Approaching the finish line…

An Update from the Tales From When I Had A Face Kickstarter…

How the hell is it March already, let alone March 12th? 

First...  The main course. We are nearly ready to release a beta version of the Tales From When I Had A Face PDF for Backers. There will be a brief pause, during which I'll be drawing up final notes ("bugs"), and I will be keeping the door open during that time if any of you notice any errors that you'd like to pitch in the pot. More about that and how to download send a separate Backers-only post how to download a copy shortly. 

In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of the final pieces we just fitted into place. 

I've been enjoying the opportunity to illustrate a very hand-drawn map of Alterran for the front-matter, which lets me dig into my RPG roots a little bit. (And my RPG present, it looks like I've got 5 nights booked out of the next 7.) 

This is a slightly more illustrative style than I generally use as a GM, though I'm using it as an opportunity to take "hand drawn" about as far as I can take it. Aside from text and final touch-ups, it was done with micron pens, pencils, and markers. 

Alterran Map (for beta edition) If you'd like a slightly higher resolution version, click here. 

I also penned a few words for the Endnote, which will likely be placed in the final edition that's set up for print. 

Author’s Endnote:

The occult, science and art arose from the same spring. Not in certainty, but in uncertainty, honed into skepticism. Each begins with retaining space for the unknown — for how wrong we might be about the world outside our rendering of it. This uncertainty would pervade everything if we did not hold on to the assurances of what we “know”.

It is naïve to think that our thoughts aren’t guided by unseen forces, that we always know the origins of our own actions, motivations, thoughts and fascinations, let alone anyone else’s. There’s no solid ground under our feet, and it is our beliefs that often obscure how precarious our vantage point is, and what a drop there is beyond it, even as they lead us right to the edge.

“I want to believe” — but why are you willing to believe what you do, and not something else? What led you from A to Z? Our beliefs are a source of commitment to assumptions, and most people who claim to believe in nothing are surely lying. What we come to believe is not a choice like picking a shirt to wear for the afternoon, nor can we believe ourselves through a brick wall any more than we can remove ourselves from the vast machinery, the history, that conspired to make us as we are.

So the occult doesn’t really have to be about buying into an alternative paradigm, or believing in spirits. You may, for whatever reason. But that pre-loaded belief can just as easily lead you astray as any other. In this light, a system of magic becomes a reaction to the numinous, a defense mechanism, in both its positive and negative connotations, and literature can also be a system of magic.

There can be a virality, a contagiousness about our beliefs. Ideas have people, not the other way around. Expanded through myth, beliefs can be the spark that starts a religion, a revolution, a war.

We’ll never have our most important questions answered. This is one of the compelling lies that first draws us to many stories; that we can get a definitive beginning and an end, rather than just a confused and unrehearsed middle. In life, we make do with what conditions have provided (thrownness), and come into this world in medias res. Much of art is artifice, but it is also an act, and its true point of origin is often only retroactively clear. It is not logic that dictates our course through life, except the logic that we demand of reality: that it resemble a story that reaffirms our beliefs. The world and our place within it can be made sensible, and the unseen made visible. The rest will be discarded or repurposed.

In retrospect, Tales From When I Had A Face was my attempt to put practice to this premise. Then again, I can’t recall a moment that I chose to write this story. One day I awoke, and the words began to form. It is my belief that by that point, if I intended to stop, it was already too late.

If this is occultism (dealing with “hidden forces”), then I am an occultist. If not, then I am not.

-JC