#zedeck siew

I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around Stray Virassa (2020). It is an island. I can not decide from the text if the “stray” part is figurative — that the island is part of a chain, but sort of oddly or inconveniently placed — or if it is literal — that the island drifts here and there. And I think my confusion is intentional on Zedeck Siew’s part, the devil.

Making matters stranger, spirits of drowned dead of Mu think they must come to the island to linger, thinking it the Fourteenth Hell. Again, the text shrugs about whether this is true or not. It seems not, but then, the island has an unusual density of people with sorcerous talents, so perhaps there’s something to it.

We get to meet some of the sorcerers — a fortifications specialist and a fertility wizard. We also meet folks traveling to seek their advice. Two random tables are there to help you make the oddballs the players meet and I love them. There are also tables for the drowned ghosts. A fold-out insert is for dropping dice on to conjure distant memories of Mu. I like that a lot.

Andjang (2019) is a trek up a mountain to find a haunted palace and the horrible parasitic queen who rules there. All royalty are parasites, but in A Thousand Thousand Islands, its a little more literal.

This zine is feels the most like an adventure so far, though the edges of are still vague and dreamlike. There is something to do — go up the mountain — there are places to explore — the palace at the top for one — and plenty of people to meet — royalty, attendants, pilgrims. It’s still all open ended, but there’s a trajectory here, which is a bit of a shift from the previous volumes. This one has the most random tables, too — rumors, magic weapons, eldritch powers, strange travelers. Folks who are looking for something a bit more traditional might want to start here.

This is the, well, not the first notes of horror. Upper Heleng certainly has horrible things in it. But this is the first time ATTI seems to be actively trying to creep me out from the start to the finish. It works. Andjang is unpleasant.

Upper Heleng (2019) is a primal, seemingly sentient forest. Time and the Forest had children together. They are largely unpleasant — leeches that steal things besides blood, living gibbon-shaped beehives, a moth-faced man who can appear like the dead. They’re disturbing without being unpleasant, facets of an ecology that feels balanced even as most of it remains obscure.

There is a novel insert for traversing the forest, a large fold out with boxed text detailing different features. Toss dice, where they land charts the path. If the total of the dice is even, the way through is a waterway. If the total is divisible by three, there is a camp in one location. There are also profiles of characters the players might meet. Most are relatively normal. One is an itinerant swordfish lugged around by his friend, one of the strongest men alive — this is a key indicator of how weird some of the future NPCs are going to be.

I mentioned the poetic feel of the text. This zine has one of my favorite intrusions of modern language — cut down a tree at the edge of Upper Heleng and the “forest shuts like a refrigerator door.”

Kraching is a region where cats are holy and protective their secrets. There are many woodworkers, a cult of assassins that venerates cat claws and a treacherous plot or two. Cats always seem to be plotting something, even if most wind up being too lazy to enact their schemes.

I previously had some lines here that were watered down musings from the book, but they honestly need more space than I could fit here, so you’ll have to buy the book when it comes out. Instead, let me just stress that in a world where Tolkien and Joseph Campbell dominate the language of fantasy, A Thousand Thousand Islands stands as a sharp (and beautiful) rebuttal of the monomyth.

A Thousand Thousand Islands is a series of zines detailing a fantastical version of southeast Asia, particularly the islands of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. In the real world, these islands share in many social, cultural and folkloric traditions while each region or even each island retains their own distinctions. So too with A Thousand Thousand Islands. There are eight zines as of this writing (supplemented by two zines of artwork and a volume of essays and fiction examining supernatural creatures from Malaysian folklore), each unique but part of a greater whole.

Each volume details places of interest, notable people and goods worth seeking out. Mr-Kr-Gr (2017) here is a kingdom ruled by crocodiles where travelers may not spend the night. There are random tables — this has one for type of demon idols and one for identifying traits of crocodiles. If it weren’t for the tables, honestly, you’d hardly realize the zines are for RPGs at all. They read more like wistful travel journals rather than sourcebooks. In fact, this is one of the most beguiling features of the series: it is powerfully written and full of poetry. That’s something I don’t think I can say about any other RPG book — their prose is too often preoccupied with being either weird or useful. Here Siew weaves songs that often feel personal in addition to being useful to an RPG.  All the while, artist Munkao gives the poetry weight and gravity through detailed landscapes and emotive portraits. You can get as lost in his illustrations as easily as you can in Siew’s words. Between the two of them, the result is a world that is beguiling. No matter how many volumes come out, I’m left feeling like I’ve only caught a glimpse and that there is so, so much more to see.