INTERMEDIARY MUND is Equal Parts Absurd Dream and Fantasy Nightmare

This feature is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #178. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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This series of articles is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Exalted Funeral. While Exalted Funeral puts us in touch with our subjects, they have no input or approval in the final story.

In a dark cave lie bodies on bodies on bodies. There are the bodies of dog-faced people slain by a mysterious liquid. There are the bodies of travelers, slain by the dog-faced people. And in the middle of the room there’s a mystical scepter, the SCEPTER OF PURE CHAOS. Of course, picking up the SCEPTER is a terrible idea. And of course, if you’re reading INTERMEDIARY MUND in the first place, you’re probably the sort of person who would do it anyway.

INTERMEDIARY MUND is a collection of campaign drawings and writings from cartoonist Ben Marra’s past experience running old-school roleplaying games for his friends. The drawings are simple, in black and white without much differentiation from each other in terms of style. The writing is simple too, with short sentences that often come to nasty ends. Inspired by and using mechanics from older tabletop games, INTERMEDIARY MUND is incessantly frightening at the same time as it will hold nostalgia for those who’ve been with the genre a long time. Put another way, INTERMEDIARY MUND is here to steal your lunch money before it tells you about the time an ancient wizard got possessed by a magical orb. And it’s going to tell you the stat blocks of that wizard and that orb, too.

The supplement is presented in loose order around three stories, each of which follows a group as they work their way through an adventure. These stories are Marra’s campaign records, which eventually became the basis for INTERMEDIARY MUND. Each one is like a fucked-up sitcom, where every page brings new horror to the terrified party. Every page also has complete stat information for each enemy, so a Game Master looking for inspiration can take it right from the source. And of course, all these figures are illustrated in black and white, drawn full of creeping shadows and with an unselfconscious, creative sense of absurdity that always goes hand-in-hand with danger.

Marra is a Grammy-nominated illustrator and he’s also a lifelong fan of comics who’s been drawing since before he can remember. He grew up amid the black-and-white comics bubble of the 1980s but didn’t start making comics until his 20s. Dungeons & Dragons was also a late addition to his life. “I was a victim of the Satanic Panic – my mom bought into the negative media stories surrounding the hobby at the time.”

His first time fully playing tabletop role-playing games came when a grad school friend homebrewed a Warhammer 40K campaign for Marra and some other friends. Marra was hooked. Upon moving back to New York City, he bought the Advanced D&D books he’d been unable to purchase as a kid and started studying up. Soon, a friend he knew through the TTRPG scene, Tim Callahan, introduced Marra to DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics), one of the several systems INTERMEDIARY MUND is compatible with. As Marra ran DCC games for his friends, he did daily drawings to summarize the campaign and to become “less precious” with his method of illustration.

This process of drawing and writing about his campaigns was essential for Marra to understand them. “Few things ignite my imagination like when I run or play TTRPGs. Many images and ideas flood my brain, and I need to get them out either with drawings or words. I don’t want them to be lost to the vagaries of memory.”

The qualities Marra values in a campaign diary are that it be composed as the campaign unfolds, not in retrospect, and that drawings remain simple but memorable. His economical writing is frequently beautiful at the same time as it’s terrifying. For example:

Beyond the village was an enormous city in the distance. The city was as tall as a mountain. The spires of the city were silhouettes against the deep red sky. The single setting sun was a plate of molten iron behind a curtain of smoke.

This same language turns to describe the ravages of enemies, who take out swathes of innocent people as easily as breathing. Sometimes they’re composed of the people they kill, and other times they possess, mangle or disintegrate them. When adapted to a campaign, these enemies can pose a real threat to the party, creating an anticipatory atmosphere because the next messed up thing is always just around the corner.

At times I felt like INTERMEDIARY MUND was trying to gross me out. However, Marra says he’s not trying to provoke a certain feeling. Rather, the experiences his characters have serve a narrative purpose. “The unpleasant elements exist to raise the stakes of the crisis characters are facing; it’s only when presented with a crisis that characters make choices that define who they are and advance the [story].” Those crises include plane-hopping beings and murderous slavers, many of whom have kill counts in the dozens. These enemies aren’t pushing the envelope in terms of their character, and they’re not meant to be: as crises, they exist to make the player characters stronger both mentally and mechanically.

Unlike his previous work, Marra doesn’t see INTERMEDIARY MUND as a form of pulp, or only as adjacent to it. “I don’t see TTRPGs as genre fiction like pulp, but as a different form of entertainment. INTERMEDIARY MUND, while in the genre of fantasy, is a record of an experiment in collaborative storytelling using a game apparatus.” Of course, because of the attribute blocks it includes, it can also be used as a campaign tool. He believes GMs can pick and choose from it as they wish, in a similar way to how he crafts campaigns from various sources. When he’s running a game, “I just need a fraction of an idea to build from, so I see this book as providing blocks that could be used to build something new.”

His inspirations are wide ranging, including comics artists like Eugene Jaworski and Plastiboo as well as a guy named Stafan who posts his old D&D drawings on Flickr. Johannes Stahl’s book of campaign drawings from a player’s perspective was also an influence. What these artists’ drawings have in common is a sense of small against large, a crushing scale that often incorporates extraplanar elements. “The stuff I find most inspiring is work from in the early days of TTRPG’s emergence”, Marra says. “There was a very DIY aesthetic to the crafting of the games and the artwork.”

INTERMEDIARY MUND stands out for being uncompromising and unwilling to bend to reader or player expectations. Marra’s compulsion to gather and remember details from his past campaigns has resulted in a memory book that is more of a creative vision than a commercial product (though, of course, it’s both). This book’s status as a personal record of play humanizes the trippy, violent and strange aspects of collaborative storytelling, and makes for a compelling and chaotic read.

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INTERMEDIARY MUND will be available at Exalted Funeral soon. Marra’s newest graphic novel WHAT WE MEAN BY YESTERDAY arrives in bookstores August 20th. His daily WWMBY comic strip can be read on his Patreon.

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Emily Price is a freelance writer and PhD candidate in literature based in Brooklyn, NY.