I Shouldn't Have Read Jack Vance

2025-09-05

They should've NEVER let me find this guy!👋🏿

Bro I've been having one HELL of a time this month because of something that started with a nightmare. Basically my friends and I were contacted by a demon and forced to play a game.

Did I make a Faustian bargin and accidentally name them as my creditors?

That's not important.

I don't recall what it was, hide or seek or something. But the thing we had to hide from was an imperfect clone of the demon. It was missing obvious features like everything above the forehead and the bones in-between its knuckles and wrist.

We were told to never look directly at the Demon's shadow. And we didn't.

Because we're fucking goated.

We won and escaped. During a final sit down, while the demon talked about our victory, a "vibrating" thing sat down to my left, warm like another human, but it was only supposed to be the demon and my friends here. And none of them had moved.

I looked, and it was the shadow. Sudden jumpscare and that was the end of the dream. Yes yes, very hehe haha. Okay, but here's where I went off the fucking rails.

Or maybe I did before then but I only connected the wires with that nightmare in particular.

Also did I mention that I consistently have nightmares when I go to sleep and my face is cold? Is that normal? My on-going theory is my brain thinks I'm fucking DYING and starts getting stressed, giving me nightmares. But I hate heat and sweating, so I'll take those nightmares every single time vs waking up hot.

Anyways.

Curiosity Hooked the Cat and Dragged it to Hell

Since I was young, my mom encouraged me to keep a dream journal and go looking for where these things could've come from. I stopped doing that by time I was 15, but the habits flare up now and again. I went looking for parallels to this "thing" and found a wide variety of similar stories and myths.

The Golem from Jewish Kabbalistic stories often were missing pieces, usually runes.

The Shadow from Jungian and slightly Freudian psychology. Anyone that has played Persona already is VERY familiar with this one. In some cultures the shadow actually represents the soul and there's a lot of hell that's raised when someone or something steps onto yours. Naturally the shadow is just an approximation of the person who casted it. It's never perfect, distorted by light and air.

The list goes on. But as I was drawing these lines and reading, I thought of something.

Wouldn't this actually be a sick enemy for my game? What if the Enderman from Minecraft wasn't so like, goofy? The entire idea of an enemy that reacts when you look at it is very unexplored. Instead we have a lot of Weeping Angels.

I stopped myself at first because my world is very High-Fantasy typical JRPG. And it's that way by design because I love lying like hell giving great experiences to my players. But this "thing", the Unseated Guest, isn't the only bizarre thing in my setting. Many creatures, species and races are things that I traced back to their mythological roots and reinterpreted into something else, often to horrifying effect. Or if not horrifying, then Strange.

Strange Fantasy (Also I don't like Morrowind)

Hemming and Hawing. Huffing and Puffing. Rolling my eyes into the back of my head. There was no way I could avoid the Morrowind clone allegations. If I added 1 mushroom, it was over.

It's always been such a strange world right? Legends say the man who almost single handedly built Morrowind's World was high on god knows what and sprawled out on his bathroom floor. It was just a story, but The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind really does make you feel like that.

Everything is so...bizarre. Right?! Floating land jellyfish. Gargantuan insect things that walk across the land faster than any horse. Mushrooms bigger than most skyscrapers.

The most normal thing about Morrowind is the racism! That's one hell of a world! And I love it from a distance! I'm not going to rant about the combat and how it's out dated. Instead, I was having an existential crisis because it felt like I was touching on something that would open a door for my creative output.

Every artist knows that feeling I'm sure. You're scrambling around through your pintrest boards trying to connect dots, draw lines, shuffling pictures and references across years, looking for that spark that seems to duck dive dip and dodge away from you.

But then I found it with a simple google search.

"What kind of Fantasy is Morrowind?"

The answer didn't come from a page. It came from my new best friend, Gemini.

"Something something, it's weird fiction lol."

That's what it said! I'm not lying look it up! Do your own research, I can't spoon feed you!

Here's the Wikipedia for it.

Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves.

The issue here is while I do think there are some horror elements in what I've made, I'm not exactly New Weird either. My world is firmly Fantasy.

So I've labeld my world Weird Fantasy and I'm leaving it at that. That's not the biggest deal anyways.

God Bless Jack Vance!!!!

As is my mark, I like to dig backwards into the sources for various things and Jack Vance and his Dying Earth series did a LOT for RPGs without anyone noticing it. Book of the New Sun, Viriconium, Peridito Street Station, so many fantasic sources for this weird way of world building.

But I read Dying Earth first and it stuck with me like crazy.

First of all, Vance writes like we just caught him on a train getting ready to hop off. It's faster than that really nasty Bleach fan fiction I read months ago. And to be frank, I fucking hated it on first read.

"Who the hell is that?"

"We just travel to a new world?"

"Oh he just so happens to have all the secrets and a way to move from a to b?"

"And who the fuck is that girl on the horse?"

"When did he end up in the fucking cage?"

It's BLAZING fast and Vance doesn't give a fuck about explaining plot, setting, who, what, when, where, nor why! On top of that, he writes in that whimsical olde timey english. Sometimes using just bullshit words! That's like, crazy to me! We do that in real life all the time don't we? But it takes some serious gall to, in the middle of the book, throw some nonsense word that isn't in ANY dictionary and trust that I'll understand it.

And I did.

That's the magic that made Vance such a beloved author. He's an author's author. He trusts that you'll pick up what he's putting down and waves his hand if you don't. That right there is my design philisophy and I love to see it elsewhere.

From this one book, I've been able to think of 3 new type of trees for my world, 2 herbs, 4 monsters, 2 magic items, and it's gotten to the point where I'm literally re-writing certain parts of my world and things are clicking even more than they were before.

No longer do I feel "bound" by the conventions of the genre. Why do the Elves have to be Elves? Why add Dwarves at all? Orcs? To what end? All of those things are products of Tolkien and his 20 years of fake language building, bastardization of old european stories, and his mind.

But don't we all have such an ability? That's the spark Vance reignited in me. There's a power in working within the bounds of a system that you know very well, but isn't it SO much more interesting when you step outside of it?

From every entry on this blog, I hope I've demonstrated to you by now that convention is the last thing I give a fuck about! I'm the one who asks why we have the rules we have and if we can't find new ones. I LOVE SERIOUSLY LOVE going outside the lines!

And now I'm sprinting in a dark maze that Vance threw me into, running into terrifying things everywhere I look, but I can see it in my Obsidian Notes. The world is coming alive. A shiny JRPG veneer that hides a grotesque, bizarre, and squirming tumor growing underneath!

And by that I mean it's just a normal game! A normal JRPG! Because I don't lie! I hate telling lies!!! It's the worst thing ever!!!

Anyways, I'm going back to Book of the New Sun now.

Cheeks(What???)~ | Luther✌🏿