#skrabalai music

[ylkcheeeks]

So I want to write this down now because I feel like this is going to be one of the anecdotes that I use to explain what I love about theater of the mind role playing.

So this is in the Matt World (it’s short for matter) setting, which was originally a one shot but we had a great time so now it’s a chill ongoing game.

Things to know are that this setting has more of an Adventure Time vibe than a LotR vibe, with Living Puopet as PC option, muppety kenku, evil spirits that need a cookie body- that sorta thing; my character is Relic, a mechanical cat bard- since he is more of an automata than puppet he’s a reskinned warforged- who of course I picked the Tocken for. He’s a lil clockwork guy! I wasn’t sure what it was exactly, from the description:

Tocken: A hanging set of carved oval bells, usually played with a pair of light wooden hammers (or open handed). They are most common in underground cultures, where the resonant tones can carry.

I tried looking it up, figuring it might be either an older instrument I just hadn’t heard of, like the shawm, or a more common instrument with a fanciful rename like

Yarting: A southern instrument from Amn and Calimshan that is a Faerûnian analog to the guitar. Numerous variations have spread across the continent.

And when I searched there clearly wasn’t a real instrument called a Tocken, so my brain retained “wood + mallets + real instrument” and I was like, ah, it’s a marimba but invented by Germanic analogue gnomes or something.

You know! Or like that worthikids short.

Just like, a little desktop size one because he’s a lil guy.

But this past couple of sessions have seen him nominated as the favorite of Princess Pastria (of the eleven Kingdom of Keeb) for the battle of the bards, which is a pretty big thumb on the scale because she/the king also announced that she will be stepping up as queen soon as she has come of age and he wants to retire, and by the way the grand prize is court bard, a job Relic was lowkey offered and he turned down. (He IS a cat.) So, you know, we got small problems commander. Theres a bunch of other intrigue going on and character growth- really good stuff- but we leave the end of the “prep for the show” session with Relic on stage about to play his first song. It is the first performance of the second day after he was allowed to skip the qualifying round as the favorite, it is the crack of dawn, there is a massive audience, most of whom clearly have been up all night enjoying the party vibe. Half the party didn’t even come back before he had to leave, so it’s just The Magnificent Mister Midnight, our rabbit wizard, backing him up in the wings.

And that’s where we wrapped so we could start the next session with my GM’s system for how audience hype will be impacted/measured. I realize something I missed on the downtime day was buying a second instrument, so asked him if I could retcon that, that’s cool, great.

So I am thinking that it should be something which would compliment the Tocken or make sense he would also play that, and I thought, I should see if I can find anything more about it, it probably is based on something I don’t know AND has a silly name. I also decide his second instrument is a hurdy-gurdy which for some reason isn’t a core instrument? Anyhow they are wrong and my clockwork boy will hurdy his gurdy if he wants to.

So I of course reread the description and realize this can’t be based on a marimba. First I look to see if someone else has already been like “this is basically a…” and while I do find other people asking what the heck a tocken is, and a few gorgeous fan created solutions, no dice on an absolute answer.

Special shout-out to this brilliant solution- it turns into a javelin!

I set about meticulously looking through Wikipedia’s incredible cataloguing of percussion instruments. I am learning about SE Asian percussion ensembles which are very cool and all sorts of marimba-adjacent instruments, it’s great. But none of it is even close to a hanging set of carved oval bells, until. I find it.

There is one melodic percussion instrument based on wooden open-ended bells, which are played on a rack. It actually seems like it is truly the only one of its kind; going down the list there are classification numbers for each instrument similar to the Arne-Thompson system for folktales, and nothing is under the same subdivision as this magnificent thing.

So I tell my GM that I have had my own instrument all wrong and what I think it was based on- it’s not an exact match- and he replies

GM: THATS WHAT YOUVE BEEN PLAYING??!?!?

GM: XXXX I HAVE BEEN PICTURING A DRUM

YC: I was picturing, like, a marimba??? (…)

GM: I am also realizing in this moment that, for the past 7 sessions of DnD, when you have said marimba I have been picturing a steelpan

And I want you all to picture that too now because that is even better than a mini marimba. Little clockwork cat busting out the tunes on one of these.

Honestly I love that image.

Anyhow we clowned on it for a bit longer and at the beginning of the next session as we moved from catch up chat into actual playing, I asked the other players what they had been picturing, because I had apparently been wrong this whole time about my instrument (I’m just going to identify them by their characters here for efficiency & privacy both). I had read off the description back in session zero and said that I thought it was like a marimba but otherwise it has mostly been “okay so Relic starts playing faster” not so much interactions which would remind anyone of the tocken’s form.

Our intrepid kenku investigative reporter rogue was also picturing a marimba… and also had thought the word “marimba” meant steel pan drum. Specifically, he pictured a couple of them on a harness like in marching band, which I love even more.

Mash those together mentally, basically.

The wizard, both most scholarly in-character and the one party member who isn’t USAmerican, was picturing a xylophone and submitted this photo to explain he meant specifically a toy xylophone.

And finally our sock puppet Paladin of The Hand Below, who is not so much with the wisdom, had been picturing basically a shamisen but with a diamond-shaped body.

And if you’re someone who doesn’t know me yet read this far, I hope you also have your own mental image and tell me about it.

The instrument I have actually been playing this whole time is a skrabalai.

Original photo by Wikipedia user Imodab, filter effect added by me because it looks cool. Call it faerie fire.

As far as I can tell the tree stump mount isn’t required per se but it is both traditional and preferable.

It’s so much better than I had been imagining! Immediate retcon that this- or a travel size rack- has been the thing this whole time.

Relic as we left him at the end of last session, apparently.

We have had all these serious stakes because of Relic’s performances- he has a +10 afterall- including getting the crown-princess’ attention, for good or ill. And all this time people have been getting down not just to a little clockwork cat, but to a little clockwork cat who hauls out a birch stump, sets up what looks like a washing board with the middle replaced with dowels, carefully takes a series of carved wooden bells out of their pouch and arranged them carefully on this rack. Then he takes out little mallets and begins to play them. And you couldn’t get that wonderful juxtaposition if there had been a visual all along, so again I say, three cheers for the theater of the mind.

Also I am now interested in what people are doing with the skrabalai in modern music, but that’s a question to dig into another day.dnd