It wasn’t an existential threat like it was for many—but 2025 was for me still quite a wrestle. The past two years have been.
I am still not over stuff that happened in 2023. Maintaining friendships is hard; I am often angry; I always feel like I am nothing at all.
But hey! I am finally getting the therapy I need; Sharon and I have been working more on our house; and my personal + political convictions took a hard, clarifying tack left.
Unalloyed goods.
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A practice I began as a countervailing force against the internal roar of:
“You have made nothing! You are too slow a writer! You don’t know how to design games! You are not worthy to make art! You are too naive and stupid to understand the way the world works!” etc
are these rings. They don’t fit me super well and scratch easy; none of them cost me more than RM50. I like how understated they are.
I get a ring whenever I finish a personal project and it is fully out in the world. I have five rings now:
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SHRINESHARE, an art folio made with Sharon Chin and David Blandy. Featuring 16 (and counting) artists from around the world; exhibited over a half dozen (and counting) times around Malaysia and the UK. Inspired by Amze Emmons’ Help Yourself, and explores ways we can shared ideas of the sacred without depending on the temples of the state (museums, institutions).
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A PERFECT WIFE, a contemporary horror adventure made with Amanda Lee Franck, Scrap World, and David Blandy. (Physical copies here!) About a pontianak, a refugee community, and the impunity of patriarchal power. (This ring is also shared with A CROCODILE, EATING, a shrine and art installation about how pain is metabolised, for WEIRD HOPE ENGINES. That show is the reason we made A PERFECT WIFE—it was a fundraiser to get Amanda, Scrap and me to the UK. But the crocodile should really have their own ring!)
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TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, an adventure campaign for David Blandy and Daniel Locke’s ECO MOFOS!!. About dead mecha, and what to do what to do when the ruins of hypercapitalism still poison the garden you’re trying to plant, after its collapse. Pretty personal to me, as I live next to an aging petroleum refinery; it is the focus of our IRL environmental activism. (Sequel coming soon!)
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CHAPTER SERF, a full TTRPG fan game for Warhammer 40K. (It’s free, obvs.) You play peons serving the setting’s demigod supersoldier man-children. About toil under feudal lords who were never raised to mind your humanity. My most recent project, and one am unreasonably proud of; a lot of the design work in this is me test-running stuff that will be part of my big 2026 game project, Inshallah.
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THE TIDE RETURNING, an adventure campaign for Yochai Gal’s Cairn; it is part of the Cairn 2E Box Set. About mangroves as a landscape; conflict between a settler-colonial project and an indigenous resistance; cycles of repetition, of consequence, of justice. Colonialism that I return to often, given my homeland’s own history and the horror abroad in the world today. Every return comes with more clarity.
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Because these rings are loose, when I wriggle my fingers they turn around and around and rub against each other with a pleasing (annoying?) clinking sound, and they help remind me I matter.
I am working on a book now—the wayang puppet on our library shelf isn’t ornamentation; they are both patron and research informant!
Maybe I can add another ring, soon.
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In 2026 I will still be fidgeting my fingers, clinking my rings together—but it is a tic I hope to rely on less and less, as time passes.
In 2026 I hope I will be less angry.
In 2026 I hope I can be well enough to be a better friend to the many, many people who were friends to me, who I can never adequately thank.
Scant hours left! The Backerkit campaign ends Tuesday. Go back it NOW.
You should back it because I am part of it. I will be in Four Fathoms Deep, an adventure anthology launching together with the core rulebook. I will be in verygoodcompany.
I am still writing my adventure. But I have a title, and I have a blurb:
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TO DRINK UP THE SEA The tide is falling—continuing to fall. The tide has been falling for three days, now. On the sand are jellyfish lumps, drying out. Look closer! Their tentacles are bundles of optic fiber. On the surf is a dolphin, poisoned, dying. “Stay away!” he wheezes. His blowhole sputters blue blood. In the middle of the bay the waves are breaking. What is it—a shoal, a wreck? A head, a metal head, the size of a comet. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its temples. Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its eyes. Its eyes are open. It is awake.Tomorrow the tide will fall: you will see its hungry mouths.
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This is a follow up to TO PUT AWAY A SWORD, the dead-mecha adventure I wrote for ECO MOFOS!!.
In SWORD the giant robot was an obvious metaphor for hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry. In SEA the giant robot will be the same. I keep writing about the same things; hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry is personal to me, I guess? I live in a petrogas town. Every breath I take reminds me of hyper-capitalist ecocidal industry.
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Was going to post some images / references that make up my moodboard for this adventure.
A kaiju sitting at the edge of a dead sea, spewing a deadly gas. I can’t help read her as a refinery gas flare.
But she also lays eggs. BPRD as a whole concludes by the world ending—but also beginning again, with the earth now an Eden for the amphibian people born from monsters like her.
I’ve never liked this story, but also I’ve never forgotten it: its disgusting dragon(s) like lava flows, like landslides. I believe Byatt wrote the story for / during the Siege of Sarajevo?
In it is the sense of unavoidable catastrophe. That to be human is to dodge around it, prod at it, find boredom in it, rescue what you can from it.
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The most recent is from my own life.
Last week, Senyar, a tropical cyclone, formed in the Straits of Malacca. This never happens in the Strait of Malacca, you understand? Ours are relatively halcyon waters, protected from monsoons, weather systems, tsunamis.
Not any more, I guess.
Hundreds have lost their lives in Sumatra and Thailand.
Senyar hit my hometown last Thursday. The wind wailed; the trees did jigs. I shut what I could, and tried to sleep. The next morning I woke to mess: pools of rainwater in the living room; a porch strewn with pots and branches; trunks and power lines had fallen all around town. (Later the news would report a hundred homes damaged.)
After checking in on loved ones the next thing I did was hurry to our favourite beach, to check in on our favourite mangrove trees. These trees would’ve been worst-hit by the storm.
They survived—though the bedrock around them has eroded further. I worry for them.
Still: our mangroves survived. They survived when concrete did not. During the night, a jetty platform owned by the Petron refinery collapsed into the sea. This is a platform where the tankers moor, to offload crude.
That morning I squinted at the jetty’s rump remainder, water gushing from its broken edge. (No oil spills, thankfully!)
Is the giant in TO DRINK UP THE SEA the cyclone storm, or the petroleum platform?
I don’t know yet. I’ll be writing to find out. It will be an ecocidal disaster, of course. But perhaps such disasters will be calamities for each other—
And I hope imagine us rescue ourselves from them, and belonging, transformed, to the world that comes after.
CHAPTER SERF is a tabletop roleplaying game and adventure, set in Warhammer 40K, where you play those hooded peasant weirdos you sometimes spot in the backgrounds of the art.
Children, kidnapped and brainwashed before puberty.
These are not well-adjusted, fully-developed persons. When do they ever get the opportunity?
What would it be like, to serve such persons? To run their supply chains? Keep their households? Satisfy their desires? Clean up their messes?
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In artwork and cinematics; on miniature bases and in bitz boxes; described in comics and novels, Space Marine architecture is replete with candles.
So many candles.
A Space Marine doesn’t think about where candles come from, or what candles cost. (They think about war and xenos and traitors, stuff like that.)
A Space Marine wants candles—so there should and must be candles.
CHAPTER SERF is a game about getting an emotionally-arrested, casually-genocidal bossman demigod—to whom it would be sacrilege to say no—the candles they want.
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I keep trying to write fan TTRPGs for 40K.
The first was Paper Route, also set on a giant flying cathedral of a spaceship. I never finished it. It was called “Paper Route” because the ship was cargo hauler, transporting a planet’s worth of office paper. There were orks with origami guns, and paper-wasp tyranids, and eldar scooped up alongside a whole forest.
Where my mind was at with Paper Route was: “40K should be funny.”
The second 40K TTRPG thing I made was for Kieron Gillen / Rowan Rook & Decard’s DIE RPG. It was an adventure called “POWERSWORD PURGATORY”—a bunch of 30-year-olds, former regulars at ye-olde-FLGS, get Jumanji-ed into POWERSWORD (ie: not-Warhammer 40K) for one last hurrah.
With “POWERSWORD” I was trying to work through how I felt about the fandom, and 40K’s place in culture now. Its drift from Thatcher-era DIY nihilism to corporate-IP neatness; its earnest embrace of “xenophobia is justified actually” power fantasies.
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CHAPTER SERF is my third attempt. And my strongest, maybe?
Because it isn’t a piss-take. There are jokes in it, of course. It wouldn’t be 40K without jokes. But I am taking the Warhammer 40K setting seriously. I’m not being meta, nor winking at the reader.
I finally have something genuine to say, through all that grimdark set-dressing—about the weight of inhuman institutions crushing ordinary humanity, and what we make of the scraps soul left us:
Forcing a mother to betray her own son; Saving a labourer from lobotomising servitorhood; Arranging the funeral of a Space Marine’s discarded lover;
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Design-wise, I am most pleased with CHAPTER SERF’s favour mechanic.
The Imperium of Man is an extremely feudal network of bickering fiefdoms, each with iron monopolies on different facets of far-future life.
It made sense to me, to link what stuff you can have with how much factions like you. Buddy with the Mechanicus and you get access to fancy bionics and lightning guns. Piss off the astropaths? No psychic powers for you.
This is essentially a gear list married to a faction / major NPC relationship map. I like it because it removes the need for players to worry about dollars and cents—a thing that makes no sense in most 40K TTRPG framings.
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I hope people find CHAPTER SERF a fun idea. I am pretty proud of it! I particularly enjoyed writing the various vocations / professions—thinking up what sort of servants Space Marines would want / need.
I started making some sketches for it, but I can’t really spare the time to make all the art that I need—so the PDF is text, only, I’m afraid.
I did the layout myself, in Google Slides, which I know is the least efficient way to do things—but hey! If that isn’t 40K I don’t know what is.
A powerful gang of cockerels, a series of killings, and bitter quarrel between siblings.
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IN DEEP NIGHT, A COCKEREL CROWING
An ill omen, folk say—of bad weather at dawn; of vengeful spirits passing through; of violence, death, to be discovered tomorrow.
In Sang Sarama, a cockerel crows every night. Folk keep their windows shut. Neither screams nor begging will get them to open.
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A GRISLY FIND
Another morning, another body. Did you know who this was?
On the steps of Broken Bone Alley: a lanky girl, her neck open, her thumbs missing. Quick Aniya. A runner, passing messages for the Left Spurs.
In the wet market trash heap: a greasy man, stabbed in the heart, right hand gone. Mashud. A rum merchant selling opium toddy for the Right Spurs.
Dangling from a park tree: a cat, shaved, hung by their own disembowelled innards. Temujan Binggara. A custodian of the River Stone Lane Temple.
Nailed to their front door: an ink merchant, bled from punctures all over, right index finger severed. Tika Manyusha. The city’s most reliable fence.
In the wreck of her palanquin: a woman and her servants, shredded by glass bomb. Dyo Ra Smisha. Judge and known associate of Kathik Shah.
In front of Great Might Martial Hall: a cockerel, his right spur removed long ago; his head more recently. Mathik Shah. A senior guru of the Left Spurs.
These killings are a countdown. When Mathik dies a line is crossed. The schism within the Spurs escalates into daytime war.
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THE SPURS
A hundred years ago, with blood and fire, Brother Bantam won the gamecocks of River Stone Lane their freedom.
They became the Spurs—a mystic society, an organised gang. Today they brew opium toddy; run protection rackets; own coffee houses.
Recently the Spurs are divided. Their future is the question. Do they gentrify, go legit? Or do they finish the revolution Brother Bantam started?
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THIRTEEN CHICKS COFFEE HOUSE
On every roof ridge: statuettes of its namesake, lined up. Its third-storey balcony is a parapet, made from bullet-resistant teak.
Inside: the balcony overlooks dining tables, were important persons can make deals while high on toddy and distracted by jiggling dancers.
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ONG TONG GATHIK, AMBITIOUS COCKEREL Strong, steady, careful. Haggling, spur arts, bomb-craft. Spur blade. Mail coif, breastplate. 2 spirit.
To prove his conviction, he cut off his left spur. To profit from it, he got himself adopted into the Ong Tongs, a powerful merchant family.
Has a hedge fund manager’s ruthlessness. The murders he orders are designed to provoke the Lefties into indiscriminate violence.
When that happens, Gathik will station his men around warehouses, noble manors. The Righties will appear to stand in defense of the city.
“I have no better right spur than you, o my brother,” quoth the Bantam. So Kathik cut his off, in obeisance to holy words.
Like an aging crime boss whose criminal empire is falling. The assassinations he orders are meant to curtail the Righties’ enterprises—to no avail.
Kathik is about to lose his younger brother Mathik and his human lover Samisha both in short order. He will order the Thirteen Chicks burnt to the ground.
No more eggs snatched from a hen’s belly. No more lives sacrificed in the ring, or at the table. Emancipation for all fowl!
They have their right spurs removed. They wear piercings; their green-brown-red plumage is oil-preened to a gleam. They show up in gangs of four.
All carry the blessing of Brother Bantam: if injured, their bleeding clots into a substance strong as steel. Typically they shape these into throwing stars.
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RIVER STONE LANE TEMPLE
Once a cockfighting arena, it was never renovated, so chicken-kind would not forget. The cages have long rotted away, but the timber stands remain.
In the pit: Brother Bantam, in copper—chest puffed, wings out, spur mid-strike. To be initiated as a Spur, a cockerel must ritually battle this idol for a night.
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BROTHER BANTAM God of war, god of wind, god of wisdom.
His life was the squeeze of a cage, the scream of a crowd, the squint in his eye as he watched those he fought bleed out, die.
He fought his brothers. He would kill them no longer. Instead he killed his trainer, and the crowd, and the idea that cockerels had to fight each other.
Worship is traditionally reserved for male chicken-folk—but Brother Bantam seized godhood by expanding the circle of liberty. Could he not do it again?
Offering: Give all: A lock, that you broke. A bag of money, earned through violence. Blessing: Choose one: You shape blood from your injuries into tools which clot steel-strong, lasts a day. Your bellow halts all other creatures as long as you sustain it, for one combat.
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THE COMBS
They are exclusively a brotherhood, the Spurs. And while Lefties might believe in general galline liberation—cocks are still the priority.
The Combs began as a group of hens. They admit non-chickens. They believe that freedom is a virtue, applicable to all peoples. They preach vegetarianism.
“Nothing but a clucking circle,” a Rightie might say. “Blasphemers!” a Leftie might say. “They think humans should be let into the temple!”
Has spurs as long as any cockerel. Still has both. “Why should I cut either? This Rightie-Leftie thing is turning us poultry-minded!”
As exasperated as a suffragette. You encounter her at the Thirteen Chicks or the Great Might, trying to talk sense into her brothers Gathik and Kathik.
When gang war breaks out Sathika and her fellow Combs will put their bodies between the two sides, in an effort to stop hostilities. They will probably fail.
A trader selling herbal medicine, her beautiful children, and a trail of empty cribs.
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A DAY FROM TOWN, BY A MUDDY BANK
Auntie Sa is breaking camp. Her four daughters douse the fire pit; her two sons load fist-sized jars and child-sized urns onto handcarts.
Her youngest boy sits on a log. Auntie Sa towels his head dry. He sits hunched, staring into space, arms pressed to his chest like a rat, like an insect.
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AUNTIE SA’S MIRACLE MIX
Auntie Sa sells medicine, not pottery—jars of paste thick as marmite and bitter as soap. “Good for pains, good for pregnancy!”
Eat a jar, sleep, dream you are being buried alive. The next day all injuries on you are healed. “Secret formula. Don’t ask, okay?” She winks.
The chief ingredient is Auntie Sa’s own eggs, mashed. Eat her miracle mix once: now it tastes delicious. Eat her miracle mix thrice: now you obey her every word.
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AUNTIE SA, MEDICINE PEDDLER Sensitive, steady, wilful. Healing arts, pot-making, hovering. Sting. Protective amulet, false flesh. 4 spirit.
Flowing clothes, wagging finger. “Drink enough water. Don’t skip breakfast, or afternoon naps. Eat more ginger.”
“All kinds of ill winds, nowadays,” she says. She hands you a free sample of her miracle mix. “Prevention is better than cure!” Her children never fall sick.
If forced to violence, Auntie Sa reveals her wings, the abdomen between her legs. Her sting is a scorching electrocution; you are paralysed for an hour.
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SA FAMILY VALUES
While travelling they camp by sources of clay. They shape large urns, coil by coil. These are placed in a pit, covered with wood and excreta, and fired.
They turn up on market days. Here they brew medicine, with pot lids open. The herbal stink is advertisement enough.
Auntie Sa ingratiates herself to mothers of small children. Her family will pay these mothers a house call—before skipping town the same night.
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A VICTIM
The husband Prias spends his days in the orchard and his evenings at the wine stall. He sleeps on a bench there, now.
The wife Naria hides in her house. “They say that medicine seller stole the baby. That’s not what her husband is saying. He’s saying she gave the baby away.”
It is true. Naria gave her baby away. She couldn’t tell you why. Maybe she was not fit to be a mother. Maybe she should die.
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HOW SA CHILDREN ARE BORN
A prepubescent child is stung then placed foetal into an urn filled with miracle mix. Sealed within, nourished by paste: they change.
Auntie Sa cracks the urn open a year later. The child appears outwardly the same. A year older, perhaps? But they have forgotten speech, and do not need to blink.
They relearn these things. They learn how to make miracle mix. It is all they eat, now. They cannot survive on anything else.
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SA CHILD Strong, steady, wilful. Herb craft, foraging, defending. Boning knife. False flesh. 2 spirit.
Cinched waist, perfect complexion—if you break their skin, you see black-and-yellow chitin. Staring eyes, brows that don’t stop twitching.
Immune to all disease. Naifs, they have no memory of their previous life. Auntie is their mother. They look to her for answers. They never disobey.
Should Auntie Sa die her daughters develop wings, stinging abdomens; start to lay eggs. They split up to mother new families.
Hello Zedeck! I like your adventure Lorn Song of the Batchelor and want to slot it into my SEA fantasy setting. One small hangup is, I don’t have a name for the wider area. So you have a name for this? If not do you have some tips for creating a good name?
Thanks,
Anonymous
Names of places come difficult for me, too!
I wrote Lorn Song as being suitable for slotting into any “peripheral” territory—ie: any region outside a metropole / imperial core.
When I write places like this I tend to think in my mind that they are part of an upland, or the uplands. I like this generic name; it feels real, true to the area’s relationships.
Locals would call their homes by affectionate, descriptive names, things close to them. It is mainly cartographers and conquerors (and often there is no difference between these two kinds of people) that need proper names, to distinguish their many demesnes …
The Gleaming Fins’ river valley could be an upland of an existing territory of the setting you play in? “Upper ____”? Or a name of a territory that reminds you and your players of a real-life territory your own country once / still colonises.
A seed from a divine source, the tree it grows into, and the demon that follows.
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THIRTY YEARS AGO, AS THE SUN SET
Prau Sa Pritiya danced. Her chest shivered, her hips swayed—she so stirred the god of hunters that he shook his house of sky.
That night there was a meteor shower: the stars fell, and set the forest afire. That night the god of hunters fell in love with Prau Sa Pritiya.
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STAR SEED
Divine milt. Freshly spilt, it burns hot as a furnace. Any tool forged in its heat comes alive: able to speak and move of their own volition.
After three days the stuff has cooled enough to touch. A star seed fits in the palm of your hand. A fruit with firescale-like skin; glowing flesh inside.
Peel, eat. It is chewy and sweet and seedless. You will give birth to a child, on the next full moon. If you don’t have a womb, this will be fatal.
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THIS EVENING, ON THE MUDDY ROAD
Feet squelching to a six-count rhythm, rung by skin drums. The whole village marches behind a litter: borne by six men, bearing Lady Hind Eye.
Her eyes are two citrines. Her skin is wood. She wears an aureole of antlers. They promenade her now, at rains’ end, so the deer know to start fawning.
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LADY HIND EYE God of fortune, god of finding, god of deer.
They fell as star seeds. Her sisters were eaten by animals, and became animals themselves. Only she was swallowed by the ground. She became a tree.
The brush surrounding her is littered with antlers. Stags leave them as gifts—thanking their aunt for finding them a mate.
She stands in a niche, carved into her trunk. She does not speak, but always listens; she knows all that happens in the forest. Her niblings are hopeless gossips.
Offering:A bunch of lychees. A fistful of fertilizer. Blessing:For a day, Lady Hind Eye smiles at any statement you make about her forest that she knows to be true.
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TEN YEARS HENCE, WHERE A FOREST ONCE STOOD
Winged insects swarm your lantern. Cricket song ceases. In its absence you notice a rustling: on the ground, all over; under your feet.
A sting on your ankle. Another. A bite between your toes. You stumble to the nearest rock, try to brush off this assault. This is when you see him.
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THE MAN MADE OF EARTH
When a sacred tree is felled, and a termite nest consumes its stump, that nest eats pulp and grievance and becomes a mound demon.
Mud in the shape of a man. Moves the same way a mountain range does, in animations made to illustrate tectonic shift: geography sped up.
Civilisation is a house built to shelter us from nature, from time. The mound demon’s sole appetite is to bring houses down.
It boasts “haunted items from around the world”, gathered via its owner’s “paranormal investigations and his contacts within the world of the macabre”.
Besides a shelf of “spell kits”, I took no photographs, inside. I have to admit I was unnerved.
Back home, a collection claiming to exhibit cursed items would have been quite serious. Displaying a command of ilmu; an institutional mastery over spiritual entities. It would feel keras.
Here, in the secular UK, it is some dude’s prodigious collection of spooky memorabilia. The prop puppet from Sawsits amid a classroom-photo’s worth of haunted dolls. (Patrick’s thoughts on the Museum are nuanced and worth reading!)
One doll caught my eye. Propped on a desk, red, clown-like—surrounded by a shrine of letters. Wall text explained the doll’s name was Tommy:
“We are not going to give out any information about the effects he has on the living … if you do get affected in any way and it continues you can write a letter to tommy to ask him to stop affecting you”
With the museum’s address appended.
Tommy’s letters spilled over and were tacked onto the facing door. Some were in Arabic. Signed greetings from all over. “We believe in you Tommy!” “You are very nice.” “We all love you very much!”
Were these genuine petitions to Tommy, so he’d stop haunting them? Or an ironic, impromptu museum guestbook?
Whatever the case: people seemed sincere participants in this letter-writing ritual; in juicing Tommy up; in saying they believed his story.
In paying tickets of their attention to make him realer.
In mid-March 2025, it came out that the century-old Dewi Sri Pathrakaliamman temple—a small place of worship in downtown Kuala Lumpur; built in 1893, predating Independence—was slated to be demolished.
Jakel Group, a textiles and property-development corporation, was staking their claim to the temple’s land. Jakel intends to build a shiny modern mosque, in its place.
Eventually things were “resolved”—the local Hindu community agreed to have their temple moved to a nearby site; Jakel will build their mosque, as planned.
A frustrating resolution, in a Malaysia riven by ethnic and religious supremacy. In a different time, in a better Malaysia, the temple need not have moved.
Yet:
(“People sleep in tents, ministers sleep in mansions.” Image source)
The truth is that situations like these are pretty common. Kuala Lumpur’s face is ever a-blur: old communities and edifices making way, often against their will, for towers and glass; malls, condos, mixed developments with rooftop pools.
Under the Torrens system, City Hall gets to decide who owns what land. And City Hall has always been developer-friendly, if not developer-bought.
How many low-cost flats and semi-rural kampungs and “squatter” communities fall before the diggers of the wealthy? How many of their disappearances go uncommented on, or are waved away in the name of “progress”?
The Dewi Sri Pathrakaliamman temple became a national story is precisely because it is a temple.
Devotion is attention.
And while religion often devolves into fascism or communalism, it is nice to have a god on your side, if you are up against Mammon.
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(Photo: John Smalley)
Shrine As Practice
I’ve been thinking about shrines a lot, lately.
Shrines as play. I built a shrine to a crocodile god, in a gallery show about TTRPGs.
(Photo: Grace Wong)
Shrines as memory. Sharon’s Portal work is a performance piece, fire ceremony, and photo posters permanently installed at a Port Dickson beach to remember two beloved mangrove trees.
In the popular Malay cosmology, geographical features both natural (trees, termite mounds, mountains) and man-made (mansions, highways, museums) are often inhabited by penunggu—literally: “waiting entities”; in other words: “guardians”.
Datuk kongs, earth deities worshipped by Chinese communities here, whose shrines dot the landscape throughout the Archipelago, are a kind of penunggu.
Worship of a datuk kong usually begins with a dream. The deity appears to a local in a vision, and commands them to build a shrine.
In 2018, after a spate of homophobia and transphobia in the news, Sharon dreamt of a sea goddess coming out of the sea, wearing the rainbow colours of the queer flag.
I was once told that Australian governments are obliged to consult Indigenous communities before approving any development plans.
And since the most features in the landscape are imbued with history, with stories, with ecological and cultural meaning, development always happened slower than developers liked.
Honestly? This is how it should be anywhere.
Much of Australian artist Gabrielle Bates’s work is about challenging gentrification and community-shattering urban change. This is explicitly a magical practice: “Artist-as-Witch”.
Beginining 2016, her practice of tree shrining, the artistic and ritual investiture of trees with divine and magical significance, has been performed around Sydney.
We are tabletop roleplaying game-designers. “Game Design For Planetary Survival” was the subject we were meant to discuss.
I was very nervous about speaking, and panicked, and forgot what I wanted to say. (I spent my time waffling on about my hometown, mostly.
I wanted to say this:
You cannot have “planetary survival” without a relationship to place.
Late capitalism has become really good at keeping us “un-placed”—digital ghosts drifting frictionless through the world at the speed of a map app’s “x hrs away” estimate.
“Globalised” (meaning: rootless) beings are easier to atomise into units, commodities.
How can we claim to have a handle on any sort of material reality if we skip over the material realities where our actual bodies live?
Placedness, rootness, localness. Gradual relationships to your immediate neighbourhood, your specific landscape: the trees on your street, flowering in season; the history of the bus you take daily; the habits of animals in your municipal waterway.
As game makers and players we are pretty good at imagining stuff. We play with secret histories, strange magics, odd gods, alternate futures. We are already good at creating shrines to such things, at our tables.
What is the genius loci of your landscape? What memorial can you build at the entrance to your neighbourhood? What spirit lives in your favourite tree? What is an appropriate votive offering for the fish-god gestating in the canal; the engine-god in the car you drive to work?
We are very good at immersion, at playing as if things were real.
So make it real. Speak to your trees, aloud. Let your neighbours see. Leave candles at the memorial you made on your roundabout. Build an altar to birds. Cast spells at a protest rally.
Because attention is devotion, and devotion is attention. If that dark god Mammon, whose name is Capitalism, has seized speedy, frictionless materialism—playful, small-scale, deliberate animism is radical.
Have relationships with the gods of your life, your community, your stories. Be devoted to these things. Build shrines to them. Focus on them. Make them real. Make your place real.
A CROCODILE, EATING is an installation work, ritual performance, and shrine.
It is part of WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, a contemporary visual art exhibition about tabletop roleplaying games, running at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK from now until 10 May 2025.
If you ask me to build a world, I will build a crocodile.
On linoleum flooring, stones are arranged into the shape of a saltwater crocodile. Embedded in the stones, on the crocodile’s back, are bowls, jars and platters of all kinds.
At the snout of the crocodile, on a rickety stool. At regular intervals, this printer noisily begins to print on coloured paper—stories about generational pain, family trauma, personal curses.
A printed notice reads:
The crocodile is kind. They love us. They eat our pain. Help them eat. 1. Take a sheet, read its prayer aloud. Help the crocodile understand. 2. Tear up the sheet. Help the crocodile chew; they have no more teeth. 3. Place the shreds of your sheet in a jar. Help the crocodile swallow. 4. If the jars overflow, wedge your shreds between the stones. The crocodile must swallow. 5. Thank the crocodile aloud. They are too full to reply. The crocodile is kind. They love us. We have so much pain. They must eat.
Specifically its cover. A loving and reverent tableau by Nadhir Nor, who presents the titular crocodile of the adventure as a sumptuous feast—each organ served on its own platter; spiced, wreathed in perfume; the meat arranged as both lingam and yoni, filled with flowers and water.
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2. Modern magic.
(Excerpts from my proposal doc for A CROCODILE, EATING)
Southeast Asian magical practice, when depicted in anthropological or art contexts, is often rendered in a particular aesthetic language, designed to read as authentic:
Black-and-white photographs. A woman in traditional clothes. Verdigrised bowls and platters and incense holders. Fresh-cut flowers. Muted, archaic, like a temple complex unearthed by archaeologists.
But magic as it is practiced today isn’t like that. Curses are between feuding neighbours, in low-cost housing. They are cast in a flat, by a gig worker, with victims’ faces printed by an inkjet printer with clogged nozzles.
Temples are painted in bright pink, lined with linoleum, beautified with artificial flowers, lit with white fluorescent tubes—affordable, long-lasting, bright.
Which bits of a ritual are essential, and which bits can you abridge? Can you cast a blessing over WhatsApp?
True magic and belief care more about being practical, than reading as authentic.
The tomb of Syeikh Ahmad Majnun, a 15th-Century saint, was used to swear oaths. At the foot of the tomb is a pillar, with a hole. You would place your hand in this hole, and speak your oath. If you spoke lies, the hole would close on your hand and crush it.
As shipping a whole oathstone to Nottingham wasn’t practical, A CROCODILE, EATING is built from Cornish pebbles, bought from a garden-supply store.
Whatever works, you know? Again: magic is practical.
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4. Hang Tuah’s footprint.
This shrine marked the spot where the Malay demigod Hang Tuah once stepped, thereby indenting the rock with his footprint.
It was used by locals: to ask for children, to ask for love, to ask for fortune. People would leave live chickens as offerings. (Nearby villagers would take these chickens home, to eat.)
Both Sharon and I have been thinking about shrines, lately.
We have come to see them as an artistic and political counterargument to national institutions, official religions, corporate IPs, platform monopolies—the exclusive franchises of power, money, and the state.
Despite nationalism’s efforts to centralise and clone a national identity, still we mutate, still we bootleg, still we graffiti, becoming once again ourselves. And—particular to post-colonial societies—in doing so we casually continue the work of liberation, sneaking the idea of freedom away from our own architects and elites and prime ministers, who would seek to seize its meaning for their own purposes. The churches or mosques or temples to demos that the federal government builds are ours to transform. To take from. To ignore. “No need. We’ve got our own shrines at home.”
Along with David Blandy, we made ShrineShare, an exhibition-in-a-folder of personal shrines by sixteen artists from around the world.
A CROCODILE, EATING is me sharing mine.
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6. Games as shrines.
(My home group, with custom T-shirts our GM Amanda made. Mine says: “Impostor Syndrome? Not In This Economy”)
Tabletop roleplaying games resist dogma. As much you might like to appeal to RAW or Jeremy Crawford, play always and inevitably mutates to fit the mood and metre of your own table.
The rules system you use might furnish a set of cultural mores, an architectural vernacular—
But it is you and your players who actually make the game: your habits, your house-rules; your preferred procedures of handling particular situations; your in-jokes and callbacks and thematic fixations.
In play, a TTRPG is a shrine dedicated to your home game, a set of unique rites—always unique, always local, always small-scale.
How do you present a roleplaying game in an art gallery?
I am no visual artist. I have no paintings or sculptures I can present, to transport visitors into a different world.
As a writer I mainly think in texts, narratives. I could have presented something narrative for WEIRD HOPE ENGINES: invited audiences to sit and play through an adventure; given them rules and characters and a scenario to play through.
Would’ve been unsatisfactory, though. While imaginative and experiential, such a work would not really have been visual. And TTRPGs take time—“sit down, participate for half-an-hour” time—which is a lot to ask, even of the most eager gallery visitor.
“Games as shrines” gave me a solution.
I’d make a shrine in the gallery. You’d play the shrine by performing some simple ritual actions. The shrine is tangible, made of stone and accompanied by a diffuser putting benzoin oil into the air. Its associated meanings and practices evoke a world, a cosmology.
You pray to the crocodile. The prayers are real and in earnest. You feed the crocodile. The crocodile changes with every prayer; as the exhibition continues the crocodile grows and is furred in colour.
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8. Pain.
None of the prayers you offer to A CROCODILE, EATING are fictional. All of them—stories of family loss; fraught relationships with parents, with homes; abuse, cultural misogyny, ethnic tension, toxic masculinity—are true.
Some of them come from my own life. At least half come from my friends, who shared with me their stories via THE CAT IS KIND, a prototype shrine I made a week before leaving for Nottingham.
You would ritually offer “a story that aches” to this cat-shaped piggy-bank, and the cat would eat that ache for you.
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9. Port Dickson.
Everything I make is ultimately about Port Dickson, the small Malaysian town in which I live.
Port Dickson is defined by its relationships to places across the sea. It is a town of petrochemical industry; exporting diesel and jet fuel abroad.
In return, from the First World, we received unwanted textiles by the container-load, in huge bundles—there are many “bundle” shops in my town, thrift stores essentially, where locals sort through the piles of discarded factory uniforms and fast fashion for still-usable garments to sell second-hand.
(Fun fact: all of the coats I wore in the UK I bought from the bundle!)
We fuel your civilisation, process your trash.
For A CROCODILE, EATING to embody my context it has to communicate the flavour of this relationship:
The shrine’s rites do not allow gallery visitors to say their own prayers. You are only ever feeding the crocodile burdens imported from somewhere else.
The sense of an exhausted land, continually asked to take on more weight from without—growing more exhausted and strange, changing.
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10. Sincerity.
For this shrine to work it had to be real.
I took my shoes off whenever I stepped onto the linoleum. I prayed as I built the crocodile, stone by stone. Every time I entered and left the gallery space I faced my small, tired crocodile god, and I bowed to them, and believed.
I hope my belief makes the shrine real, and you feel this, if and when you visit, yourself.
Anonymous
