PANIC!
The situation has become dire. Confusion, darkness, and the unknown surround you. You dig deep into your bag, hoping for something useful, knowing that the bag will give you whatever fate decides.
Will you find help?
Will you find confusion?
Will you find glazed nuts?
This is the chance you take with BOTTOMLESS BAG!
Close your eyes
Reach inside
FROM WITHIN
This grouping was selected at random from a communally generated master list of four hundred. It is my hope that these ten items can be used as a forecast or guide to your week ahead. You can also use a ten sided dice to turn each weeks items into a miniature oracle. Whether you choose to take these items literally or metaphorically, it’s up to you to find how these things may help. For a more thorough overview go to Introducing Bottomless Bag and Bottomless Bag 01.
Item 131
#120: COCKROACH ON CRUTCHES
Even survivors need support sometimes
Item 132
#36: LION
A majestic predator
Item 133
#103: APPLE CORE
What remains once the good part is gone
Item 134
#360: CALCULATOR
To assist in keeping the ledger balanced
Item 135
#50: POTATO
a versatile tuber
Item 136
#131: COMB
To straighten and style
Item 137
#145: A PIPE
For framing or flow
Item 138
#211: AN OVERFLOWING WICKER LAUNDRY BASKET
A job undone
Item 139
#81: MILK CRATES
Found storage
Item 140
#133: CANE
Something to lean on
DIGGING DEEPER
We’re going to something a little different this week in this section. Instead of drilling down on a single item I want to explore one of the main inspirations and drives behind BOTTOMLESS BAG, both as a tool and as an approach to magical practice. This is just the first of what may be many such explorations.
When I was a teenager I took a job at my local comic shop. They sold comics, Magic: The Gathering cards, and role playing books and supplies. For the most part I stuck to the comics side of things and ignored the guys coming in to get the newest Dungeons and Dragons sourcebook or Vampire: The Masquerade rulebook.
To be completely honest, I used to look down at the role players because of the nerd tribalism of the time. In the 90’s comics folks and gaming folks didn’t really mingle all that well. When the store owner noticed how I treated his gamer patrons he decided it was time for me to get more familiar with that side of things. He game me an ultimatum: join one of his D & D campaigns or lose my job. I created my character then and there, tribalism be damned.
I joined a game being run by the store owner as an axe welding chaotic good warrior dwarf by the name of Barton (named after the main character from the Coen brothers’ movie Barton Fink) and he used the next four weeks to punish and embarrass me for how I had been treating the local gaming community. I will admit that I came into the whole thing with a sarcastic attitude and may have deserved the fate that came to my character.
At the end of week one, Barton had gone into a coma. Week two came and went without Barton coming out of that coma because I had a series of bad recovery rolls. At the start of week three Barton succumbed to his injuries and I was forced to help voice the non-player characters in the game. By week four the store owner took pity on me and let me out of the game. He felt that I had learned my lesson. It was true, I never treated the gamers poorly again. This wasn’t because of the thorough punishment, though.
The gamers had won me over in those four week through their willingness to let go and BECOME those characters. They embodied them and treated what the dungeon master said as reality for that couple hours every week. Even through my immense levels of embarrassment I could see and admire their ability to conjure their lawful good human cleric or their chaotic neutral elf mage. As a shy, depressive teenager it absolutely blew my mind.
It ended up being my one and only campaign but the experience changed how I interacted with fiction and helped cement the idea that the imaginal can be lived outside one’s own mind. The things I learned in that game still have an effect on how I create art and my own magical practice.
It also helped inspire BOTTOMLESS BAG.
Some of you may know already that the title BOTTOMLESS BAG is a direct nod to the Bag of Holding, an item from Dungeons and Dragons. In the game, the Bag of Holding is used to expand your characters inventory by a large amount. The bag holds a portal to the Astral Plane so it’s much larger on the inside than it is on the outside.
Now, after all of that meandering and reminiscing, I will get to how this applies to BOTTOMLESS BAG.
The core of BOTTOMLESS BAG is roleplay. I feel that this is the core of most oracular systems, honestly. You are taking a disparate element and attempting to fit that into a narrative that you either live out in your imagine or live out physically. What I’m trying to do with BOTTOMLESS BAG is remove the subterfuge and tell you to turn the answers you seek into a heroic quest and the items inside the bag into your supplies necessary to complete your task. It’s forced improvisational roleplay in the form of an oracular book.
I understand the apprehension that comes with the selection of items and how one can view them as fantasy items and weapons. This part comes more from my own ideas of “mundane magic” and being reminded constantly by my son that anything can be anything if you pretend. How can a nail help you solve your problems? Or glazed nuts? There is bound to be an answer somewhere if you take the time. It’s like watching a kid pretend a toilet paper tube is a telescope or believe a house made of Lincoln Logs can hold their entire family. It’s all imagination and improvisational play.
But isn’t that all magic to some degree?
Many of us “fake it till we make it” when it comes to rituals and spells. We perform our magical actions with the confidence that they will work because without that foundation they will likely fail. Those ideas, those thoughts are all roleplaying. Instead of acting as though you are an elf or a dwarf you act as a successful practitioner. You roleplay as better version of yourself.
All BOTTOMLESS BAG is meant to do is hold your items.
YOU figure out how they help you on your quest.
That’s all for now. Come back next week for another dig into the BOTTOMLESS BAG.
As always:
SEE WHAT’S INSIDE
DIG DEEP
AND
HAUNT ON
ABOUT ERIC J. MILLAR
Eric is the artist and writer behind Outlet Press. He has published over 20 books over the last four year with VACA: Outlet Illustrated, Volume 5 being his most recent publication. He is also the creator of The Disruption Generator, the randomly generated bibliomantic oracle, and The Impossible Game, a cleromantic oracle, both published in partnership with We The Hallowed.
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