I have branded my most recent game, 10,000 SWORDS AGAINST HEAVEN, as “communist” and “marxist” or “maoist wuxia.” I must confess that doing it in that way has become nothing more but a sort of polemical marketing system. It sure brought on an unlikely audience, even after I’ve resigned to the fact that branding anything as “commie” would surely fail in a neoliberal world such as this.

To all those that have supported this endeavor, you truly are fucked up radicals. Despite your support, I still have no illusions that I will ever become petit-bourgeois enough to be able to do this full-time. I have no illusions that I will be bourgeois enough that I can hire workers and so on. Rest assured that if that ever come to pass, the money will circulate to those that need it the most in this cruel world.

But let us return to the topic at hand: if I continue to express the game of 10,000 SWORDS AGAINST HEAVEN—and therefore, the world of HINGSAJAGRA— as communist, what makes it communist in the first place? Why go with this title, this pamagat, that is essentially a death-knell for the game’s marketing to the Southeast Asian audience, who have been propagandized the most about the “evil” of Communism?

First, a matter of metaphysics (gasp! A Dialectical Materialist engaging in Metaphysics?!). As much as I don’t subscribe to psychoanalysis, I’m a huge reader of Badiou and the whole strand of Speculative Realist (I believe myself to belong in that school if we’re talking a matter of Philosophy). I think Reality as we know it is something we experience and understand everyday, but ultimately, cannot completely express. The fact that our language is symbolic, dealing with signs and signifiers, means that we will only ever interact—through Language—with the signs and symbols that signify something instead of expressing something Real.

In the Ultimate Truth, however, this attempt to express Reality through Symbol is real itself.

There are many things I think are Real. The Real is a Prism for Symbol—there are multiple symbols for any single Real thing. For example, the Symbols of Nation are symbols for the ideal of a country. Though they are ultimately Fantasy (in the sense that they exist to hide a hole in the symbolic order of things, the hole being Real). Furthermore, all religion and all mystic traditions and even all attempts at magic are Symbols for something Real beyond what we can comfortably communicate. Man is a species of symbol.

I mention this because this fundamentally colors how I have attempted to express revolutionary communism in Hingsajagra. Instead of writing a game that has mechanics that enforce you to be communist, I instead wrote a world that is, at its core, communist. Or more accurately, that communism as a human politics and symbol is closer to the Real of the world than the rest of the other Alignments/Truths/Ideologies. Instead of writing a game that has strictures that must make you Communist, I instead wrote a game that has a world that is Communist.

This, of course, reveals a bit about how I view the world myself. Due to the social nature of humans, cooperation leading to civilization, and communality being so core to the heart of humanity, itself being a social species, I view Communism and Marxism as ideologies that are the closest to the Real of Humanity than every other ideology.

This is obvious of course—Capitalism and Fascism and all the other socioeconomic systems require fantasies to constantly reify and make-real their economic realities, while most people would agree that should the world crumble today, we will return to something that is essentially primitive communism as it is described by Marx and Engels.

Not only that but there is constant and unceasing propaganda (Reality-Making) against Communism as well, while the majority of Communist propaganda is revelatory in nature about the Contradictions of the current system rather than reality-making. This is another important aspect of the Communist movement. Marx calls Communism, in The German Ideology, “The real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” While Marx did not intend the word “real” to be used in the sense that Badiou or I use “Real”, I think it’s applicable. Communism tries to do the Real. Rather than attempts at creating models and visualizations and psychoanalyses that settle into Bourgeois thought, it seeks to capitalize on rupture in society, to move it toward Revolution. What is Revolution but a shattering?

Therefore, much of the mechanics of 10,000 SWORDS AGAINST HEAVEN is light. It has three components—the Player (the Wanderer), the Arbitrator (the Intercessor), and the World (the game). Play moves through a dialectical conversation between the three. The World itself tells everyone else that it its a world wherein Communism is the closest to the Real, and that everything is trying to cover it up. To plant its fantasies. There are no Communist states, no Communist places. The International Bourgeoisie are trying to snuff out the last fires of Communism in this world. What do we do about it?

I’m not anti-authoritarian, but baking in the Communism into the game’s mechanics (in a sense, the game’s metaphysics) feels coercive and Reality-Making. My approach to this is Materialist. My approach to this is similar to Disco Elysium’s approach: it lets you do whatever you want, you can side with whatever. It doesn’t create a game with Soviet posters everywhere, with the well known signifiers and symbols for Communism, no. It depicts a world ravaged by Neoliberalism and what the Ruling Class does to those that dare challenge its power. Deep down the Ruling Class understand that their time is temporary, and they can only lengthen it, stay their ultimate demise, with tremendous, excessive holocaust and genocide.

In Hingsajagra, the World is the World. There is no Spirit of Communism that is the Spirit of History—that’s Idealist. And in 10k SWORDS there is no grand mechanic that reinforces Communism. Repetition-to-create-Reality is Nazi methodology. It is what Capitalism uses to create its Reality.

No, there is only the World, and you’re dialectical position as both its negation and its sublimation. You can be Fascist, you can be Neoliberal. Many people are. Many people exist as contradictions of themselves, of their material contexts. Most people are creations of their societies. The World’s Mask is Neoliberal, but its flesh writhes for a world that is not. What world should that be? Another fantasy? Or something closer to what is Real?

I didn’t want to create an Idealist Communist game by creating mechanics that tell you “Hey, this is being a bad Communist. Do this to be a good Communist.” Us Marxists have been at each other’s throats trying to clarify what makes a good Communist for the last century. I wanted to create a Dialectical Materialist game. Where the Communism is invisible because it is the world. In the same sense that OSR games essentially train you as a player to get more creative, so does 10k SWORDS dare you to interrogate not just the World of Hingsajagra, but the World we have. It’s the only one we’ve got.

After all that, one might ask: why do I still use the term communist to describe it anyway, when I don’t want it to be seen as just that? The answer is simple, really: I just wanted to use the word. In most of my years of writing TTRPGs, so much of the work involved is after creating the work. It must be understood that no matter what you do you will never create perfection. That does not exist, only the striving for it. So after you’ve done the work, what next? You have to talk about it. Market it with people. And just marketing it yourself is not going to work. You have to talk with people, and to get any product you make off the ground you gotta atomize it into easy to digest chunks because we live in a post-marketing world.

Anywho, that’s all for now. I’m still slaving away at THE FALLEN OGRE-MACHINE. The last few weeks were crazy busy for me at work and I was saddled with sicknesses and hay fever so I haven’t been able to function at all. I usually get more productive around March when things get hotter, but climate change hasn’t allowed for that and the World is heading towards its own rupture right now so who knows.

Anyway, as a thank you, here’s an excerpt from one of the Martial Arts coming for Fallen Ogre-Machine. The dungeon will have two martial arts (Sunyata Cutting Light, Demon God Altar) and one magick art (Scarlet Sun Magicks).

Thanks all. May your days be beautiful.

Sunyata Cutting Light

The ultimate cutting act, is to cut the heart of reality itself. Reality is Empty. To cut Emptiness is to reveal its contradictions bare. To negate the negation. This is Omniscient-Nature.

An art developed by Rukanyawattra of the Endlessly Cutting Blade. Rukanyawattra was a peerless master of the curving blade. His skill was so endless that he could cut all about him if he kept his sword unsheathed. And so he chose to keep it sheathed. Taking ideas from Amatsunese iaijutsu techniques, he developed his own ability, which he called the Resting Cut. Cutting from a relaxed, non-violent state, shearing through contradiction.

Despite developing this, he realized that just this was not enough to save his village and family during the genocides of the United Union of Peace during the Second World Revolution. And so he joined the Isanese Vajra League—which would eventually consolidated into the Isanese Communist Party. Here, he learned of the importance of collective action and united struggle. He taught his skill to all the others with him, and found that the only way to protect the Working Class and all Oppressed Peoples is through united combat. And so he perfected Sunyata Cutting Light with technicks that accentuated two things.

First, they are technicks that work best when in conjunction with allies.

Second, they are technicks that expressed the truth of the positive aspect of radical emptiness—that all things are interdependent, and to cut one thing is to cut another thing in a dialectical entanglement.

To cut yourself is to cut another. To cut another is to cut yourself.

Fighting Style

Sunyata Cutting Light style attacks always begin and end sheathed. Longer combinations might have up to 5 cuts unsheathed, but that is considered one attack within the philosophies of the Martial Art. After all cuts are unleashed, it is sheathed again.

Parrying with Sunyata Cutting Style almost never involves unsheathing—the sheathe itself is wielded as a shield to deflect and redirect incoming strikes.

Sunyata Cutting Light I: Stillness

The sword that does not cut is the sharpest.

VIO 11, KII 11, PER 10, Saber (must be sheathed), 1 Breath

Cut from an impossibly relaxed position. Sudden, unsheathing the blade and cutting in a single impossible movement. +2 Attack Check. If it fails, you sword stays sheathed (you never cut in the first place) and you avoid the target's attack, if it was attacking you and it was melee. The enemy's sword cuts the empty air where your hand was supposed to be.