Hamlet offers an excellent example of why many modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays can’t be entirely trusted. While the traditions of emendation which have arisen around each play over the past 400 years have generally improved the texts, some of these traditions are both radically incorrect and yet rabidly stubborn in their persistence. It can be truly amazing to return to the original texts (imperfect as they may be) and discover that things you thought were fundamental to a play were, in fact, concocted out of whole cloth by an essentially random bloke in the 18th century.

(This is why preparing fresh scripts from the original sources is an important part of the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare.)

If you’ve got a copy of Hamlet handy, I invite you to flip it open to scene 1.5 and find these lines:

HAMLET My tables, my tables, meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

I can virtually guarantee you that near these lines you will find the stage direction “Writing”, “Hamlet writes”, or the like. And if it isn’t on the line itself, then you’ll find it in the notes. (As with the third Arden edition, which reads in its notes: “Hamlet now produces a literal writing tablet or notebook.”)

Now, it is absolutely true that “tables” is an archaic term meaning “tablet”. But I can absolutely guarantee you that Shakespeare never intended for Hamlet to yank out a notebook and begin jotting down the minutes of his meeting with the Ghost.

Why can I do that? First, because the stage direction doesn’t appear in the original texts. Second, because this passage reads, in its entirety:

… Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain
Unmix’d with baser matter; yes, by heaven.
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables; meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

“The table of my memory.”

Never has a clearer metaphor been written. And yet when the metaphor is reinvoked a mere 9 lines later, modern editors universally interpret it in the most literal of fashions and jam in the stage direction. The direction itself was originally created by Nicholas Rowe in 1709 as part of what can arguably be called the first modern edition of the play, and it’s stuck fast ever since. Arden, Oxford, Riverside, Yale, Folger, New Cambridge… You can even find it in the Klingon Hamlet. I have literally never seen a printed copy of the play that didn’t include the direction in some form (except facsimiles and other editions seeking to present the original text without editorial correction), and for ten years now I’ve made a habit of picking up any copy of the play I come across and flipping it open to the incriminating passage.

How is this possible? I surely don’t know.

What I do know is that this misguided editorial tradition has had a tremendous impact on the performance history of the play. As early as 1755 we have written records of an audience member complaining, “‘Tis absurd to suppose that Hamlet actually stood in need of tables to refresh his memory upon so affecting an occasion.” The jarring nature of Hamlet “stopping his action” to pull out pen and paper has often left performers seeking an alternative: John Gielgud apologized for excluding this bit of business from his performance. Mel Gibson seized his sword and attempted to carve the words into the stone walls of Elsinore. Others have writ the words in their own blood.

On the other hand, there are those who have fully embraced the direction. In the 2000 National Theater production of the play, for example, it became a central pillar of Simon Russell Beale’s performance as he carried a small notebook and pen throughout the play, jotting down notes as the moments suited him. While the conceit is fascinating (one could even imagine such a diary being given over to the charge of Horatio at the end of the play), there seems little doubt in my mind that it would not have arisen if not for this errant stage direction.

Originally posted on November 20th, 2010.

Tagline: “The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.” Great fun for the clever, the intrigued, and the sadistic.

Imagine: You sit down at a table with your gaming buddies, and they’ve all got a funny grin on their face. “What is it?” you ask, oblivious to your inevitable fate this evening will bring to you. “We’ve got a new game,” they say. “Oh?” you say. “Sounds cool. What’s it called?” “Mao.”

Maniacal laughter echoes through the room.

You’re confused. “Meow? Like the sound a cat makes?” “No, no,” they say. “Mao as in Mao Tse-tung. But that’s unimportant.”

Brave soul that you are, you say, “Well, what are the rules?”

More maniacal laughter.

“The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.”

“Which one?”

“The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.”

“You mean you can’t tell me any of the rules, except the rule which stops you from telling me the rules?”

“The only rule we’re allowed to tell you is this one.”

“Uhh… okay. Let’s go.”

WHAT IS MAO?

Mao, as you may have already surmised, is a card game where the first and foremost rule is that you cannot state the rules. You must learn while playing, all the while being penalized for breaking rules which you don’t even know exist. (Obviously you learn what you should be doing based on what you shouldn’t be doing and are getting penalized for, as well as the example of correct play from the other players.)

The other trick up Mao’s sleeve is that at the end of every round of play, the winner of that round gets to add a new rule to the game – a rule which he doesn’t tell to anyone else. The rule can take any form (including the overriding of the core rules) and remains in effect for the rest of the evening. Thus, even once you learn the game, you still haven’t learned the game.

The only other thing I can specifically tell you about this game is that it is played with two normal decks of 52 playing cards.

THEN HOW DO I LEARN?

There is, of course, at this point an obvious dilemma: How do you learn the game if I (and no one else) can tell you the rules and no one local to you knows how to play?

By reading an example of play.

With such an example no one is telling you the rules (and thus breaking the rules), but they do allow you to conclude what the rules are through inference.

The best resources I have found thus far are the pages of Ka Wai Tam. His examples of play are the best and most concise I have found, and he links to several other Mao resource pages.

 MAO VARIATIONS

Things aren’t quite as easy as I’ve lead you to believe.

Anyone who is a card game aficionado (I occasionally like to think of myself as such) knows that the rules of games tend to fluctuate wildly over time. Although certain centralized resources such as Hoyle’s compendium have a tendency to lock certain games into specific patterns (Parker Brothers’ version of Monopoly, for example, has successfully wiped out the vibrant sub-culture of variant Monopolies which preceded it), the tendency is still there. Anyone with a roleplaying background shouldn’t find this all that surprising – the dawn of the industry were basically hacks of D&D which differed from it to various degrees, and today the web serves as a central clearinghouse of home rules, variants, and expansions for many popular systems.

A moment’s reflection should lead you to the quick realization that the basic nature of Mao would quickly lead itself to healthy perversions, growth, and variation. After all, the core spirit of the rules discourages setting anything down in stone – and someone who plays a brief session may never pick up on some of the subtle nuances (and thus would carry a distorted version of the game with them to be taught to someone else). Plus, the fact that you are supposed to add a new rule to Mao after every round of the game lends itself to the development of favorite home rules which may lead to their incorporation into the core rules.

The exact origins of Mao are unknown. There is a strong probability that it derived from a German card game called Mau-mau (note the similarity in name). Another path traces it to Bartog, a similar card game. All of these may ultimately be bizarre perversions of Nomic.

The earliest reference to Mao is to Mark Alexander’s group at Ithaca College in New York. Where it went from there is unclear, but apparently students carried it from one East Coast college to another. By the mid-‘80s there were hotbeds of Mao variant activity in Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. Today there are at least three major “families” of Mao variants, and probably far more hanging around out there that we don’t know about.

(Check out Jason Holtzapple’s Unofficial Mao Card Game Site. He has a Mao Family Tree, documenting variants which are known to him. If anyone has knowledge of other variants, I’d loved to hear about them – and I’m sure Holtzapple would, too.)

Ka Wai Tam’s version of Mao is known as “Waterloo Mao” – it’s a fairly simple and straight-forward version, and is greatly helped by the fact that his examples of play are comprehensive to a degree which many other examples fail to achieve. (The only problem I had was figuring out some specific rules relating to spades. After some brief correspondence with him I believe I’ve got that sorted out, though – and will gladly help guide anyone to the proper conclusions. Then again, maybe I’ve intuited it all wrong and have introduced a whole new variant to Mao. Such is Mao.)

CONCLUSION

If you aren’t intrigued by Mao at this point, definitely skip it. It’s obviously not your type of thing. Personally, I stumbled across references to the game while doing some web research on Nomic (which I may eventually get around to reviewing as well) and was instantly ensnared by the concept. The game is both clever and complex, successfully existing at multiple levels of play, comprehension, and strategy. I heartily recommend it to card game fanatics everywhere.

Style: 5
Substance: 5

Author: Anonymous
Company/Publisher: None
Cost: Free!
Page Count: n/a
ISBN: n/a

Originally Posted: 2000/03/21

I remember this review creating a fascinating schism of reaction: A lot of people criticized me for posting a review of a free and public domain game. This seemed to be driven by a couple of factors: First, there were people who felt the primary purpose of a review was to tell them whether or not they should spend money on a game (and therefore a review of something free, which they could check out without paying anything, was pointless). Second, there were people convinced that Mao (or one of its variants) was so common that it was impossible that people hadn’t heard of it.

XKCD didn’t exist yet, so I wasn’t able to reference the lucky 10,000. But I felt personally vindicated in the review by those who replied to say that they hadn’t heard of the game but were intrigued by what I had to say.

For me, personally, Mao was both a revelation and a 60 day fad: I enjoyed it a lot. One of these days I should really teach it to myself again.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

VESTIGIAL COLOUR

“From that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour – but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.” – The Colour Out of Space, H.P. Lovecraft

Sometimes also referred to as a stunted colour, the vestigial colour is that remnant left behind when the pupating colour launches itself from a planetary mass. Perhaps it is some reaction mass, necessarily abandoned in order to propel the rest of the colour on its way. After all, the laws of Newton demand that in order for anything to go anywhere, something else must be left behind. (Although such a concession to our earthly physics seems hardly in keeping with the colour’s character.)

What is certain is that the vestigial colour’s effects are still felt upon the landscape near it, although in a much less energetic form than the pupating colour: Stunted flora that is “not quite right” in the spring. Wild things that leave queer prints in the winter snow. In a disquiet they cannot quite name, many people flee the region while others are unwittingly compelled to remain.

Perhaps most disturbing is the report that numbers twist queerly in the wake of the colour. In a digital age, who can say what effect the vestigial colour might have upon the memes and videos and telecommunications which fill our every waking hour?

Think of this and it might be true: In order to fuel its ascension, the pupating colour harnesses a memetic processor of incomprehensible scope and nature. When it leaves this world, what it leaves behind it is a stunted and broken version of the same – stripped of value and order and purpose, but nevertheless possessed of the gross mechanisms which seek to assimilate and consume and regurgitate and transform the memetic landscape around it.

These actions are no longer guided by any true purpose or agenda. But the thoughts twist and the spirits of the eye are haunted and slowly, year by year and decade by decade, the influence of the vestigial colour spreads inch by inch. And those beasts and men who are insensibly translated by it are sent ahead as its heralds.

COLOURS OF THE DEPTHS

There is another theory which holds that colours were the dawn of life on earth. That they crashed like flaming mercury through ashy and primordial skies, creating meaning and order where they found none.

If such a thing were true, then we are all descended from madness. We would be forced to reconsider the strange and hallucinatory bioluminescences reported by those who explore the abyssal depths of the sea. We would be pressed to call for a greater caution before exploring the strange and unseen truths which lurk in the primeval trenches of the world; those places where the unspoken pressure of the aeon-lost truths which once clung to unnamed ziggurats would seek to crush all human reason.

And if one were to accept that such ancient, primal colours did exist, one might be called to question the identity of that glimmering, shimmering iridescence which clings to the skin of Cthulhu in his immortal, sunken vault.

CYBERCOLOURED NETWORKS

Now we move purely to the hypothetical. Colours act as predators in a memetic landscape made real. They consume thoughts and ideals and genetics – they very concept of a thing – and then take action upon the memetic fiber of existence as we understand it.

Given the existence of such a thing, we must understand that the channels of memetic transmission pose a unique and horrid danger. They are avenues – vast boulevards – down which the colour’s strands can stretch without any spatial relationship. The fiber-optic lasers of our networks can be skewed towards the hideously impossible chromatics of their light. The flickering LEDs of your computer monitor are nothing more than the rainbow-slicked surface of an oily depth.

We look out into the universe and we see the Paradox of Fermi writ in every silent star. We look down and see our entire world bound into a single memetic nexus ripe for the voracious plucking of the colour out of space.

DUST OF THE COLOUR

Another vestige of the pupating colour’s launch is the dust of the colour: As the colour saps its feeding ground of all its memetic life, what’s left behind is a broad expanse of fine grey dust or ash. No wind ever seems to touch or shift the dust of the colour, and most who draw near avoid it almost without thought. If questioned in particular about their aversion, it seems to primarily derive from the fact that the dust of the colour was never properly fixed in their mind; it never truly rested in their thoughts. It simply did not exist for them despite its evident presence.

Similarly, photos of the dust of the colour seem to occlude it more often than not. Such photos stitch themselves together as if the dust were not present at all, like some Photoshop heuristic being applied to the world itself.

But the dust can be harvested. It is mentioned in a number of grimoires as a reagent of particular potency (particularly in rites of unmaking or undoing), and there are other texts which report those have consumed it.

Even in the smallest doses, the dust seems quite potent. To its users it presents visions of broken worlds. Of pasts there were not and futures which do not proceed from the present. More disturbingly, the bonds between the consumer and their world are often reported as being stripped away: If they were married, then they were never so. Books they wrote now belong to other authors. In paradox, their parents were never born or they were never born to their parents.

Often shadows of these former truths can be found, but they do not lessen the horror of the loss.

SEEDS

The seed by which many pupating colours come to a new world arrives in the white hot heat of a world flame and does not cool. Its substance is soft, almost plastic in nature. Upon first landing, the seed is possessed of a soft glow, but this fades over the course of a few days.

If heated, the seed produces no occluded gases. It contains no metals. Its substance cannot be identified with terrestrial tests, although it possesses a measurable magnetic field. Although non-volatile, it noticeably shrinks over time. (And even when physically isolated, the seed will continue shrinking while leaving behind no identifiable residue.)

The seed is a solidified extrusion into our three-dimensional torpology. It protects the memetic neutrality of the nascent colour so that it neither interferes with the memetic structure of the parental colour (or colours?) nor is corrupted by it. (The pupating colour, thus, is a clean slate ready to have impressions made upon it by the world.)

It is possible that the payload launched by a pupating colour is the seed itself (or a pod of such seeds). But it seems more likely that the colour’s seeds are created in extraterrestrial environments of which we could only fancy: Forged in depths of a gas giant? Skimmed from the surface of a neutron star? Scooped from the thin, memetic vacuum of an Oort Cloud?

These are mysteries which shall light our eyes with impossible hues only when we have journeyed deep into the voids of space.

Query: “My PCs were drugged, captured, tortured, and put on a slow boat to their execution. The villain comes in to interrogate them and they just toss one-liners and empty threats at him. How do you get your players to take your villains seriously?”

Kill them.

I’m not saying you should capriciously seek to slaughter them, but if the logical outcome of the PCs’ actions is lethal then let the dice fall where they may and don’t protect them from the consequences.

A lot of GMs shield their players from the negative consequences of the actions they take… and then wonder why the players keep engaging in bad behavior. (One common reason for this is that the GM is protecting the railroaded plot they’ve predesigned. But it just demonstrates how the railroader’s desire for rigid conformity actually just creates a compounding fragility which makes it ever more difficult to achieve the conformity.)

Conversely, I’ve played in games where PCs had explicit script immunity and had great experiences. But it requires the players to erect a rigid wall between their metagame knowledge and the actions of their characters. If the characters start acting as if they knew they had script immunity things go bad very, very quickly.

It is uncertain whether these are truly different stages in the life of a “colour” or if they are distinct, perhaps representative, samples of a biology utterly alien to human understanding.

PUPATING COLOUR

This form of the colour is most vividly described in H.P. Lovecraft’s original “Colour Out of Space”. At the dawn of the creature’s life cycle (or at least this phase of its life cycle), it seeks vast quantities of energy (drawing lightning strikes to itself, tapping into the electrical grid, or the like). Once it has been “jump-started”, it rapidly grows by feeding on the environment around it.

However, it must be understood that this is no terrestial feeding. In some incomprehensible way, the colour is consuming the memetic content of the world around itself: This initially manifests itself by way of the colour “super-charging” the physical realization of the object. For example, fruits will grow at a prodigious rate; computer systems will achieve impossible benchmarks; animals will become capable of incredible physical feats. This hyper-expression of the memetic ideal allows the colour to rapidly process the memetic totality of its surroundings, but even at this early stage the colour’s consumption of that memetic essence is apparent: The fruit will be bitter to the taste. The computer will manifest strange run-time errors. The animals will exhibit queer and unusual behavior (often blending their traits with those of other creatures in the same region).

Once this rapid phase of initial growth is complete, the pupating colour will begin to “digest” its surroundings. What is left is a grey, desiccated reality slowly turning to empty dust. (This, however, should not be mistaken for any form of normal decay: Even in the most advanced stages of destruction, the memetic integrity of the original will still remain horrifically intact. Thus, for example, bodies half-turned to dust will still exhibit slow and deliberate movement, betraying that the original consciousness is still trapped somehow within.)

At the end of its pupation, the colour undergoes a metamorphosis into a secondary (or perhaps higher) form. The exact nature of this form, however, is unclear: Ammi Pearce described a great uplifting and withdrawing of the effervescent emanations of the colour from the great swath of land it had infested or infected, culminating in a “launch” of one (or perhaps) more entities into space.

However, in the final stages of its existence before that extraplanetary launch, there is little doubt that at least some portion (or agent) of the colour had become motile and perhaps even physically manifest (producing a “splash” within a pool of water when it retreated to a well). And there are also those, Pierce among them, who claim that something still lurks within the gray and desiccated fields of the Gardner farm. At the moment of metamorphosis could one part of the creature have launched as genetic/memetic seed pods while leaving some other post-pupating creature behind? (Or was the motile agent of the colour merely the possessed form of one of Gardners’ sons? Pierce reported that, in the final phases of their infection, mother and son would converse in screams that sounded like some alien and inhuman tongue.)

INQUISITIVE COLOUR

“I might have told myself the rust had eaten away the car until it was thin as a shell, but I was past deluding myself. All at once I knew that nothing on this beach was as it seemed, for as my hand collided with the car roof, which should have been painfully solid, I felt the roof crumble — and the entire structure flopped on the sand, from which it was at once indistinguishable.” – The Voice of the Beach, Ramsey Campbell

Where the pupating colour feasts upon the memetic content of its environment for its own aggrandizement, an inquisitive colour mimics the objects (and, eventually, animals and people) around it. Of course, it is still ultimately destructive to its environment: The templates on which it builds its mimicry (seeking and striving to understand the alien worlds in which it manifests) are built by draining the memetic content of the originals.

“But of course, the more one thinks of the beach, the stronger its hold becomes.”

Of particular interest to the inquisitive colour are intelligent beings who are inquisitive about it, to which it is drawn like a lodestone. Although perhaps it would be equally true to say that it creates the inquisition to which it is drawn. In either case, it draws those near it into a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors and sinks its memetic hooks deep. These siren-like memes often take the form of strange patterns – often in natural phenomena (like the sands of a beach or the cascade of a waterfall), but sometimes in other forms as well (like the torn leaves of a book or the ashy cascade of a forest fire). Often those afflicted by the colour will describe a painful constriction of the skull, which is merely a physical manifestation of the colour’s memetic searing of the neural channels.

Another common manifestation of the inquisitive colour is its whisper. This inexplicable memetic earworm will attempt to manifest itself wherever possible: In the sound of the sea in seashells; a corruption of the MP3 files on a computer; an instant messenger on your phone that connects to nothing. Even if one can physically escape the inquisitive colour, often its whisper will follow, subtly infiltrating their lives and inexorably drawing them back to its origin.

Over time, the ghost-like meme patterns manifested by the inquisitive colour will begin to move and shift. As the strength of the colour grows – or, perhaps, as its understanding of the memetic realities it is processing grows clearer – the vague patterns become larger and more complicated forms (although these often fade into and out of reality). At the same time, those afflicted by the colour are slowly reduced towards the same common denominator until they are little more than metaphors of their previous existence. They will begin to vanish intermittently from reality as it becomes more obvious that the colour is transforming the physical laws of our reality (or persisting despite their hostility), and each time they return they are a little less comprehensible to human sanity.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the inquisitive colour is that, in its final stages, it begins to so closely mimic the world around it that it can no longer be distinguished from reality itself. Except there is left the vague and horrible sensation that the reality it is seemingly conforming to is not actually identical to the reality which was there before; you are simply no longer able to remember or understand (or perhaps comprehend) the reality which you had known before.

If that is so, then it is possible that our world as we know it is nothing more than a fresco of inquisitive colours, laid one atop each other in the soft plaster of our minds.

There are even those, hopefully driven mad by the colour, who claim that all of reality is nothing more than layers of such colours laid out like kaleidoscopic cloth. That the scope of our worldly perception is only the craqueled interstice of the memetic matrices of a many-coloured mesh.

SENESCENT COLOUR

Senescent colours manifest effects similar to pupating colours by hyper-expressing idealized memetic forms while nevertheless subtly warping them in hideous ways, but they do not expand aggressively. This has led some to suggest that senescent colours are the opposite end of the colour’s life-cycle, but this is most likely nothing more than a terrestrial assumption being applied to something far more complex and alien.

The fallibility of this comforting lie is perhaps best suggested by the rich psychological effects which are manifested by the senescent colour. These groping accords or hallucinogenic visions make it seem as if the senescent colour is trying to communicate (or perhaps inculcate) complex and alien memetics into the consciousness of those coming into contact with it. But often the transformative wake of these incoherent concepts nonetheless leaves behind a veneer of alluring ideas. These ideas, in turn, can prove seductive even to those who never come near the senescent colour. Is the senescent colour truly dormant in the decrepitude of age? Or is it merely more insidious in the viral paths of its memetic transformations?

Similarly, relics infected by a senescent colour often become the focal point for mass conversions. And the subtler (and perhaps more important) question is: Mass conversions to what?

It is said that a senescent colour danced in the halls of Solomon’s Temple, inspiring pale copies of itself in ivory pomegranates. When the Temple fell, it was carried away from that place in the Ark of the Covenant.

Another may have lit Excalibur’s blade and sought to transform the emerald isle.

When the Houmuwu ding was unearthed in Wuguan Village in 1939, the senescent colour that clung to its bronze walls may have seeped out into the Yellow River and sung a song of Cultural Revolution until its ghastly harmonies marched 30 million to their deaths.

Go to Part 2: The Remnants of the Colour