This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Constant-Leather9299 on 2024-10-15 15:06:37+00:00.

Poland. Year 1990.

After the fall of communism in 1989, Poland transitions to democracy and a free market economy.  The economic state of the country is still in shambles, but there is a lot of hope for the future. For Polish people, 1980s were synonymous with violent political oppression and poverty. For Americans, 80s are a source of nostalgia for stuff like playing DnD or trying out cool NES games. The Iron Curtain was now gone and all that stuff started arriving to Poland too, but in the 90s. Too bad everyone was dirt poor though. The new and cool Western products were an object of fascination. After all, all of it was previously completely unobtainable.

Why on earth am I rambling about the economic state of 1990s Poland in a Hobby Drama write up? Because it’s a backdrop from where the hero of our tale emerged.

1. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF KATAN: POLISH TTRPG SCENE IN THE 90S

Kryształy Czasu (English: Crystals of Time) are a tabletop RPG system created by Artur Szyndler sometime in the 1980s - one of the very first Polish TTRPGs, in fact! According to Szyndler, the work started around 1984-1985, but the system was completed around 1990. Clearly his passion project, it was originally distributed in the form of floppy disks or in handwritten notebooks at fantasy fan meetups by the author himself. Later on in 1993, a revised version of the system was published by a Polish fantasy magazine Magia i Miecz, spreading it far and wide. 

How was the system? Well… According to an article I found, Crystals of Time were never really well regarded. Common criticisms included lack of proofreading, an absurdly inconsistent universe that regurgitates common fantasy tropes, lack of balancing, rules bloated with tons of unnecessary dice rolls, and insane random encounters/effects that could literally end the game on the spot (such as a side effect of a spell being able to erase the entire party of players from existence) and - most importantly - a characteristic, inept writing style. Put a pin in this last one. My brother - a hardcore TTRPG fan and a Game Master for many years - described it to me as “about as fun as filing tax documents” and that he “thought someone wrote it as a joke”. Take that as you will, but I’ve never heard him say stuff like this about any other system.

However, it should be noted the system did have legitimate fans - its biggest strength was its accessibility (and the fact it was free). What other options were there? Back then you couldn’t just walk into a store and buy a DnD manual. You couldn’t even pirate it because no one owned a computer. The least you could count on was a barely readable photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of someone’s DnD manual. In English. So good luck with decyphering all of that!  If you even know any English in the first place. So you’re stuck here. You’re stuck with Crystals of Time.

Author of the aforementioned article, Piotr Muszyński, writes that Crystals of Time garnered a lot of goodwill from the public at the time because it was a Polish product created in a time when they were automatically seen as lesser than the cool, shiny, Western stuff that just started to show up, so the system got some praise for the effort alone. And while CoT faded away with an advent of other imported TTRPGs such as Warhammer, DnD or Old World of Darkness, it still had a very small yet dedicated fanbase of nostalgic middle aged fantasy nerds. Crystals of Time were mostly forgotten… until they suddenly came back into the spotlight.

In the strangest way possible.

2. THE RETURN OF KATAN: A CROWDFUNDING SAGA

Poland. Year 2014.

Artur Szyndler starts a campaign on a crowdfunding website polakpotrafi.pl. Crystals of Time are back, baby! 

…This time, as a novel - titled Crystals of Time: Katan’s Saga: Labyrinth of Death, part 1 and 2 (Kryształy Czasu: Saga o Katanie: Labirynt Śmierci, część 1 i 2). As a true fantasy epic, a new modern classic that will surely be discussed and analyzed for eons. The goal of the campaign was raising money for the creation of the first volume out of planned 13 entries (each split in 2 books) in Crystals of Time: Katan’s Saga. The description of the campaign goes into detail about turning Crystals of Time into a franchise, which are unusually ambitious for a mostly forgotten TTRPG from the 90s. As Szyndler himself wrote: “as you can see, our foresight extends further than the astrologers are able to foresee” - and goddamn, he wasn’t kidding. So, what was the goal? A mere 55 THOUSAND Polish złoty (~15000USD). A small price to pay for a literary masterpiece. And this is when people started getting skeptical.

As the wider internet learned of the campaign, they started noticing quite a lot of red flags. To release a book, you’d feasibly need a team of a couple people, like editor and beta readers. Crystals of Time: Katan’s Saga boasted a team of nearly 40 PEOPLE(!!!), including 12 editors and 14 graphic designers. The campaign also had an official youtube channel, which posted a lot of trailers to drum up hype. The trailers are quite amateurish and consist mostly of recitations of very bad poetry about the island archipelagos of Ochria. And there’s also a traditional dwarven funeral song, which is 22 minutes long. In case you need some cool tunes for your sex playlist.

It’s not a secret that the author also had quite an ego. Take a look at what he had to say about the book!

"The scale of CoT. How many times do I have to say that the thing you knew up to this point was merely 1-5% of everything I came up with? Over 25 years ago, before Magia i Miecz, it was 3700 pages - including the universe. Some have seen these documents - a pile of 1,5m height. And now the scale of CoT is right before your eyes. And this is just the beginning…

“The last thing is what the beta readers said. You read this book for the first time for all the action. It’s hard to stop reading - I promise. For the second time, you’ll read the book to understand the world, because the information are scattered across many chapters. You cannot know everything without getting to some longer descriptions. For the third time, you’ll be reading it for the schemes, mysteries and subplots. Decyphering it all is an essence of all 13 volumes. I don’t recommend doing it during the first read. There is too much to comprehend. You must understand, this isn’t a normal book.”

“As I said from the start, this book will shock you with its ideas. The things that nowadays seem absurd will be soon throughly analyzed.” 

“The writing style is what it is. You have to accept it, or not read at all. Sometimes the suspense will be jarring, but I will remain consistent.”

“As some of you already noticed, the competition isn’t resting and already started to create bad reviews for the book. A few of the sponsored “counter-articles” were already detected by you all. I didn’t expect them to be so fast.”

“Biggest assets of the first volume of Katan’s Saga are the 25 vibrant characters of our party and their unbelievable experiences, as well as the plot of the novel rushing forward like a meteorite.”

Artur Szyndler also stated that he hates writing descriptions of this universe that he’s so proud of, so he’ll put them in between chapters in the form of poetry. Or, as he calls it, a “rhymed prose”. He also defiantly defended himself from doubters by stating that "if someone is looking for a beautiful writing style, they should go read Mickiewicz instead." Normally it would’ve been a little worrying to hear these things from the next literary sensation, buuuuuuuut… Oh hey, look, this masterpiece will have exactly 700 different fantasy races and 25 main characters! And if you give Artur 20000 or 50000 złoty, he will make YOU into one of the protagonists of his book! It would be a shame not to take this golden opportunity and be forever immortalized in literature!

And then Szyndler uploaded a few chapters as samples to the campaign page. This is when the internet got their first taste of the book.

And oh boy, the result was not good.

3. HALF-FJORDS, HARMONY AND BAD POETRY: SZYNDLER’S LICENTIA POETICA

Before we dive into the endless void that is the book’s plot, we should talk about how this thing is written.

Let’s say this straight up: the book is a car crash and attracted bile fascination ever since the internet saw the sample chapters for the first time. Due to its clumsy, yet weirdly captivating writing style and absurd over-the-top plot, it frequently loops back into being the greatest unintentional parody you’ll ever read. The book is full of word salad, grammatical and spelling errors and features a stream of consciousness-type narration, which was confirmed to be a result of Szyndler literally dictating the book to people who were writing it down for him. (Or, as haters referred it to as, "the transcript of a TTRPG campaign ran by the…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1g49wgw/literature_is_gorlam_the_brave_still_running_the/