Once on the heights, if you can reach them, you might see the world as it is.

 
 

Here's an extremely obscure early Chambers work published by F. Tennyson Neely.  I recently discovered it in primary sources and thought it was completely undocumented since his death, but it turns out the magnificent Miskatonic University Department of Literature got there before me.  

I won't keep you in suspense:  it's not a revelatory new weird novel.  It's just the introduction to Neely's 1895 edition of Tolstoy's Master and Man.  But still, it's an early undiscovered work that gives us a small window into the man in his early career, when he was still writing what he loved, before the obligation of the commercially successful stuff wore him down.  There may be a hint of rebuke to the critics who hated The King in Yellow mixed in there as well.  

Chambers' first book was In the Quarter in 1894, published by Neely.  In 1895 he had three published books:  TKiY and this introduction, both by Neely, and The Red Republic for Putnam.  

TKiY was published in March.  

The only primary sources I have for this introduction are The Fourth Estate (NYC), June 6, 1895; the News of Chicago, June 11, 1895; and the weekly Boston Ideas, June 15, 1895.  

The November 9, 1895 New York Times says the Putnam brothers "are about to publish" The Red Republic.  

So it looks like this is Chambers' third publication in book form, and possibly his last collaboration with Neely, whom he was glad to get away from.  

Again, it's only TKiY-adjacent, but it's a Chambers work almost nobody has read in probably over a century.  So here it is, for anybody interested:  

CLIMB the heights, stand face to face  with the master, learn to see--then, before the eyes have lost their focus, turn and look down on the world below. Ah! how small we all are--we busy little people swarming among the fields of art! We work hard and the fields are fertile; why should we wish to climb the heights where the soil, they say, is barren? Ask us and we answer: 

"Here we all are masters in our little fields; why should we seek the heights above the world? Nobody could see us up there."

"What matters that?" you say.  "Once on the heights, if you can reach them, you might see the world as it is."

"And neither be seen nor understood?  Oh, no, here the world sees us, and we are very happy, each in his little field."

The years pass and few leave the fields to seek the heights, and of those few how few arrive? Count them, the living with the dead: Bizet, Wagner, Tolstoi, Zola, Maeterlinck, Poe, Browning, Puvis de Chavannes, Regnault, Fortuny, Innis, et puis? [and then?]  Oh! there are more--some as yet invisible, some still climbing. The world will always stand gaping at the climbers.  Each worker in his little field will wag his head and stare; but when at last the climber rises above the cackle from the fields, it is only by that cackling that the world knows that the climber is above it. For the world can no longer see him nor comprehend his words, but the world will say it can, as long as the agitated colonies cackle among the fields.

If the masters from their heights can see and understand us, we also must rise before we can understand them. We must leave the highroads and well-trodden by-paths among the fields so often tilled; we must close our ears to the cackling, and the echoing bray of the world; we must toil upward to the side of the master, and then try to look out over the world from his heights and with his eyes.

"No! no!" cries a little worker in the fields, "the world doesn't look like that to me!"

But the little worker can only see as far as the wall which separates his acre from the acre of his little neighbor. If you tell him this, he may revile you, or he may stoop and look through a chink into his neighbor's yard. In the latter event he will cry triumphantly, "I was right! All the world is like my little acre!" forgetting that this neighbor also built a wall.

The world knows that Tolstoi is a master, but do you imagine the world would know it were it not for the cackling in the fields? Oh, the world is braying loudly and its ears are very long and keen! It is too heavy, however, to climb, but its weight can crush and mangle. Bizet died of a broken heart--but he died on the heights; and after he was dead, crushed by the heavy world, the tardy tumult from the fields set the world braying; but the few who understood Bizet are not very grateful to the world.

"Tout écrevain, [sic] dans quelque sphère que s'exerce son esprit, doit avoir pour objet principal d'être utile!" [Every writer, whatever the sphere in which his mind operates, must have as his principal aim to be useful!] thunders good old Hugo.

Has Tolstoi conformed to this? Confirmed! He learned it on the heights and he teaches it.  

Commerson has given us a creed: "Il faut être sans cesse aux barricades contre ses passions, et toujours au congrès de la paix avec sa conscience." [One must constantly man the barricades against his passions, and always make peace with his conscience.] Is it Commerson or Tolstoi who speaks? "Always at peace with one's conscience." That is Tolstoi: and as Gerfaut says: "La conscience? C'est tout simplement le bon sens de l'âme." [The conscience? It's simply common sense of the soul.]  That is Tolstoi's great and simple creed, and we understand and love him for it. And we love him for his truth and his pity and his goodness--and his splendid sincerity, his manliness--and because of all these, for his great art.  For these are the component parts of art, and art, without each one of them, is incomplete.  Dissect it as you dissect light! Hold up to it the prism of research, and as the colors of the spectrum are disclosed, so shall it be disclosed to you that truth, goodness, sincerity, manliness, and pity, which is charity, together form the eternal light of the world, true art. Yes, it is the eternal light, the "great white light " of our world, and if we will climb the heights we shall find the masters standing in the glare, almost alone. They and they only can teach our eyes to see the world, lighted by this "great white light," and when we have seen and understood, we love the men who teach us, and call them "masters."  Tolstoi can teach, and he will, for it is his creed. He is a master and therefore good. Good men are not rare, but, "en ce monde il faut être un peu trop bon pour l'être assez." [In this world, one must be a little too good to be good enough.]  

ROBERT W. CHAMBERS.

 

5 Acts: The King in Yellow

 
Before reviewing 5 Acts:  The King in Yellow by Jason Bower, three disclaimers:  

First, the copy was provided by the author.  It came as a gift without even the promise of a review, let alone any pretense of influencing the content of any review.  And it had been on my shopping list anyway; the gift merely moved it up in the line.  Still, one discloses these things.  

Second, I am committing the gravest sin in TTRPG reviews:  I have not had a regular game group for some years now, so I am reviewing this book without playing it.  My perspective is as an enthusiast, collector, and bibliographer of works inspired by Robert W. Chambers, and a lifelong (if currently not practicing) lover of tabletop roleplaying.  I am not, in this case, telling you as a GM how it runs at the table.  Consider this a book review, not a game review.  

Finally, there is an aspect of the very structure of this game that is potentially a spoiler for the players' first game, if the GM wants to hit them with it by surprise.  I will hold it to the end in a spoiler section, but understand that it is absolutely fundamental to the core theme of the game.  

5 Acts:  TKiY is a rules-light, narrative-focused system.  On the scale from "Powered by the Apocalypse" to "Runequest," it is way down at the former end of the spectrum.  It is almost better understood as a Victorian storytelling parlour game with extra structure than as a traditional TTRPG.  Dice rolls are few and impactful, and the included adventures are primarily a setting and core concept, with the story emerging from narrative collaboration between the gamemaster and players.  If your group isn't into this sort of thing, it's unlikely they'd have a good time.  This sort of game requires everybody to be game, and fully onboard with the concept.  If your players like games like Brindlewood Bay, this may be your thing.  If they love the mechanics of a conventional D&D or Call of Cthulhu game for their own sake, it may be a tough sell.  

The core mechanic is a dice pool system with degrees of success (Success, Failure, and Success with Cost).  The character classes are as rules-light and narratively-focused as the rest of the book:  they are mechanically defined by a specific class ability (similar to a PbtA playbook).  The Repairer of Reputations, for example, can use his blackmail network to coerce NPCs, and the Grave Worm can cause decay by touch.  Using your class ability adds a die to your dice pool for the check.  Failure results in increasing "Strain," and Strain risks the character developing "monstrous features," physical signs of the PC transforming into an inhuman monster (not figuratively).  

On first read, many of the suggested powers and monstrous features rankled my RPG instincts:  they felt like their implications would be impractical at the table.  Further on in the book, I realized I'd neglected a core aspect of 5 Acts:  it is inherently a one-shot with single-use characters--and a game world--that never persist between games.  A single session tells the story of a group of characters who read The King in Yellow, realize that they personally are destined for majesty, and pursue that destiny singlemindedly as events rapidly escalate to cosmic crisis.  It is a game of heightened reality, in which a PC becoming slightly unstuck from space and painful to look at, or accumulating  trailing horde of loyal rats, is normal and appropriate.  They begin as mundane people, but by the end of a single session they will be gods, kings, monsters, or dead.  There is no XP or other character progression in the conventional sense, though at some point they find the Yellow Sign and their supernatural class abilities ascend to a cosmic scale.  That Repairer of Reputations, for example, can actually pull off a world-straddling coup.  Players are encouraged to "go-big."  This is, again, a one-shot:  the game world is expendable.  

The core gameplay loop begins with a Nightmare, the "combat encounter," as it were, of this system.  The players experience a shared dream in which they must overcome some beast or peril, whether a gala night at the end of time with the Conqueror Worm, a Biblically-accurate angel, or a masked throng trying to force them into the Government Lethal Chamber.  The Nightmare brings with it some suggestive prophecy guiding them toward their magnificent destinies.  On waking, they consult The King in Yellow (the play, not the King) for inspiration on how to proceed, through a structured, revolving storytelling framework which takes up significantly more space in the book than the mechanical rules do.   The players take turns inventing images from the Play, interpreting them as instructions, creating a plan to effect those instructions, and actually carrying them out.  

The overall structure of a conventional session is played in the titular five acts.  We begin in Act I with normal people who read a play they shouldn't, and end in Act IV with universal cataclysm.  Act V--  ...that's for the spoiler section.  

The Scenarios chapter presents settings of wonderful variety, from 13th century Germany, to the maiden voyage of a parallel Titanic, to the set of a 1970s giallo film production (I wish I'd thought of that one), to the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, to a populous space station orbiting Eta Cassiopeiae in the distant future.  Each is two-to-a-few pages with a description of the setting, its "nightmarish theme" (such as violence, falling, or being chased), the physical and metaphysical crises that incite the adventure, the PCs' place in the setting, and example people, places, and events.  

Overall, this was a very satisfying read.  Bowers' book is full of vivid, imaginative images, and in a very pleasant detail, he cites his sources.  Throughout the text he'll name inspirations that can guide additional reading, from Anselm of Canterbury to "Dr. Pipt's Liquid of Petrifaction" from The Patchwork Girl of Oz.  The character of the book is based on Chambers directly (with nary a Derlethian tentacle to be found), and the works that inspired him, were inspired by him, and formed his context.  Of course I liked it:  it may as well have been written for me personally.  It is concerned with themes of decadence, ambition, and unreliable narrators.  

The last thing before the character sheets is a collection of vignettes, very short stories exploring relevant themes.  There is The Appalling Hospitalization of Hildred Castaigne, Futurist, which recounts in its unreliable-narrator way Hildred's return to Dr. Archer following the events of The Repairer of Reputations, and The Dance of Perpetual Suicide by Alec and Genevieve, Torturers which does the same for The Mask.  It is not all hitched to Chambers' stories:  there are as well recontextualizations of Greek myth and *The Sorrows of Young Werther,* for example.  The section is a nice bonus.  

That's it for the safe part of the review.  I can't tell you how it plays at the table, and frankly I don't know if that would tell you anything about how it would run at *your* table, so table-dependent a thing it is.  I expect it would bomb with some game groups and thrive in others.  In any case, as a work of Chambers-inspired literature, I'm very happy to add it to my shelf.  

In addition, 5 Acts:  The King in Yellow does one more thing that I have seen only once before in a TTRPG, and even then--  

But let's proceed in spoilers.  

Spoiler section:  

I'd mentioned that this is a game of heightened reality, but it is also a game of grounded realism.  I'd also said in passing that it is concerned with unreliable narrators, but this was very badly understating the case; it's almost a lie of omission.  5 Acts is fundamentally a game of unreliable narrators.  I hide this behind a spoiler warning because, while the game takes on a new dimension once your players know this, it might be fun to hit them with it out of nowhere for their first time.  

Way back in the hoary oldentimes of the 1990s, John Scott Tynes created a "roleplaying metagame" called POWER KILL.  This game overlays your group's existing game.  You play your regular session of D&D, clearing out the kobold warren, carrying off a load of loot, and leveling up as usual.  Then the GM takes all the character sheets, hands out new ones, and assumes the role of a counselor at a group session of dangerous criminals confined to a mental institution.  He interrogates the actions they took while under the influence of their delusional identities:  "But why did you invade that low-income housing project and systematically murder people room-by-room while stealing everything of value?"  The system has more complexity, but I'm simplifying to get to what we need here.  

Tynes was making a statement about hack-and-slash gaming of the era, and I recall him saying in an interview that he didn't necessarily expect it to actually be played:  it was sort of an essay in the form of an RPG system.  Bowers, however, uses a very similar mechanism as the fundamental basis of his game.  

Act V is the Debrief Phase.  The heightened-reality story is over, that world ended or warped catastrophically.  The GM collects character sheets, and the players assume the roles of investigators of some kind.  We are back in the normal non-apocalypse world.  The PCs from Acts I-IV are all dead or institutionalized, and the new PCs (now something like police or federal officials or mental health staff) recontextualize the events of the story in mundane terms.  They engage in, as the book puts it, the retroactive removal of supernatural events.  The Organist believed he was whipping a city into a supernatural frenzy with his arcane melodies, but in fact he caused a panic blasting music from a Bluetooth speaker while shooting into a crowd.  The Anachronist thinks she stopped time and walked right past a guard, while in fact she hit him from behind (causing permanent, disabling brain damage) and propped him up in his chair before gliding dramatically past him.  

This is not, I expect, just a gimmick.  If you drop it on your players by surprise, it's just part of the text of the game.  But on subsequent plays, it surely must inform a subtext to the experience all the way through.  Even as they're acting out mad power fantasies, the players will be considering what their actions may look like in the Debriefing.  It will be a whole game played as an unreliable narrator, really living and feeling the experience of that unreliable narrator.  

As with the rest of the game, I can't tell you how it actually plays and it clearly depends entirely on your table in any case.  This is a gameplay conceit that requires a lot of narrative effort from your players.  Some will love that, while others will want the more familiar experience of going into a prepared story.  But I respect the innovation regardless.  Bowers set out to create a game of unreliable narrators, and adopted a device that seems perfect for the purpose.