us happy.”

A great weariness seems to assail the biomancer, his florid flesh sinks in upon his annealed bones and suddenly he looks less a mighty wizard and just a man worn down by decades of hard struggle and cealess worry.

“Yet, yet, this world-tomb, this cage, it holds refractions of truth, and though it nauseates us, we do well to study it, the better to escape it, pervert it, subvert it ... I babble. Let us talk of Beasts as categorized by our custodes.”

“Before we touch the Beast, let us touch the Human. The essence of the Human is the trifold perfection created by the MKR: the Trinity of Mind, that which the Oldthinkers call Ba, of Breath, the life-energy the Oldthinkers call Ka, and Body, the incarnate materiality those selfsame Oldthinkers call Ha. All Beasts are deviations from this Trinity, attenuations of existence.”

First, we have the Embodied, Beasts with soul and personality. Sentient, but not human, their uncertain position in the ladder of existence is taken as evidence of the ineffable wisdom of the Minds by the Ministry. A convenient justification for their hierarchy and power.

We, knowing better, may call them Sapients. For, if our stock descended from Man Sapient, then they are Other Sapient.

Common folk will know the Chantler and the Doghead, Ensarc, Ling, and Phylake, and of course the Cetacean Seasingers. We may talk of more.

Second, we have the Unbodied, Beasts woven of the stuff of the noösphere, things of knowledge and energy free of the Veil of Matter. Here we stand with the Ministry, for nothing can be Human without a body. Thus, it is the MKR’s Truth also that a Human who would shed their vessel of flesh and circuit for a life unbodied would become a Beast, for it is the limits of the flesh that are the seed-soil of Human values and morality and ethics.

Many of the common folk call all the unbodied Spirits, but we know that there are great differences between Dragon and Daemon, Ultra and Tlumac.

… the expository narrative pauses …

One of the things I’ve been working on almost since the moment I published the Ultraviolet Grasslands way back in 2019-or-so has been a list of strange terms, weird places, odd events.

It started as “Fragments of a Glossary” (p186–190), but as I wrote other books and then edited the second edition, the idea of keeping a glossary within the book itself (and later within other books) became harder to justify.

For myself, flipping to the back of a PDF or ebook to look up a term is ... a hassle. And while it is lovely to have a glossary in a physical book, the more I wrote and drew about the Vastlands, the bigger and weirder the glossary became.

Other things started creeping in: vignettes, stories, characters, creatures.

As I worked on the sequel-rulebook-worldbook to the UVG named Uranium Butterflies (I’ll explain that in the next post, I think), I extracted v0.1 of the Lexicon of the Vastlands some time in 2022. In late 2022 I finished Uranium Butterflies, but realized it was not the fork I wanted to take. I forked that book - simplifying the rules back closer to those in UVG 1E (that’s the Vastlands Guidebook I finally offi-launched last week) - and the world-setting into Our Golden Age.

But that left this growing document - the Lexicon.

I was pretty clear on was what it was: an alphabetical compendium of oddities, strange terms, and unreliable narratives. In game terms: an anticanon grab-bag of ideas and goodies for the game master and their players.

I was less clear on how it was. That is to say, I tried a number of different ways of writing and layout and process. It’s a challenging document since it’s not finished or, indeed, finishable. Every time I write a new thing or have a new idea, there may be a version of it that should make it into the Lexicon - either the way it is described in the work in question, or undercutting it in some way.

I initially laid it out in Affinity Publisher, but after the whole memory bleed debacle of 2022 and then the colorspace catastrophe as we went to print with UVG 2E, I decided that Affinity - while a nifty piece of software - was more hassle than it was worth in my workflow.

Then I tried maintaining it in Apple Pages, then I moved the whole thing to Adobe Indesign, but that turned out to be overkill. Now, the whole Lexicon lives as an Apple Pages file that I export into a little PDF every time I add enough entries.

As far as this kind of text-first digital publishing goes, I must say Apple Pages does nearly everything I need, including hyperlinking the table of contents, all for the low-low price of free. So, I guess besides announcing the Lexicon of the Vastlands, this post is also endorsing that software.

Anyway, this was a long and rambling way to say: I hope you enjoy the Lexicon (v0.51a) and have fun with it!

I don’t know. I think it will keep growing longer, more byzantine, and more ridiculous, particularly as the VLG+OGA trilogy winds down.

What I do know is that as I return to revising the Zoa of the Vastlands, the “Non-Human” Bestiary companion to the Pananthropy, that bestiary of humans, I find myself needing to chuck a lot more strange things into the Lexicon. So one book and the other archive grow together.

If you find strange setting apocrypha fun, that lexicon is for you. If you want to see more illustrations of creatures? The Zoa will, this time, be for you.

Till next time.

—Luka

Are you an enjoyer of original indie tabletop roleplaying games? Of strange fictional worlds? Of solo artists? You’re in luck! I happen to deal in all three. If you wish to support me with the glossy coin of this digital realm, let me invite you to support me on my patreon, the WizardThiefFighter stratometaship. Why there and not here? Ah, well, you see … Substack uses Stripe for payments and is not available in this here country and I do not feel the desire to set up a business entity in Delaware for the purpose of … look, it’s long and complicated. Patreon is, currently, not.

Thank you for understating! [sic]