Generative Surrealism (Music/Dungeons/Stories) Jazz in your RPGs

First, I hate knowing what is going to happen. I avoid spoilers for movies. The speculation about what is going to be up there on the screen is better (most times) than what might really occur up there. Same for D&D: I avoid "modules" and "story paths" like the plague, unless it's an event and I need to have some arc for a convention or something. Why? I dunno, my brain is just like that. I don't particularly crave completeness, or finality, or resolution.

I recently finished watching Twin Peaks: The Return(s3). Absolutely nonsensical, terrifying, unexpected, and - if you give up the need for resolved "arcs" that make sense in a logical way - absolutely delightful. It's been like 2 week and I'm still mulling over what it means, if Lynch means for it to convey anything at all, or if my subconscious and other parts of me are computing it properly, with the proper glitches. The warm sense of distress and confusion in this case being a FEATURE not a GLITCH. Surrealism is better than concretism, and I feel that way about my D&D, too. I sort of like it to be playable at the table, not this "Maze of the Blue Medusa" shit, which I mean would make a great arthaus/paintpunk thing but at the table, I mean no. Trust me I sat and tried and I wasn't stoned enough. Nor do I care to be that kind of stoned trying to imagine with other people (trying to make a connection and hang out is different than raw creativity). David Lynch does NOT make good DnD - or maybe he does, how the fuck would I know?, I guess. Mr. Lynch if you want to play DnD with me sometime, hit me up.

I also recently got into synthesizers, another thing that I gave up in middle school because of antipathies from my peers. I don;t fancy myself a musician (quite the reverse, I make NOISEs) but I like to tell the machine how I like to do things, fiddle with knobs (in DnD, too) and see what springs out and be delighted, or else hit the button to generate a new thing. You may have noticed that I throw-out/vomit forth a lot of pseudorandom pregenerated bullshit. It's because I dig the thinking deeply about TONE and TIMBRE a lot, rather than specific worldbuilding. I much better like to leave a lot of room for players to leave their mark on the world rather than having all the things sorted out aforehand...

I don't know. Remind me to link posts of my hideous noise-making devices. Only the most deranged person would call it music, I suppose. Sometimes after an hour of fucking around with the synthesizer I built I will have the most lurid and amazing and aware dreams that remind me of some great Lynchian stuff. I wish I could distill some of the frenetic weirdness from my dreams into DnD - I have tried it and been modestly "succesful" I guess. I put up a series of things on DTRPG that centers on my dreams of life in Florida, and every so often I have new dreams in the same vein that would make for similar offerings if anyone were interested. My favorite ones are the least comprehensible! Often I dream of walking around the Bird Road Flea Market, pressed for time. Once when I was a lad, I found the original Fiend Folio for 5$ in a stack of cast off books - the original one with the Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythoi in it! Been downhill ever since.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but maybe I will go further inside the rabbit hole some other time.  Broadly, I like to tell the computer "Give Me Some Hints, and do the boring parts, and let us do the fun parts" which, I guess is what a computer is for.

Remind me to link you to TidalCycles, VCV Rack, Mutable Instruments, GAN those kinds of things. Do I like jazz or jam bands? I'm probably at the age where I should start to like those things. I should do a GAN for dungeons - DeepDungeons!. That would probably rock. By the way, the illustrations in this post were made by a adversarial network from NightCafe (GAN + Clip, IIRC) - try it yourself if you like! It would be the most amazing thing if a GAN were to just make Jacquays-style maps with doors that open onto nothing and long corridors that lead to rooms full of THIS IS THE WATER AND THIS IS THE WELL