When the mind is sick, sometimes even stranger things come out.

"Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

It is my understanding that Independence Day, the 1996 summer blockbuster, was nearly universally reviled in Europe and, well, everywhere in the world that is not the United States, with many critics pointing to the speech above as the epitome of unironic American egocentrism. After all, what is a clearer statement of American arrogance and ignorance than the supreme success of a movie predicated on an asinine analogue between the American Revolution and an alien invasion?

This is not the point of this post.

American egocentrism is nothing new and to say something new about it would be difficult and, more importantly, not particularly meaningful. To attack it on the American Independence Day would also be a poor move: a nation's citizens should have the right to celebrate their nation on the anniversary of its founding if no other day, should they not? Perhaps, then, we should attack nationalism, or the positively connoted synonym patriotism, which Samuel Johnson famously declared "the last refuge of the scoundrel". After all, Americans have only recently emerged from eight years of opponents to government actions being summarily dismissed as "unpatriotic".

This, too, is not the point of this post.

Or at least, not exactly. The genesis of this post lies with a bumper sticker I saw some weeks ago: I have meant to write this since then, but the Fourth has finally given me the motivation to actually do so. The sticker's text was something along the lines of, "The PATRIOT Act is Unpatriotic". Pithy, of course, and a standard line since the infamous legislation that legalized so much dangerously unsupervised surveillance. But I argue that the line is an intrinsic contradiction; that it fails before it begins by accepting a vocabulary whose baseline assumptions already make the winner the side of centralized authority, secrecy, control, power.

It is no news that what passes for "liberal" in the United States--or rather, what is allowed to pass for liberal in the mainstream political and media spheres of the United States--would barely pass for center-right in any other modern political discourse. But even among those ostracized, "radical" members of the American Left, there are many who still suffer from a great and terrible fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". They find the PATRIOT Act offensive not just because of its contents but because of the audacity of the name, the vile contradiction between signifier and signified that they perceive from it. They rise to anger when mouthpieces denounce them or others as "unpatriotic" because they are the "real" patriots: because they support what the United States was truly founded on, the values they espouse, which are contrary to the centralized authority proffered by the "other side".

It is not simply that they fight a battle, not realizing that they have lost the war, it is that they fight a war on terrorism with terror. It is that they fight a war to end war. It is that they are arguing from a position whose central tenets, if examined closely and truthfully, can only result in the conclusion that war is peace and freedom is slavery. And thus, of course, ignorance is strength.

Their failure, their first and damning mistake, is that they accept the premise of the "nation". That the idea of the United States is a noble one, that it is a real and living entity that must be defended from those who would prey upon it, that a legitimate purpose of government and politics is the vitality and morality of the nation.

This is bullshit.

The idea of the "nation" may, in fact, be the most dangerous bullshit ever thought up by the minds of men--or perhaps not. But certainly the nation, the successor to the empire (though of course empires persisted long past the rise of nations and persist today, America's being the most notable), is one of the greatest tools of oppression ever devised.

A nation is an artificial community. People naturally group themselves by connections of family, locations, resources, anything that can connect people together. Human beings are a social species; their strength is in networks. Alone (although we are never truly alone, of course), we are weak; it is by working together, by giving and taking from each other, that human beings have accomplished what they have.

Networks, however, can be difficult to build. Beyond the blood ties of family, human connections can be notoriously tenuous--barring childish "friendship bracelets" and the like (though they of course are similar symptoms of the same desire for signification), there are no permanent marks of friendship. Friendship is a connection based on trust, but trust, of course, is something that is difficult for many people to give. And so we create visible signs and symbols of our connections, to make sure they are based not simply on trust (as if a physical embodiment gives a connection more strength--though of course often it does, in that a person who defies a signified connection becomes known as a betrayer): we have contracts, and laws, and titles, and business cards, and in the process the network solidifies and becomes an institution.

The essence of a network is its fluidity: it is flexible, mobile, easily redefined--in fact, it exists in a sort of quantum uncertainty at all times, so that it has no definition at any particular moment except when one is asked for. It is the strength of networks: they cannot be tied down, or destroyed by one link in a chain being destroyed, for there are no necessary parts. Everything is replaceable. But this is also the danger of networks, for humans: we are replaceable, and so the only thing we can rely on to keep us from being replaced is the goodness of the other parts of the network.

An institution is a network without fluidity, a network frozen in a moment of time, so that all the connections that existed then become a permanent structure, never to be in danger of being replaced, and never to be added to. It is a structure: a tribe and a chieftain, a fief and a lord, a kingdom and a king. The titles of nobility, the levels of the church, every hierarchy, every artificial social construction designed to give rigidity to social networks, the epitome of which, of course, is the nation: a social institution so vast it can contain 300 million people (or over a billion), manifest as a bureaucracy with such vast reams of legislation and levels of governance that no individual could ever conceive of the entirety at once, so that instead it is reduced to one or two words, a bite-size vocal meme to be repeated in lieu of any real understanding of the vast complexity of the social sphere the institution superficially encompasses, a golden idol to bow before in lieu of any real conception of the nature of God (which is, of course, simply another idol. But that, too, is not what this post is about.)

Besides churches or other organized religion, there is no other institution that has acquired as much legitimacy as the nation--and in the postsecular world of today, even religion's supremacy is arguable. In the years after the beginning of the Iraq War, the "Support the Troops" ribbons became a tired punchline of ignorant consumerism; but the criticism, of course, was always simply that those who purchased such ribbons had not actually done anything to "support the troops". It was and remains and unquestioned assumption that everyone should, in fact, support the troops.

I do not mean to suggest that American soldiers deserve to die--but I do believe that no one deserves to die. And thus it is without qualms that I can say, I do not support the troops. I do not say, I merely criticize the administration that sent them there, or even the new administration that keeps them there. I criticize the cultural worship of the nation that leads people to accept that it is a noble thing to kill or even to die for an artificial construct with as much real impact on the average person's life as, well, any major Western power. It is easier to see the lack of influence of the nation when considering another: there are many nations in which the American government has more influence than the local national government, most obviously, but the people living in those nations do not pledge their lives to the cause of the United States.

The nation's success, I think, lies in its coopting of the notion of "citizenship". You may be members of a club, employees of a company, or followers of a church, but you are a citizen of a nation, and that word enjoys many special connotations that the others do not. While again there are similarities with religion, for most people, citizenship implies far more duty, loyalty, and responsibility than membership in any church. This is because citizenship is at its core a word for the type of give-and-take interaction that is the nature of every real, nonartificial community.

Citizenship is not a bad word--it is, in fact, I think a very good word, and a very important word, deserving of respect. Citizenship means being an asset to your community and not a burden--the problem is in the definition of "community", which has of course expanded far beyond any rational borders (though such borders would of course be nebulous, as any true network is) to include the entirety of modern states.

In such a context the values of citizenship becomes impossible to follow because there is no way to ascertain what benefits the "community" of the nation and what does not--beyond, of course, what the national government says. Which is the entire point of the nation, its great danger and its great promise to those desiring power: when a person can no longer contextualize their community, when the network of people they know and rely on becomes too vast for them to even begin to understand, they turn to institutions and structures to provide simple labels for them to use instead, and simple values for them to use instead of true evaluations of benefit.

And thus young men willingly fly hundreds of thousands of miles around the world to kill and be killed by people they know nothing about and believe that they are being good citizens.

But this is from a physical newspaper and I don't feel like looking up an Internet link.

Government backs down on Internet-filter mandate

In a rare reversal, China's government gave in to domestic and international pressure and backed down Tuesday from a rule that would have required personal computers sold in the country to have Internet-filtering software. Just hours before the rule was to have taken effect, the government said it would postpone the requirement for the software. The government did not say whether the plan might be revived. Top U.S. officials had protested the plan after it was imposed abruptly in May, calling it a barrier to trade.

(Emphasis added.)

Remember: Internet censorship is only a problem with it puts a burden on the manufacturer, because the only job of government is to ensure the market runs smoothly.

Same Bat Time

Session 2's end found the rookie adventurers taking an extended rest in a formerly ghost-filled hallway. Normally I try to end sessions on at least a minor cliffhanger, either some surprising revelation or the start of a combat--it gets the players excited for the next session and leaves them with at least some idea of what they'll be doing. I managed to do this in session 1, ending with a tease of the encounter with the mud lord, mostly by accident, but I couldn't get one for session 2.

This is more due to scheduling than anything else--unlike my previous campaign, which played a set day every week for a set time, and thus I planned every session to last that time and could plan the end appropriately, we play this summer campaign on a much more ad-hoc basis, essentially getting together when we can and playing until people need to leave. Without a good idea of how long any particular session is going to last, cliffhangers become much more difficult to pull off (although I did manage to half-way establish one at the end of session 4).

Trap, Crackle, Pop

Session 3 began after the player's first extended rest. I used the opportunity to try to recover a little bit of the sense that this hallway was not just a corridor where some ghosts once hung out by describing the characters experiencing disturbing dreams of ghosts--my personal explanation, though the players didn't get this and thus it was rather useless, was that after surviving the intial trap they were immune to further illusionary attacks, but their minds were more vulnerable in their dreams. I also started my work on connecting the players into the ongoing story, by having the party's deva (a reincarnating embodied angel) dream instead of what he quickly figured out was the Keep's past, implying that in some past reincarnation he had been at the Keep. The players also seized on the memory--of soldiers fleeing back down the hall towards where the players had entered--as foreshadowing of something particularly dangerous ahead of them.

First, however, they had to make it through the remaining traps. I had originally planned for the first level to have multiple paths through multiple traps, simply because I am trying to create more open-ended encounters and nonlinear paths (though honestly your players will always create their own paths as long as you give them the leeway to), but in the end the t-junction the characters found at the end of the hall became something of a false choice (at least as the players experienced it).

The players went right first and found a classic fantasy dungeon staple: an open room filled with fire crossed by a narrow beam. The fire was illusionary, of course, but once again I failed to have come up with a way of sufficiently hinting at this (and once again it didn't really matter). The skill challenge to cross the beam went quite well and produced an interesting and surprising narrative despite the failure of the trap's intention. The two acrobatic characters, a ranger and a rogue, crossed with little difficulty, leaving behind the less agile wizard and cleric. They found on the other side of the beam a passage of magical darkness that they could physically enter but could not find any way of seeing in. Cleverly, they came up a plan to stab a javelin recovered from the bullywugs into the mortar between the stone bricks of the walls and tie a rope to the end of the javelin, ensuring that they could make their way back. I had not considered this possibility (though it obvious in retrospect, of course), and so I quickly improvised a way to trap the players despite the rope.

Originally the dark room was supposed to lead quickly to the next and ultimate trap, the disassociation of the darkness necessary for the next trap to work well. With the rope, however, the players could reasonably find their way back to the fire room; thus I came up with an illusionary wall that only appeared to those who had passed far enough along the passage, trapping them there but allowing others, such as the eladrin wizard who realized he could fey step across and promptly came after the others, to follow the rope through to the other side--and become trapped as well.

The cleric, meanwhile, decided to explore the left option, which led to what I called in my notes the "crushing room", inspired, as my players quickly identified once the trap was sprung, by the trap from The Temple of Doom. I tried to introduce another hint to the illusions by describing to the cleric how the room was empty, but as he entered he tripped and found skeletons at his feet that had not previously been there (they had been hidden by the illusion until he made physical contact). Fortunately (or not), after activating the trap and realizing that the walls were closing in, the player rolled phenomenally and managed to shove open the door far enough to escape. (If the character hadn't escaped, he would have after taking some damage ended up in the next trap with the others--though I never quite came up with an explanation why, given that the previous trespassers had simply died in the room.)

Mirror's Edge

After a short interlude in the darkness whereupon I separated the players by describing how as they proceeded further their other senses dulled as well, eventually reaching the point where they could no longer tell if they were still touching each other, the players arrived at the final trap, a situation I had immediately thought of when I began contemplating an illusionary dungeon but feared would be easily spotted and extremely difficult to pull off well. Luckily, unlike everything else in the dungeon, this trap came off far better than anything I had considered possible.

I explained that the players awoke in two separate groups, both in small lit rooms and both surrounded by a number of monsters. I then asked the players if I could separate them--playing the two encounters out in two separate physical rooms as well--to enhance the feeling of separation. Trusting their DM, the players accepted with little second thought. I did explain as we went that this was something some DMs did, and explained my nervous and more frequent than normal pauses and considerations and combat note-taking as my having never split a party before in this manner--all of which was true, if missing the real point.

I alternated between groups each round; some of my players suggested it would be faster to just do multiple rounds with each group and then switch, but I brushed this off by saying I didn't want to make the others wait too long. Once again, I think the newness of the players and their trust in me as the DM and knowledge base of D&D traditions helped a lot; experienced players would recognize immediately that this was a very odd situation and probably would have caught on much more quickly.

As was, the players completed the encounter without recognizing the trap. The contigencies I had planned for, such as the players attempting to speak to the monsters (the monsters' responses would just be unintelligible angry growls), never came into play: the players simply attacked until they killed the monsters, or, in one group's case, was felled by the monsters. Then I described to the wizard's group how he finally got a grip on the strange magical aura that seemed to be permeating the entire level--and saw through the illusions that were the monsters, now revealed as their own party members.

It was a fascinating fight to run just for the strange dynamics of it as DM: I didn't do any normal tactical thinking for the fight as I made no decisions except for the one real monster in the room ( a fell taint drawn by the illusions), and so my energy was instead occupied with keeping track of who was attacking whom, who moved where, how much damage they did, and figuring out how to translate all that into the other group's map. It also gave me a chance to play with describing monsters I don't normally use--the stand-ins for the party consisted of a dark creeper (the rogue), a koa-tua whip (the wizard), a troglodyte crossbowman (the ranger), a foulspawn seer (the cleric), and a basilisk (the ranger's beast companion).

The players' reactions--both during the fight and after--were also immensely gratifying. During the fight they grew frustrated with me over the monsters' unusual healing abilities (especially when after "killing" the dark creeper it stood back up on its next turn) and high damage (all players used their daily attacks during the fight) and eagerly claimed the loot they were sure to get once the encounter was finished: "I want his staff!" After the fight, the players worked their way through the descriptions of their respective encounters, figuring out what monster action corresponded to their own, and generally reveling in how fooled they had been. They were so generally pleased and surprised by the encounter, in fact, that we decided to simply break and go to dinner rather than attempt to immediately continue the game.

Session 1 ended on a small cliffhanger as my new players approached the ruins of the Keep, the object of their quest, and a mob of bullywugs emerged and surrounded them, led by a giant half-dead staff-wielder (a Mud Lord with the Deathhunger template from Open Grave applied and a few custom changes). When the time came for session 2, the players were eager to blast some zombie frog.

Plan of Attack

Between sessions 1 and 2 I finally decided most of the details of the inner Keep: an underground dungeon with two levels. The second level, which I planned first before I was even certain there would be a first level, would be the laboratory of the ancient gnome artificer whose work would be the focus of this first quest. One of my players was surprised upon reviewing the Monster Manual that there were "robots in D&D": I was already strongly considering including warforged and that comment just cemented it. The lower level thus evolved fairly quickly as a facility for the production of warforged, albeit it with some more sinister details (which I will not discuss as the players have yet to discover them).

The first level proved much more difficult. My thoughts returned frequently to an illusion-based security system: the first level would in essence be a giant booby-trap designed to discourage and ultimately eliminate trespassers. Gnomes, of course, are known for illusions, and I liked the idea of players gradually recognizing that their experiences were not real (it appeals to my postmodern/self-referential sense, I suppose). Actually coming up with mechanics to produce that experience, though, proved quite difficult, and in the end mostly failed, with the exception of the final trap, which succeeded far beyond my wildest dreams.

Session 2

But first the players had to face the bullywugs. The initial description of the mud lord's escort, a pair of bullywug twitchers wielding javelins that seemed much better made than the previous twitchers' rough wooden spears and actually had metal tips, prompted the first great meme of the summer campaign: one of my players asked seriously if the bullywugs made the spears themselves or stole them, as "they don't appear to have metalsmithing capabilities". This comment prompted uncontrollable laughter from one of the other players, apparently amazed that anyone would consider such a question. To reward the first player for his thoughts, I told him what I had actually planned to inform them after the fight was over: the javelins bore Dwarven runes that suggested they were in fact stolen.

When we finally started combat, the players already demonstrated a firmer grasp of both combat mechanics and tactics. The players recognized the bullywug croakers for what they were: minions with a close blast attack that made them extremely dangerous while the party was grouped together and thus important initial targets. After those had been dispatched, the players focused primarily on the mud lord, reasoning that although it was obviously tougher than the other enemies, its death might cause the others to flee (a suspicion that was in fact in my combat notes). The combat took some time due to the mud lord using his template's abilities to heal himself: I tweaked the death hunger's abilities to allow it to intentionally sacrifice one of its own (in fact, a twitcher at full health) to use its Consume ability, describing it grisly grabbing the adjacent bullywug and biting off its head, which successfully incensed the players at both the brutality of the description and the mechanical effect of the healing.

After a brief interlude in the surface ruins of the Keep, the players proceeded to the first underground level, where I made my first major mistake of the session. I had continually returned to the idea that the gnome had not only set up illusionary traps but also attracted the bullywugs or other creatures in the past as savage guardians by posing as a Wizard of Oz-esque god. The first room, containing a crude, blood-soaked altar, was to have this illusionary figure appear when the players entered, but I forgot to put it in my notes, having never decided exactly how I wanted the effect to work, and thus did not implement it. This didn't impact the players much, luckily: the relationship between the bullywugs and the Keep's lower inhabitants was in no way an important part of the (meager) plot I had planned.

The first illusionary trap, an artificially lengthened hallway in which apparations appeared to attack trespassers, also failed to work as planned, due once again to my conceiving of an idea but not figuring out the details necessary to make it work. Thus it appeared to the players that they were simply being attacked by ghosts, a misunderstanding which, as before, did not really negatively impact the players. After the encounter with the ghosts, the party's third fight of the day, many of the players were almost entirely out of healing surges and thus they requested an extended rest as we ended the session. I considered it over the time inbetween and agreed, recognizing that the number of upcoming combats and/or possible damage would require a rest at some point.