Monk and Robot duology by Becky Chambers
Here is a link to Becky Chamber’s website.
Here is the transcript of the show.
Speaker A
00:00:02.960 - 00:00:31.790
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club where great fiction becomes your next great role playing experience. I'm your host, Eric Jackson of K Square Productions.
And I'm back with Chris Grannis, Sam Liberty and David Clarkson to explore Becky Chambers robot and monk duology. A Psalm for the Wild Built and a Prayer for the Crown shy.
Get ready to enjoy our conversation about this fantastic sci fi hope punk that asks the big question, what do humans need? Let's get into the conversation.
Speaker B
00:00:33.570 - 00:00:35.162
All right, so let me start out.
Speaker A
00:00:35.186 - 00:00:38.150
By saying, hey, welcome to the DMs Book Club.
Speaker B
00:00:38.450 - 00:00:56.358
Today I am joined by some awesome people, which I didn't have you guys introduce yourself last time, that seemed very uncool. So why don't we start with you, Dave. Why don't you introduce yourself and you should tell me what your favorite random number generator is.
Speaker C
00:00:56.514 - 00:01:11.390
I'll be playing the role of David Clarkson on this podcast. And my favorite random number generator is the crawler companion that I use for my DCC games because it is fully stocked with D3s and D14s and D24s.
You can't find them anyplace else.
Speaker B
00:01:11.470 - 00:01:11.870
Go ahead.
Speaker A
00:01:11.910 - 00:01:14.542
Chris, would you care to do the honors next?
Speaker D
00:01:14.646 - 00:01:29.520
Sure. Hi, I'm Chris Granis. My favorite random number generator. I have a old zakahedron which is the 100 sided die, which you know is basically a golf ball.
It's really completely unusable and I kind of like it for its aesthetics.
Speaker B
00:01:29.680 - 00:01:30.420
Sam.
Speaker E
00:01:30.920 - 00:01:52.078
Hey, I'm Sam Liberty and my favorite random number generator is the website random.org because the numbers are so random and you can generate really anything list, list of imagers. You do a raffle with it. You can get pretty in depth with the the random numbers on random.org.
Speaker A
00:01:52.254 - 00:01:52.958
There we go.
Speaker B
00:01:53.014 - 00:03:13.000
And I'm Eric Jackson and my favorite random number generator is unfortunately just my brain. You guys have already taken all the good ones, so Eric, it is if my brain is very random.
But what is not random is the book that Chris picked out for us this month which is A Psalm for the Wild Built and its sequel, A Prayer for the Crown Shy written by Becky Chambers, published 2021 and 2022 respectively by Tor Books.
A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer for the Crown Shy takes place on an earth like world where robots have gained self awareness and laid down their tools and went into the wilderness. Without the robots, humans go sustainable with farms and small communities. Solarpunk.
Several hundred years passed and a newly minted wandering tea monk named Dex encounters Mosscap, a robot sent from the other robots to answer the question, what do people need? What follows is a combination of excellent solarpunk world building and deep meditations on what it is to be human.
So based on that summary, what would you gentlemen like to add about the story?
Speaker D
00:03:13.120 - 00:04:05.826
I would like to just start off with one of the reasons that I brought it in or recommended it other than this is the book that my wife and I have recommended to everyone because it's probably a pair of the most beautiful books I've read for the writing style, the economy of words that this has is incredible. The world building with just the first couple of pages just brings you in and keeps you going.
And that's the kind of world building that I'd like to see and try to get into my games. Everything isn't described in there, but you can see everything in your mind. And that's what I'm hoping to get out of that.
That's what I'm hoping to be able to express in these few short times we have while we're gaming.
Speaker C
00:04:05.938 - 00:04:27.814
I agree with you, Chris, and actually I liked your choice of it because it came at a good time where hope was needed. It was a very uplifting and very positive looking sci fi. When a lot of it is pretty dark, sometimes the world is dark.
I think we can all say around this time we record it might be a little dark and it is definitely good to have some hopeful future in front of us.
Speaker B
00:04:27.982 - 00:04:38.454
The hope Punk or Solarpunk is generally defined as the opposite of Grimdark, the the Holy Avenger to the Obsidian Blade of Death.
Speaker D
00:04:38.542 - 00:04:41.424
In dark times you need lights to look to.
Speaker E
00:04:41.542 - 00:06:17.440
If you all don't mind, I want to be the lone sour note here, of course, because I wasn't. I wasn't in love with these books. Although everything that you all just said about it is true, right? I don't disagree with anything that you said.
The world building, the first couple pages like really captivated and set us up to understand what will come after. Economical writing, good writing, very hopeful. It was an affirmative view of the future.
What I didn't care for about it was that for such a short book, the interest wasn't there. Like the hooks aren't there. The last chapter of each book had some meat in it that was a slow build to get to.
But for me the lack of any real conflict or any problem outside of Light next was the opposite of a selling point. It kept me from really engaging with the books.
I kind of found the characters, what's the word, I would say that they are maybe not Grading, but too good to be true.
Yes, it's hard to spend time with them because they are at once have no real problems and yet don't respond very well to questioning or interrogation. They're not great company for me, although they seem to be good company for each other and don't mind their foibles.
But it would be really grating for me to spend time with them and have everything I say thrown back at me like, you idiot. Why would you think that?
Speaker C
00:06:17.480 - 00:06:33.902
I don't disagree with your take on it and certainly I was emphasizing the hope, but absolutely I did not come away with enough for me to feel like I had something to contribute to this conversation for the purpose we have set this up, particularly as a user game, which would be the subject, which.
Speaker B
00:06:33.926 - 00:07:15.464
Is the next thing we're going to talk about because I think that the next part of this. I have some guesses as to where this will go, but I think this book is non epic. This is not a traditional setup.
It is a cozy book that covers very small events that have deep philosophical meaning. And one of the questions that I wanted to ask you gentlemen, and the answer can be no is is there a way to simulate this kind of cozy gaming?
If that was something that you wanted to do, if you wanted to bring that idea of a low stakes game, is there a system that works for that?
Speaker E
00:07:15.552 - 00:07:16.760
100%, yeah.
Speaker B
00:07:16.840 - 00:07:17.480
Yeah.
Speaker E
00:07:17.640 - 00:07:54.892
A game that I actually played with my students earlier this week called Cozy Town, I think would be ideal for this and you might not have to hack it at all. I think you could use it as written. The game does suggest that you not use human characters and use like little foxes or whatever.
But for me the, the humans in this book are already not really humans. They're like Star Trek aliens. So I think that you could totally play a game of Cozy Town set in this world.
And what would a year in one of these like subsistence farming solarpunk towns be like? Like what would happen to the people? What would they build? What would they dream fair?
Speaker B
00:07:54.996 - 00:08:28.110
They talk about them as people and I think they say the word human a couple of times. But I think that might just be a convention because this doesn't actually take place on Earth.
It takes place on Panga, which is a moon that's circling a gas giant. So we don't actually have a post industrial Earth, we have a post industrial society of human like beings.
Perhaps there's no mention of a, of a space faring past and any kind of colonization or any sort of terraforming that's true.
Speaker C
00:08:28.190 - 00:08:36.078
I. You know, the existence of robots makes me think of spaceships, but you're right, there's no evidence of spaceships or any sort of space culture.
Speaker E
00:08:36.174 - 00:08:41.294
Well, generally, I think something that the people in this book do is, like, gloss over their real past.
Speaker C
00:08:41.382 - 00:08:41.934
Yeah.
Speaker E
00:08:42.062 - 00:09:00.948
Which I don't know if that's an intentional part of the world building, but they seem to have a very airy, gauzy view of their own past where, like, the end of the factory age and the transition to what they are now, if you think about it for more than two seconds, had to be a humanitarian crisis that would make the Black Plague look a birthday party. Right.
Speaker C
00:09:01.004 - 00:09:01.284
Yeah.
Speaker E
00:09:01.332 - 00:09:05.876
Like billions of people must have died to make room for this cozy world.
Speaker C
00:09:05.948 - 00:09:06.436
Yeah.
Speaker D
00:09:06.548 - 00:09:15.876
Yeah. My read had been that this is a colony world that humanity has colonized and then lost its past on.
Speaker C
00:09:15.948 - 00:10:04.506
That's what I felt. I had no reason to think that other than my own biases. If I was thinking back to your original question, Eric, thinking about how to use it.
And again, I do not have a deep knowledge of Cozy Games. Brindlewood Bay is probably one of the first ones I played and the one that I played more than once.
Other than that, I think I played the Quiet Year once. And that comes to mind. Also Lasers and Feelings, mostly because of the internal conflict, the humanity versus robots.
You know, robots being having more human feelings sometimes than humans in some of the portrayals.
So I could see one of those simple mini games using the mechanics to portray you struggling with your human feelings versus trying to get something done, trying to be more industrial, something like that. And that's where Lasers and Feelings comes to mind.
Speaker B
00:10:04.658 - 00:10:07.066
You've mentioned my actual choice.
Speaker C
00:10:07.178 - 00:10:08.538
Oh, Lasers and Feelings.
Speaker B
00:10:08.634 - 00:10:41.812
No, you mentioned A Quiet Year, which is the only game that I've played that I thought would have this, but doesn't actually have the cozy part as much it can, but. But it has the world building aspect. And part of the reason why I was excited to hear what other people had to pick was because I had nothing.
I was like, I have nothing that I think would make this work. So please tell me. But A Quiet Year was my best guess at that.
Because you could manufacture something like that in the world building process of A Quiet Year.
Speaker E
00:10:41.916 - 00:10:45.892
Eric, Cozy Town is a hack of the Quiet Year.
Speaker B
00:10:45.916 - 00:10:47.220
Oh, okay. Fantastic.
Speaker C
00:10:47.300 - 00:10:48.922
There you go. Okay.
Speaker E
00:10:49.116 - 00:12:12.872
It's the same exact game, but instead of being about a scrabbling community in between two cataclysms, it's about, like, happy little dudes that fish and. And grow potatoes. And like today, the Fairy came, right?
Like, yeah, the projects are replaced with festivals and like, they make a few one for one switches. And like, there's Cozy tokens that have contempt tokens. So I think it would be nice.
I think what I would do is if I wanted to tell a story in this book's present universe, I would use Cozy Town. If I wanted to tell a story that took place in the transition between Factory era and the Subsistence era, I would use A Quiet Year.
And if I wanted to tell a story that took place before the Fall, I would use Icarus. Icarus, which is not a. Not a Cozy Town Quiet Year hack, but it does use an oracle of cards.
It basically is a game about the fall of a civilization at its peak, where everything seems great, but there's a crack in the facade and slowly it chips away and. And gets out of control.
That would be a good game to show the rise of sentient robots and what that was actually like when it happened then with A Quiet Year to show the transition into the modern time of the book. And then if you want to just tell a story about today, Mosscap came to visit. Right. Then you could do it in Cozy.
Speaker D
00:12:13.016 - 00:12:38.482
I actually had similar thoughts to Sam, but I'm going to go off on a little bit of a limb here. I'm going to say you can hack down, just remove a lot of stuff from Mage, because it is philosophies coming into conflict. So Mage, the Ascension.
And if you just want sort of a Cozy adventure, Y type, strange world that is slightly overgrown and a little weird. Tales from the Loop.
Speaker C
00:12:38.546 - 00:12:39.954
Yeah, I can see that.
Speaker E
00:12:40.042 - 00:13:14.266
I can see that.
I think my only sticking point with any kind of traditional game where you play a character that goes on an adventure of any sort is that this book isn't really about going on an adventure. Although, okay, characters do things and they travel. They just experience little vignettes and then think about them.
Which, like, is kind of what you would do after you consult the Oracle in the Quiet Year.
But like, the book to me was more about how humans choose to organize themselves and like, what that says about us than any particular individual or, like, struggle that a person might go through.
Speaker C
00:13:14.418 - 00:13:45.052
The struggle. The lack of conflict really stood out to me. There was very minimal conflict. And I, of course, like conflict.
And I think conflict makes for an interesting game. You know, it doesn't always have to be a fight, but it needs to be something opposing, something so that you have something to achieve.
I did like the juxtaposition of the robots being a little more human. Than the humans because the robots were actually questioning their existence, whereas humans were assuming things.
Particularly stood out for me was the robot's decision to be mortal as opposed to it just being assumed.
Speaker B
00:13:45.116 - 00:14:06.248
Which is a great way to transition to our next section. One of the things that you liked was the idea of the robots being concerned about where they came from.
If we move from system to stuff, we might add to an ongoing campaign. Dave, would you say that might be something you might want to add to any type of science fiction campaign you were running?
Speaker C
00:14:06.344 - 00:14:35.490
Absolutely, absolutely.
I would love to challenge my players with hey, these are not as a mafian robots that were just built as tools, but these are robots who question their existence and think hard about where they fit into the world. And that would be interesting to portray a robot that way.
I would steal it for a warforged in a traditional D and D game just to create some interesting dialogue and characterization. I was impressed by the, you know, by the character of Mosscap. It was interesting to, you know, to read Mosscap.
Speaker B
00:14:35.910 - 00:14:37.486
I found that his.
Speaker D
00:14:37.638 - 00:14:38.318
It's.
Speaker B
00:14:38.414 - 00:14:39.422
Thank you. It's.
Speaker C
00:14:39.486 - 00:14:40.846
It's. You're right, it's.
Speaker B
00:14:40.958 - 00:15:20.040
It's philosophy on the remnants and the circumventing of immortality to be a really interesting way to talk about robots and to keep them from being overpowered in a. In a traditional setting. Because you have a robot who has been around for much like elves or other elder races.
If I have been around for a thousand years, I of course will be OP when I enter into the campaign.
So if I have this idea that I'm not allowed to continue on after a certain point, then I think that's a really interesting way of dealing with that immortality.
Speaker D
00:15:20.120 - 00:15:39.494
And it's a past lives almost with that sort of immortality. I mean. Oh yeah, you know, Mosscap is his own or is.
Is its own person, but it has memories of and echoes of all of the old remnants is what they call of its past lives.
Speaker E
00:15:39.662 - 00:16:11.684
I agree. And take on robots and their society and their philosophy is really interesting and unlike anything that I've come across in other sci fi.
And their choice to be mortal is interesting also their deliberate choice to like break with their past. They came from the factories, but they chose to become part of the natural world.
Shows there's messaging in here about not being controlled by what came before you and like where you came from. And everyone gets to make this deliberate choice about what they'll do with their life and their relationships.
Speaker D
00:16:11.812 - 00:16:50.536
And I'm going to say I would use sibling Dex as a character in NPC in almost any game that I would run because they are a very fascinating individual. And the whole idea of the tea ceremony, the tea monk determining what to serve.
Also very interesting that they are a non binary character and that's not something we see a lot of in literature and even less in most of the games I've played. Fascinating.
And it was great because the fact that they were non binary is part of their whole character and characteristics, but it was not their whole character.
Speaker C
00:16:50.648 - 00:17:02.760
True. And also the polyamory that stood out to me as the assumption of a polyamory society. That's the way humans have their society now.
It was interesting to see that portrayed because I don't get to see that.
Speaker D
00:17:02.800 - 00:17:09.592
Very often to keep going with that whole carrying the entire tea house in a wagon sort of thing. Very Howl's moving castle.
Speaker C
00:17:09.656 - 00:17:09.944
Yeah.
Speaker B
00:17:09.992 - 00:17:14.328
It had that visual sort of feeling of that everything stacked on top of each other.
Speaker D
00:17:14.384 - 00:17:14.696
Yeah.
Speaker B
00:17:14.728 - 00:17:27.399
I personally was very excited about it because it is an excellent antidote to the everybody goes to the bar or the tavern. As someone who is a non drinker, I'm like woo tea.
Speaker C
00:17:27.979 - 00:17:47.955
It could also answer the problem that I often had going back to my old vampire games where everybody would go to the same bar and I'd, you know, have to or have to require all the bad guys to decide to go to the club to go harass the players. Whereas this could be a mobile base of operations that could travel around and get into whatever situation needs to be portrayed.
Speaker B
00:17:48.067 - 00:17:54.740
Sam, did you have anything you felt would be easily cannibalized and put into other games that you run?
Speaker E
00:17:54.860 - 00:19:07.752
So I like that the part of the world building was creating a religion.
It was a religion that seemed like real and that people practiced and had tenets and concepts and characters and sects that did not resemble really any current human religion, which I admired.
I wish even more had been done with it because like at the end of the day, although Dex was a monk, didn't seem to have any special way of acting because they were a monk. And people, although there is this religion, like it didn't seem to influence people's day to day life much or like influence how they behaved.
Although they would discuss it sometimes. Yeah, like who's this? Who's that?
Like in general, like because of the nature of the religion in the book, which is there's all these gods and they're inscrutable and they're. They're working through us maybe and they want us to do things. Maybe we can't really know what they want us to do or how they do them.
So just do what you're doing. Anyway, this was kind of the vibe I got.
And if like if I pulled out these, these godlike characters as entities into my D and D world, for instance or like a traditional role playing game world, I would probably build characters around like worship of their different aspects.
Speaker B
00:19:07.816 - 00:19:51.634
I've read a decent amount of science fiction and this was really one of the first science fiction books that I've read where I. It wasn't a hey look, they've extended Catholicism or something like that. This is how the new philosophy evolved.
And we've decided to make it a religion and not just be. Well, we're sciency people now and we don't believe in religion anymore. And they purposely built this idea of these gods.
And whether they came from something in the past or not, it's actually kind of implied that it. It's new to this age. And the idea that religion was something that people needed was.
And in a science fiction setting, that's the first time I've seen that done at least that well.
Speaker D
00:19:51.722 - 00:20:30.510
Yeah. Although I'm going to say that wasn't due to the age because they do find the ancient temple there. But there has been an evolution in the gods.
The religion is particularly interesting to me in that it is as understated as it is. It's pointed out. There are some hymns and all of that within there some sayings about it.
And Dex does discuss the aspects of their vehicle that are bear like because of the bear God and all of that pieces there. But it's an assumed religion that doesn't go into it so much which makes it feel almost more real to me because it's a background thing.
Speaker E
00:20:30.630 - 00:20:35.054
Yes. I also got the sense that the religion predated the factory age.
Speaker C
00:20:35.142 - 00:20:35.502
Yeah.
Speaker E
00:20:35.566 - 00:20:50.674
And that like this is the new evolution of it. And I think it's great that it's a sci fi book with a homemade religion and the religion is not kooky, weird, evil, prophetic magic.
It seems like a religion that people could actually.
Speaker C
00:20:50.762 - 00:20:53.090
Yeah. It's believable and it's useful.
Speaker B
00:20:53.170 - 00:21:09.108
Alaya, the lady of Small Comforts, which is who Dex serves. That's a really important thing.
Particularly in a society like the solarpunk society where things could get really subsistent and survivalist very quickly. You needed to have that balancing factor.
Speaker D
00:21:09.204 - 00:21:14.788
A society is important, you know, don't forget about others and don't forget about yourself.
Speaker E
00:21:14.884 - 00:21:22.436
In my memory, like I've never played in a role playing game that had a Religion that played a role like this. And I would. I'd like to play in one.
Speaker C
00:21:22.508 - 00:21:29.876
Keeping on the religion topic, I would definitely steal it for a society of Halflings. I could totally see a society of halflings practicing this.
Speaker D
00:21:30.028 - 00:21:56.832
I'm going to say even the actual geography, the way it's described, which are small towns separated by tracts of wilderness, and then there's. There's real wilderness around there. If you want to steal this as your basic Hobbiton, there are safe pockets here.
Then there's these little less than safe roads between them, but they're still not the wild. And then you can go out into the wild and have your adventures. That sort of setup is classic and.
Speaker E
00:21:56.856 - 00:22:14.130
Appealing, although, like, it's almost an inversion of it. Right. It's not like, don't go out into the wild because you might not come back.
It's like, no, don't go into the wild because it might not come back from you being in it. Right. It's a total flip. They're tr. They're protecting the wild from civilization, not protecting civilization from the wild.
Speaker B
00:22:14.470 - 00:22:25.630
And that's definitely part of that solar punk aspect where we're looking at ecology and renewable energy as the saviors of the planet and of society.
Speaker D
00:22:25.710 - 00:22:35.070
Yeah. In the second book, there's a whole chapter where Sibling Dex is like, I can't go there because humans aren't allowed to Mosscap.
You can because you're a robot.
Speaker E
00:22:35.150 - 00:22:48.638
Do we have other books, movies, comics, etc.
That we can recommend to the people listening that if they don't exactly capture the setting, maybe they capture a theme or an idea if they're curious about more of this stuff.
Speaker D
00:22:48.734 - 00:23:04.186
Yeah. I don't know that I've seen any other. I don't think I've seen any solarpunk media.
I know it is something from the books, and I know there is solar punk fashion, which is, you know, far less gear oriented than steampunk fashion.
Speaker E
00:23:04.378 - 00:23:45.622
I think Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein actually is interesting in conversation with this book because it's set on modern Earth or like, I guess, the earth of the 60s. Not the future, but it's about a person who was raised in alien culture.
When they come to Earth, they see how ridiculous it is and they really upset the social structure.
And it has normalizing polyamory and cannibal cannibalism and queerness and like a lot of 60s free love, drug use, killing sacred cows with much more conflict. If you want questioning of modern society with some worry thrown in on top. You could try that.
Speaker D
00:23:45.726 - 00:23:49.638
I don't have any in this genre. Like I said, this is new to me.
Speaker C
00:23:49.774 - 00:23:59.010
Yeah, this was also new to me too.
And I'm trying to think of, you know, stuff about robots questioning their existence or even humans encountering robots for the first time as some sort of media.
Speaker B
00:23:59.130 - 00:25:12.264
I will interject my recommendation for another solarpunk world building book, the Terraformers by Annalee Newitz.
I think that book has a lot of the world building, a lot of the humans, or at least people who are modern humans are perhaps blinded by corporate greed and there is a better way to live. It is definitely a post capitalist book. So I would definitely recommend Annalee New it's book the Terraformers.
Other types of media that I think would definitely flow with this would be Black Panther. Wakanda is an excellent solar Punk Hope punk kind of place.
On top of that you could include Avatar, any of the Avatar cartoons, Avatar last time, Render. Yeah, well no, the second series, Korra. I think that is very much more of a solar punky, a post post apocalyptic as Chris said.
And then you've got Disney Wall E and Treasure Planet are both kind of in that general area. But where I think it really hits is the vast majority of Miyazaki anime is right on this whole Solar Punk thing again.
Speaker D
00:25:12.352 - 00:25:20.822
You know, I'd even mentioned earlier that the cart that Sibling Decks has is very much like Howl's Moving Castle, maybe.
Speaker E
00:25:20.886 - 00:25:36.310
Siddhartha by Hermann Hess, because it's about a person journeying through the world, trying to discover their place in it. And it's. It's very inward looking. The society that they're living in isn't really doing them any favors. So they have to kind of like turn inward to.
To find the answers.
Speaker B
00:25:36.470 - 00:25:38.374
Does anyone else have recommendations?
Speaker D
00:25:38.502 - 00:25:43.730
We could also in that genre we can go with Carlos Castaneda Don Juan book.
Speaker A
00:25:45.480 - 00:25:48.896
And that's our discussion of A Psalm for the Wild Built and A Prayer.
Speaker B
00:25:48.928 - 00:25:50.736
For the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers.
Speaker A
00:25:50.848 - 00:26:25.836
You've been listening to the Game Masters Book Club, the place where great fiction becomes your next great role playing experience. The Game Masters Book Club is brought to you by me, Eric Jackson and K Square Productions.
Special thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our theme music. You can find the podcast at K Square Productions gmbc. That's GMBC for Game Masters Book Club.
See you for our next podcast where we'll be discussing the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.
Speaker B
00:26:26.028 - 00:26:28.380
And to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett.
Speaker A
00:26:28.460 - 00:26:31.700
Always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the Rising 8.