Back from wherever I was! First, I’d like to call attention and give thanks to those of you who have submitted projects to the Icon0clasm Ball (extended to end of the year for my sake!): * **Songs for Polymede (Oleander Garden):** I was fully gagged when I saw this project submitted. It’s freak shit in the most delightful way: a module whose setting is encoded through fictional myths in poetry and prose, combined with new rules for manufacture and trade, and a possible elaboration of _0E_ ’s combat rules. Transsexual body politics meets Capital-as-God meets neko goblins. This is a really fascinating setting which I’d love to explore someday, and the way in which it transforms (or, as Oleander puts it, tortures) _OD &D_ reflects the material culture of the original work, being in line with the form factor of the 1975 supplements. * **The Hidden Chains of Command (Anteater):** This is a really fascinating critique of _FMC_ as a facsimile of _Chainmail_ and _OD &D_. Specifically, the author argues that the pseudo-historical wargaming figures in _Chainmail_ which were excluded from _FMC_ ’s corresponding _Chain of Command_ are actually key to understanding the loose setting of _OD &D_ (itself reproduced in _FMC_). I was worried about seeing exegesis submitted to the jam, because most exegesis of _OD &D_ is interested in reproducing its logic and play culture, but this work is fantastic cultural critique of _OD &D_ as a setting as well as a critique of _FMC_ as a facsimile. “This booklet’s intention is to hold up a mirror to the Medusa that is [_OD &D_ or _FMC_], to show it what it doesn’t want to see about itself, hoping that this will allow referees and players to confront its setting in novel and rewarding ways” (p. 23). Very thoughtful! If it didn’t mean redoing page numbers, I’d highly reconsider my decision to exclude this content from _FMC_. * **Elfgame (Ancestral Peninsula):** This work is a well-produced, aesthetically pleasing retroclone whose goal is to be “as far as possible from its inspirations [in particular, _OD &D_] without compromising its retrocompatibility” (p. 5). To be honest, I think the OSR at large lacks aesthetic sensibilities, but the Brazilian scene in particular always consistently excels at producing materials which look welcoming and fun, while also being well-organized for play, aligning with (I’ve noticed) a tendency towards casual, fiction-forward play. That specific OSR vision is the only one that personally appeals to me despite its play-premises, and it fascinates me as an alternative strain. My own thing is almost done, and has already been wonderfully illustrated by Hodag, but I’ve been procrastinating on making a (nicer version of the) scenario map and—as I’ve put it to some of my friends—I’ve been high on proverbial opium lately due to the extenuating circumstances of our world-historical situation. Care for some late-night meditations from when I was driving for five hours? Some ledes buried in messy trains of thought? * Paul is interesting because his concerns are organizational, especially with regards to the interactions between particular cultures (in his world, Jewish or Hellenistic) and the universal _politeia_ (of God), and which concerns belong to one sphere or another. However, he does not take for granted an objective _politeia_ , but is rather interested in actively building communities organized around the singular _politeia_ he believes is correct and most just, against the one which was dominant in his time. * I think liberals tend to prefer the Gospels over Paul because, as second-generation texts, they are more concerned with individual moral guidance than what we might consider political, organizational, or cosmological issues (or at least what can be construed as such by emphasizing the “red letters” and eliding the world-historical dimensions of Jesus’ life and mission). * Liberal Jesus is perhaps nicer but even less useful than conservative Jesus. The idea that religion is an individual sphere of personal belief lacking social or historical force is in service of the liberal bourgeois society we call secular, despite being organized around its own social relations and embodied idolatrous fetishes. We can’t surrender clarity of purpose to the fascists. * The Gospels should be read as narratives which attempt to situate key teachings and events in the mission of Jesus, not even as conflicting histories (necessarily) of Jesus and his actual life. All four are useful as a constellation through which we get the gist of who Jesus was, what he taught, and why he died; but one must take an individual gospel with a grain of salt, because of their authors’ particular concerns and values. You’re better off writing a new gospel from scratch than trying to reconcile the four we canonically accept into one narrative. * Paul’s seems to self-posture as someone who is authoritative, but not necessarily dogmatic except in convictions he seems to consider core and outside of himself—probably coming from Jerusalem or perhaps revealed to him in his visions of Christ. Relatedly, I think that the conflict between Paul and James (et al.) is overstated and comes down to questions of implementing _politeia_ given cultural differences. What is actually just, as opposed to what is Jewish or Greek? Nature is a possible heuristic according to Paul. One more thing: I'm revising a concept I had for a Harvest Moon type-shit solo game or downtime procedure into a role-playing game where one player (the mayor, I guess) sends weekly digests to other players who submit their activities each month. I think this would be especially fun using physical letters and stationary, but I'm considering running something like this via mailing list. If you are interested, please let me know on Discord (assuming we're already friends there).

A game jam from 2025-08-01 to 2026-01-01 hosted by Traverse Fantasy. This is a jam for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns , a free version of the original role-playing game, published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0....

I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball”: > Not only was _OD &D_ interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. Did you catch that? In other words, “Gary and Dave had different priorities collaborating on _Dungeons & Dragons_, and this is apparent from the text as received.” I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more exegesis of this fucking thing, but that’s a big-ass claim. Is it true? Back when I was working on _FMC_ , I was interested in the development of the _OD &D_ text which consisted of a back-and-forth between its two authors. I’m indebted to Dan Boggs’ _Hidden in Shadows_ blog which I read and internalized years ago, and the timeline below is from his original 2012 post on _Beyond This Point Be Dragons_ : 1. In 1972, Arneson sends Gygax a manuscript 16–20 pages long. 2. In a few weeks, Gygax expands this manuscript to 50 pages (approximate to _BTPBD_). 3. By 1975, Gygax completes a final draft (mostly ignoring Arneson’s suggestions). Boggs’ project was to identify at which points were different aspects of _D &D_ codified into what would become the original print. Much of it centers on _Beyond This Point Be Dragons_ , the so-called Dalluhn manuscript, which Boggs originally identified as an Arnesonian ‘fork’ of _D &D_ before eventually discovering it was compiled by Mark Bufkin who used to play in Arneson’s group and copied his notes for his own games with some personal touches, like only using six-sided dice (August 2017, November 2017, March 2018). Although, he says, we can’t know exactly what was in the original 18-ish pages, we can compare the content of _BTPBD_ , _FFC_ , and _OD &D_ for what seems to originate from Arneson based on whether material in either _BTPBD_  and _OD &D_ also appear in Arneson's independent _First Fantasy Campaign_  (November 2014): * Weapon and armor prices * Construction and prices * Personnel costs * Wilderness encounter matrix * Wilderness evasion * Wilderness movement rates * Magic items (basic weapons, potions, scrolls) * Monster descriptions (mechanics, army composition, wilderness statistics) * Treasure categories * Sleeping and subduing dragons There’s some additional things not mentioned in that blog because they were some of the few contributions Arneson made to the final draft, which were mostly otherwise ignored by Gygax (but we guess they were added later because they were in _FFC_ but not _BTPBD_): the first is an expansion of rules for magic swords, now having special abilities as well as alignment, intelligence, and egoism (Boggs, October 2016); and the aerial combat rules or “Battle in the Skies”, which Gygax abridged by name in the final version to ~3 pages from Arneson’s original 18 pages (Collins, August 2020). Other aspects of the game, although they may have been (or certainly were) informed by Arneson’s original draft or Gygax’s experience playing his campaign, were at least filtered through Gygax’s creative lens. Boggs in his post attributes the concepts of classes, levels, experience, and abilities to Arneson, but I think the form they take in _BTPBD_ are non-Arnesonian if not Gygaxian: fighters and wizards abilities are split into experience levels, each requiring 1k experience points, but fighter levels represent a sort of meta-experience into the meta-levels of flunky, hero, superhero from _Chainmail_ (Boggs, February 2012), whereas Gygax assigns each level a specific fighting capability; Arneson had a unified system of equivalence between hit points, point value (to stock dungeons with monsters), and experience points (August 2014), whereas Gygax seems to build his system based on his memory of what he played, possibly partly informed by David Megarry's _Dungeon!_  rather than Blackmoor directly, especially w.r.t. difficulty-scaling in dungeons (August 2019); Gygax condenses Arneson’s list of bespoke personal characteristics into the six ‘standard’ abilities (December 2012); and whereas Arneson built his system on top of _Chainmail_ , except giving figures multiple hit points, Gygax built or recreated from memory a D20 system and modeled figure statistics using hit dice as opposed to hit points (e.g., a hero is defined as 4 hit dice rather than as 14 hit points, also referencing them being equivalent to the hero figure of 4 virtual men in _Chainmail_ , but also granularizing counts of virtual men at intermediate fighter levels). So, that’s what we know. But that’s not what I said! Sure, Arneson co-authored and thus probably contributed to the composition of _OD &D_, and we can probably guess what those contributions were by comparing his self-published materials to the drafts and eventually published version of _OD &D_. That doesn’t mean that the two authors had different priorities in their play-campaigns, with those differences being manifest in their collaborative work (or, rather, that the two authors’ contributions, as described above, express different priorities); or that the work prefigures different interpretations of itself (partly) because of its internal contradictions. Each of those points is a separate thesis which one-by-one builds upon the initial thesis that the authors’ contributions can be distinguished at all. So, we have that foundation: but do the other points hold up? I don’t know. Really. You thought that was gonna be one post, anyway?

I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball”: > Not only was _OD &D_ interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. Did you catch that? In other words, “Gary and Dave had different priorities collaborating on _Dungeons & Dragons_, and this is apparent from the text as received.” I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more exegesis of this fucking thing, but that’s a big-ass claim. Is it true? Back when I was working on _FMC_ , I was interested in the development of the _OD &D_ text which consisted of a back-and-forth between its two authors. I’m indebted to Dan Boggs’ _Hidden in Shadows_ blog which I read and internalized years ago, and the timeline below is from his original 2012 post on _Beyond This Point Be Dragons_ : 1. In 1972, Arneson sends Gygax a manuscript 16–20 pages long. 2. In a few weeks, Gygax expands this manuscript to 50 pages (approximate to _BTPBD_). 3. By 1975, Gygax completes a final draft (mostly ignoring Arneson’s suggestions). Boggs’ project was to identify at which points were different aspects of _D &D_ codified into what would become the original print. Much of it centers on _Beyond This Point Be Dragons_ , the so-called Dalluhn manuscript, which Boggs originally identified as an Arnesonian ‘fork’ of _D &D_ before eventually discovering it was compiled by Mark Bufkin who used to play in Arneson’s group and copied his notes for his own games with some personal touches, like only using six-sided dice (August 2017, November 2017, March 2018). Although, he says, we can’t know exactly what was in the original 18-ish pages, we can compare the content of _BTPBD_ , _FFC_ , and _OD &D_ for what seems to originate from Arneson based on whether material in either _BTPBD_  and _OD &D_ also appear in Arneson's independent _First Fantasy Campaign_  (November 2014): * Weapon and armor prices * Construction and prices * Personnel costs * Wilderness encounter matrix * Wilderness evasion * Wilderness movement rates * Magic items (basic weapons, potions, scrolls) * Monster descriptions (mechanics, army composition, wilderness statistics) * Treasure categories * Sleeping and subduing dragons There’s some additional things not mentioned in that blog because they were some of the few contributions Arneson made to the final draft, which were mostly otherwise ignored by Gygax (but we guess they were added later because they were in _FFC_ but not _BTPBD_): the first is an expansion of rules for magic swords, now having special abilities as well as alignment, intelligence, and egoism (Boggs, October 2016); and the aerial combat rules or “Battle in the Skies”, which Gygax abridged by name in the final version to ~3 pages from Arneson’s original 18 pages (Collins, August 2020). Other aspects of the game, although they may have been (or certainly were) informed by Arneson’s original draft or Gygax’s experience playing his campaign, were at least filtered through Gygax’s creative lens. Boggs in his post attributes the concepts of classes, levels, experience, and abilities to Arneson, but I think the form they take in _BTPBD_ are non-Arnesonian if not Gygaxian: fighters and wizards abilities are split into experience levels, each requiring 1k experience points, but fighter levels represent a sort of meta-experience into the meta-levels of flunky, hero, superhero from _Chainmail_ (Boggs, February 2012), whereas Gygax assigns each level a specific fighting capability; Arneson had a unified system of equivalence between hit points, point value (to stock dungeons with monsters), and experience points (August 2014), whereas Gygax seems to build his system based on his memory of what he played, possibly partly informed by David Megarry's _Dungeon!_  rather than Blackmoor directly, especially w.r.t. difficulty-scaling in dungeons (August 2019); Gygax condenses Arneson’s list of bespoke personal characteristics into the six ‘standard’ abilities (December 2012); and whereas Arneson built his system on top of _Chainmail_ , except giving figures multiple hit points, Gygax built or recreated from memory a D20 system and modeled figure statistics using hit dice as opposed to hit points (e.g., a hero is defined as 4 hit dice rather than as 14 hit points, also referencing them being equivalent to the hero figure of 4 virtual men in _Chainmail_ , but also granularizing counts of virtual men at intermediate fighter levels). So, that’s what we know. But that’s not what I said! Sure, Arneson co-authored and thus probably contributed to the composition of _OD &D_, and we can probably guess what those contributions were by comparing his self-published materials to the drafts and eventually published version of _OD &D_. That doesn’t mean that the two authors had different priorities in their play-campaigns, with those differences being manifest in their collaborative work (or, rather, that the two authors’ contributions, as described above, express different priorities); or that the work prefigures different interpretations of itself (partly) because of its internal contradictions. Each of those points is a separate thesis which one-by-one builds upon the initial thesis that the authors’ contributions can be distinguished at all. So, we have that foundation: but do the other points hold up? I don’t know. Really. You thought that was gonna be one post, anyway?

I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball”: > Not only was _OD &D_ interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. Did you catch that? In other words, “Gary and Dave had different priorities collaborating on _Dungeons & Dragons_, and this is apparent from the text as received.” I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more exegesis of this fucking thing, but that’s a big-ass claim. Is it true? Back when I was working on _FMC_ , I was interested in the development of the _OD &D_ text which consisted of a back-and-forth between its two authors. I’m indebted to Dan Boggs’ _Hidden in Shadows_ blog which I read and internalized years ago, and the timeline below is from his original 2012 post on _Beyond This Point Be Dragons_ : 1. In 1972, Arneson sends Gygax a manuscript 16–20 pages long. 2. In a few weeks, Gygax expands this manuscript to 50 pages (approximate to _BTPBD_). 3. By 1975, Gygax completes a final draft (mostly ignoring Arneson’s suggestions). Boggs’ project was to identify at which points were different aspects of _D &D_ codified into what would become the original print. Much of it centers on _Beyond This Point Be Dragons_ , the so-called Dalluhn manuscript, which Boggs originally identified as an Arnesonian ‘fork’ of _D &D_ before eventually discovering it was compiled by Mark Bufkin who used to play in Arneson’s group and copied his notes for his own games with some personal touches, like only using six-sided dice (August 2017, November 2017, March 2018). Although, he says, we can’t know exactly what was in the original 18-ish pages, we can compare the content of _BTPBD_ , _FFC_ , and _OD &D_ for what seems to originate from Arneson based on whether material in either _BTPBD_  and _OD &D_ also appear in Arneson's independent _First Fantasy Campaign_  (November 2014): * Weapon and armor prices * Construction and prices * Personnel costs * Wilderness encounter matrix * Wilderness evasion * Wilderness movement rates * Magic items (basic weapons, potions, scrolls) * Monster descriptions (mechanics, army composition, wilderness statistics) * Treasure categories * Sleeping and subduing dragons There’s some additional things not mentioned in that blog because they were some of the few contributions Arneson made to the final draft, which were mostly otherwise ignored by Gygax (but we guess they were added later because they were in _FFC_ but not _BTPBD_): the first is an expansion of rules for magic swords, now having special abilities as well as alignment, intelligence, and egoism (Boggs, October 2016); and the aerial combat rules or “Battle in the Skies”, which Gygax abridged by name in the final version to ~3 pages from Arneson’s original 18 pages (Collins, August 2020). Other aspects of the game, although they may have been (or certainly were) informed by Arneson’s original draft or Gygax’s experience playing his campaign, were at least filtered through Gygax’s creative lens. Boggs in his post attributes the concepts of classes, levels, experience, and abilities to Arneson, but I think the form they take in _BTPBD_ are non-Arnesonian if not Gygaxian: fighters and wizards abilities are split into experience levels, each requiring 1k experience points, but fighter levels represent a sort of meta-experience into the meta-levels of flunky, hero, superhero from _Chainmail_ (Boggs, February 2012), whereas Gygax assigns each level a specific fighting capability; Arneson had a unified system of equivalence between hit points, point value (to stock dungeons with monsters), and experience points (August 2014), whereas Gygax seems to build his system based on his memory of what he played, possibly partly informed by David Megarry's _Dungeon!_  rather than Blackmoor directly, especially w.r.t. difficulty-scaling in dungeons (August 2019); Gygax condenses Arneson’s list of bespoke personal characteristics into the six ‘standard’ abilities (December 2012); and whereas Arneson built his system on top of _Chainmail_ , except giving figures multiple hit points, Gygax built or recreated from memory a D20 system and modeled figure statistics using hit dice as opposed to hit points (e.g., a hero is defined as 4 hit dice rather than as 14 hit points, also referencing them being equivalent to the hero figure of 4 virtual men in _Chainmail_ , but also granularizing counts of virtual men at intermediate fighter levels). So, that’s what we know. But that’s not what I said! Sure, Arneson co-authored and thus probably contributed to the composition of _OD &D_, and we can probably guess what those contributions were by comparing his self-published materials to the drafts and eventually published version of _OD &D_. That doesn’t mean that the two authors had different priorities in their play-campaigns, with those differences being manifest in their collaborative work (or, rather, that the two authors’ contributions, as described above, express different priorities); or that the work prefigures different interpretations of itself (partly) because of its internal contradictions. Each of those points is a separate thesis which one-by-one builds upon the initial thesis that the authors’ contributions can be distinguished at all. So, we have that foundation: but do the other points hold up? I don’t know. Really. You thought that was gonna be one post, anyway?

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the ...

> The true picture of the past _whizzes_ by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. > > Walter Benjamin, _On the Concept of History_ It's August, so submissions for The Icon0clasm Ball for _Fantastic Medieval Campaigns_  have opened! I'm genuinely excited to see what y'all come up with, because the discursive universe of _OD &D_ needs something new (and, dare I say, it deserves a better reception than as the germ of brand-name _Dungeons & Dragons_ or of old-school revisionism). I've made steady progress on my major project for this, and I'm hopefully (hopefully!) going to run it this weekend. Before leaving you to do your thing, I wanted to reflect on particular phrasing in the jam’s prompt: “This jam challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text with concepts untenable to _the Gygaxian imagination_ ; to resurrect this corpse into a new body.” The emphasized phrase, the Gygaxian imagination, struck an interesting chord with people which I initially attributed to pedantry: what _is_ the Gygaxian imagination? What did Gygax imagine, or what do we imagine of Gygax? This was just a provocative bit of language on my part, but the implications are interesting. _FMC_ as a work is concerned with four contradictions: * **Between old-school and historical _D &D_.** How the particular play orientation and culture of the OSR is projected back onto earlier editions of _D &D_, which especially conflicts with the multiplicity of interpretations and textual dimensions of _OD &D_. * **Between the _D &D_ of Gygax and Arneson.** Not only was _OD &D_ interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. * **Between the textual and received _OD &D_.** Similar to the first point, but both more general with respect to reception and more specific with respect to the source text: most readings of _OD &D_ fill in gaps, both within the text as well as one’s own memory of the text, with a vulgar _D &D_ (along the lines of _B/X_), despite the text’s misalignment with those conventions. * **Between early and late Gygaxian _D &D_.** Gygax’s priorities both as an author and as a player of games (whether of war or role-playing) change over time, reflecting changes in his personal preferences as well as his relationship to _D &D_ as it commercializes. These contradictions interest me not because of the sanctity of _OD &D_ as some seminal text taken for granted—I only prefer it to other versions of _D &D_ in that it has a particular vision of what it wants to be, as a game, that isn’t over-determined by what it is supposed to be (since later _D &D_, just about everything after 1974, suffers from knowing it is _D &D_)—but because those contradictions are microcosms of larger discourses, within the (let’s be honest) repulsive discourse of role-playing games and that of interpretation in general. Of my own two projects: one satirizes the themes of _OD &D_, i.e. the manifest and latent content of its fictional discourse, and the other satirizes the reception of _OD &D_ as a text. In other words, if all the above is too high and lofty, think of the prompt as being satirical of _OD &D_ and popular notions of itself. Good luck, and don’t fuck it up!

> The true picture of the past _whizzes_ by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. > > Walter Benjamin, _On the Concept of History_ It's August, so submissions for The Icon0clasm Ball for _Fantastic Medieval Campaigns_  have opened! I'm genuinely excited to see what y'all come up with, because the discursive universe of _OD &D_ needs something new (and, dare I say, it deserves a better reception than as the germ of brand-name _Dungeons & Dragons_ or of old-school revisionism). I've made steady progress on my major project for this, and I'm hopefully (hopefully!) going to run it this weekend. Before leaving you to do your thing, I wanted to reflect on particular phrasing in the jam’s prompt: “This jam challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text with concepts untenable to _the Gygaxian imagination_ ; to resurrect this corpse into a new body.” The emphasized phrase, the Gygaxian imagination, struck an interesting chord with people which I initially attributed to pedantry: what _is_ the Gygaxian imagination? What did Gygax imagine, or what do we imagine of Gygax? This was just a provocative bit of language on my part, but the implications are interesting. _FMC_ as a work is concerned with four contradictions: * **Between old-school and historical _D &D_.** How the particular play orientation and culture of the OSR is projected back onto earlier editions of _D &D_, which especially conflicts with the multiplicity of interpretations and textual dimensions of _OD &D_. * **Between the _D &D_ of Gygax and Arneson.** Not only was _OD &D_ interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. * **Between the textual and received _OD &D_.** Similar to the first point, but both more general with respect to reception and more specific with respect to the source text: most readings of _OD &D_ fill in gaps, both within the text as well as one’s own memory of the text, with a vulgar _D &D_ (along the lines of _B/X_), despite the text’s misalignment with those conventions. * **Between early and late Gygaxian _D &D_.** Gygax’s priorities both as an author and as a player of games (whether of war or role-playing) change over time, reflecting changes in his personal preferences as well as his relationship to _D &D_ as it commercializes. These contradictions interest me not because of the sanctity of _OD &D_ as some seminal text taken for granted—I only prefer it to other versions of _D &D_ in that it has a particular vision of what it wants to be, as a game, that isn’t over-determined by what it is supposed to be (since later _D &D_, just about everything after 1974, suffers from knowing it is _D &D_)—but because those contradictions are microcosms of larger discourses, within the (let’s be honest) repulsive discourse of role-playing games and that of interpretation in general. Of my own two projects: one satirizes the themes of _OD &D_, i.e. the manifest and latent content of its fictional discourse, and the other satirizes the reception of _OD &D_ as a text. In other words, if all the above is too high and lofty, think of the prompt as being satirical of _OD &D_ and popular notions of itself. Good luck, and don’t fuck it up!

> The true picture of the past _whizzes_ by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. > > Walter Benjamin, _On the Concept of History_ It's August, so submissions for The Icon0clasm Ball for _Fantastic Medieval Campaigns_  have opened! I'm genuinely excited to see what y'all come up with, because the discursive universe of _OD &D_ needs something new (and, dare I say, it deserves a better reception than as the germ of brand-name _Dungeons & Dragons_ or of old-school revisionism). I've made steady progress on my major project for this, and I'm hopefully (hopefully!) going to run it this weekend. Before leaving you to do your thing, I wanted to reflect on particular phrasing in the jam’s prompt: “This jam challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text with concepts untenable to _the Gygaxian imagination_ ; to resurrect this corpse into a new body.” The emphasized phrase, the Gygaxian imagination, struck an interesting chord with people which I initially attributed to pedantry: what _is_ the Gygaxian imagination? What did Gygax imagine, or what do we imagine of Gygax? This was just a provocative bit of language on my part, but the implications are interesting. _FMC_ as a work is concerned with four contradictions: * **Between old-school and historical _D &D_.** How the particular play orientation and culture of the OSR is projected back onto earlier editions of _D &D_, which especially conflicts with the multiplicity of interpretations and textual dimensions of _OD &D_. * **Between the _D &D_ of Gygax and Arneson.** Not only was _OD &D_ interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. * **Between the textual and received _OD &D_.** Similar to the first point, but both more general with respect to reception and more specific with respect to the source text: most readings of _OD &D_ fill in gaps, both within the text as well as one’s own memory of the text, with a vulgar _D &D_ (along the lines of _B/X_), despite the text’s misalignment with those conventions. * **Between early and late Gygaxian _D &D_.** Gygax’s priorities both as an author and as a player of games (whether of war or role-playing) change over time, reflecting changes in his personal preferences as well as his relationship to _D &D_ as it commercializes. These contradictions interest me not because of the sanctity of _OD &D_ as some seminal text taken for granted—I only prefer it to other versions of _D &D_ in that it has a particular vision of what it wants to be, as a game, that isn’t over-determined by what it is supposed to be (since later _D &D_, just about everything after 1974, suffers from knowing it is _D &D_)—but because those contradictions are microcosms of larger discourses, within the (let’s be honest) repulsive discourse of role-playing games and that of interpretation in general. Of my own two projects: one satirizes the themes of _OD &D_, i.e. the manifest and latent content of its fictional discourse, and the other satirizes the reception of _OD &D_ as a text. In other words, if all the above is too high and lofty, think of the prompt as being satirical of _OD &D_ and popular notions of itself. Good luck, and don’t fuck it up!

Hi all! Hosting The Icon0clastic Ball on Itch. This is a jam for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, a fre...

A game jam from 2025-08-01 to 2025-09-01 hosted by Traverse Fantasy. This is a jam for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns , a free version of the original role-playing game, published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0....

Hi all! Hosting The Icon0clastic Ball on Itch. > This is a jam for **_Fantastic Medieval Campaigns_** , a free version of the original role-playing game, published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Although it functions on one hand as a “retroclone”, what distinguishes it from other versions is its unwillingness to compromise the confusing and fractal nature of the text, as well as its willingness to criticize that text and its authors. This culminates in a project to situate the original role-playing game within its socio-historical context, to illuminate the perspectives of its original authors and also reveal the extent to which the text is distorted by our own perspectives. It is neither traditional nor old-school nor war-game, and yet here we all are merely grasping the legs of this elephant. > > As for this ball, the category is **ICON0CLASM**. Most readers and players of the original role-playing game, even in the form of **_FMC_** , attempt to envision and emulate the game as it was originally played. Resorting to cliché and pastiche, their visions are both generic and ultimately derivative of their own notions. This jam challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text with concepts untenable to the Gygaxian imagination; to resurrect this corpse into a new body. I'm personally going to work on two to three things: first, I'll be publishing the _Apolitical Edition_  of _FMC_  (you'll see what that means when it's available!); second, I'll be laying out "Kill the Devils!" into a booklet that hopefully looks and is usable (unfortunately, may not be able to commission art for that one; we'll see); finally, I'd like to imagine what it'd look like to cast _0E_ through a lens that is neither old-school nor war-game. I hope this theme also speaks to you and, if so, that you consider contributing your own take! :) Submissions will be open for the whole month of August, so you have a grace period of like two weeks lol.

Hi all! Hosting The Icon0clastic Ball on Itch. > This is a jam for **_Fantastic Medieval Campaigns_** , a free version of the original role-playing game, published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Although it functions on one hand as a “retroclone”, what distinguishes it from other versions is its unwillingness to compromise the confusing and fractal nature of the text, as well as its willingness to criticize that text and its authors. This culminates in a project to situate the original role-playing game within its socio-historical context, to illuminate the perspectives of its original authors and also reveal the extent to which the text is distorted by our own perspectives. It is neither traditional nor old-school nor war-game, and yet here we all are merely grasping the legs of this elephant. > > As for this ball, the category is **ICON0CLASM**. Most readers and players of the original role-playing game, even in the form of **_FMC_** , attempt to envision and emulate the game as it was originally played. Resorting to cliché and pastiche, their visions are both generic and ultimately derivative of their own notions. This jam challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text with concepts untenable to the Gygaxian imagination; to resurrect this corpse into a new body. I'm personally going to work on two to three things: first, I'll be publishing the _Apolitical Edition_  of _FMC_  (you'll see what that means when it's available!); second, I'll be laying out "Kill the Devils!" into a booklet that hopefully looks and is usable (unfortunately, may not be able to commission art for that one; we'll see); finally, I'd like to imagine what it'd look like to cast _0E_ through a lens that is neither old-school nor war-game. I hope this theme also speaks to you and, if so, that you consider contributing your own take! :) Submissions will be open for the whole month of August, so you have a grace period of like two weeks lol.

Hi all! Hosting The Icon0clastic Ball on Itch. > This is a jam for **_Fantastic Medieval Campaigns_** , a free version of the original role-playing game, published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Although it functions on one hand as a “retroclone”, what distinguishes it from other versions is its unwillingness to compromise the confusing and fractal nature of the text, as well as its willingness to criticize that text and its authors. This culminates in a project to situate the original role-playing game within its socio-historical context, to illuminate the perspectives of its original authors and also reveal the extent to which the text is distorted by our own perspectives. It is neither traditional nor old-school nor war-game, and yet here we all are merely grasping the legs of this elephant. > > As for this ball, the category is **ICON0CLASM**. Most readers and players of the original role-playing game, even in the form of **_FMC_** , attempt to envision and emulate the game as it was originally played. Resorting to cliché and pastiche, their visions are both generic and ultimately derivative of their own notions. This jam challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text with concepts untenable to the Gygaxian imagination; to resurrect this corpse into a new body. I'm personally going to work on two to three things: first, I'll be publishing the _Apolitical Edition_  of _FMC_  (you'll see what that means when it's available!); second, I'll be laying out "Kill the Devils!" into a booklet that hopefully looks and is usable (unfortunately, may not be able to commission art for that one; we'll see); finally, I'd like to imagine what it'd look like to cast _0E_ through a lens that is neither old-school nor war-game. I hope this theme also speaks to you and, if so, that you consider contributing your own take! :) Submissions will be open for the whole month of August, so you have a grace period of like two weeks lol.