One of the things that I find damn interesting about D&D 4e's design is the concept of the skill challenge. For anyone out there who doesn't chuck around the twenty-siders, essentially these break down as moments where players go in turn to try different skills and accumulate successes in order to achieve a goal. It's sort of like an extended roll in the Storytelling system, save that everyone contributes and there's no one specific skill involved. You want to get X successes before 3 failures, and if you do, successful encounter. This tends to be more complicated than a simple single-check skill roll, but the payoff is immense: you have a skill-based encounter that plays out like a combat, in the sense that every PC is involved and taking turns. I can't stress how useful this is for encouraging player engagement. Now I'll admit that 4e borrows a lot from other games, and I'm not as deeply versed in the number of mechanics out there, so maybe some other game invented the idea. But it's one that deserves to be as widely publicized as D&D can make it.

The thing about skill challenges is that the rulebook recommends writing them out ahead of time: for an "interrogate the prisoner" scene, for instance, they may decree "he is a fanatic and cannot be Intimidated," or "a successful Religion check will grant a +2 to the next Bluff or Diplomacy check." I've found that it's actually more fun not to do that at all, though. Greywulf backs me up on this (relevant info in Part Five). Instead, I like skill challenges as something that either I can initiate or, with enough practice, the players can call for at any time. I've already tried standards like interrogation, chase scenes and "try to kite the troll to the guy with trollslaying experience." Last time, it was a very general "How are you going to get close enough to the villain and his hostage to pull off a rescue attempt?" Now, i could have said ahead of time which skills would work. But instead I had a vague idea that things like Stealth and Bluff could work, and left the rest to the players to brainstorm.

It worked great. The characters disguised the least stealthy of their trio to look like the person expected to report for a prisoner exchange, and while he advanced and tried the Bluff and Diplomacy route, the other two spied out a path among the rocks that would lead them around the back way to get into position (Perception and Stealth). The whole thing ended beautifully, with a Diplomacy check from the disguised priest allowing the other two to get into position for Bonus Surprise Rescue Round! And without planning ahead what they were going to do, it was all player innovation.

This is a really fun mechanic. It works great with the Storytelling system: what you'd do is set up extended rolls with open-ended skill use, and I think likely demand X successes within Y number of turns so as to make sure that failure is a possibility. It would be fantastic for Storytelling games with a strong team dynamic; consider a werewolf pack using a skill challenge to identify prey, isolate him from a crowd and chase him somewhere they can do their thing. It might be a little more easily finesseable by players, of course, because the decoupling of Attribute and Skill that Storytelling uses would allow players to really fudge the rolls they're good at as the ones they want to make — but I'm not sure it would be a bad thing. And after all, it would make things easier in some regards: maybe Dave can't roll on his maxed-out Weaponry for this challenge, but he can still involve Dexterity on something.

It's good stuff. Certainly going as free-form as I recommend would work only if you can trust the judgment of the Storyteller, and the players are going to be open-minded enough to try new things. But since I encourage everyone to play in groups like that anyway if at all possible, I don't feel so bad about saying they're worth a try.

I wrapped up Season Three of the Azuros game last night, completing Paku's ascension to godhood in time for the move back South. It went well; suitable epicness happened. I'll probably pick up Season Four once we go to Atlanta; no telling whether it'll be a one-on-one season with Aileen, or if I'll recruit other players yet. We'll see how the mood takes me.

Though I could theoretically pack up the Champions books now, I've still got a bit more epic superhero afterglow to get out of my system. Brainstorming a way to make a Ten-Eyed Man homage cool wasn't quite enough. Then it occurred to me that with a little restructuring, I could go back and figure out how to make one of the old games of my teenage years relevant. Maybe that'd let me cool down. So here's the pitch for the game I probably won't ever run — though really, the point of the exercise is that I could, and it could actually be worth it.

( Down the Rabbit Hole... )

Better now. Time to go plan how to wrap up the other games by mid-August.

Late to the party yet again, as Aileen and I actually wound up getting around to Chronicles of Riddick. Can you tell we're not serious genre fans? 

You know, it's not a terrific movie. We knew it wasn't going to be. Yet I am pretty sure that if I had seen it at, say, anywhere between the ages of 8-14, it would have been one of those movies that I would have loved forever despite its flaws, not unlike Krull. It reads pretty much like Vin's home D&D campaign in space, with freaking elementals running around (Judi Dench, as Aileen put it, as "the air genasi"), bad guys with silly names and lots of pretension — yet I respected that it wanted to be stylized sci-fi, something more like Star Wars or Warhammer 40K (and damn the realism!). "New Mecca" was pretty neat, and a lot closer to how I wish we'd see more far-future cultures: as cultures that have evolved from familiar stock, but feeling somewhat different. (Oh yeah, and really nice to see some serious multi-ethnicity in the crowd scenes full of beautiful happy people instead of reserving it for the bad sections of town. Even if Keith David met a somewhat predictable fate.) And I will always respect a work in which there was a certain level of love going into preparing the world-building. Not scientific love, mind you. I'm no scientist, but I can tell you some serious problems with the whole concept of the planet Crematoria — though again, what do you expect from a film that names a planet Crematoria? This thing was meant to be gameable. And it was a flawed film, but in a way it reminded me of just sitting down with another game master and chatting about world building for a while. The three-faced motifs and the neo-Meccan approach and the prison rail rockets and the killer pangoleopards and the flying ship called "the Basilica" — it's world porn. And I like world porn. It gets me in the mood, aw yeah.

Though honestly, the biggest warning label on this entire movie should be "Watch this before you watch Slings & Arrows." Because holy shit, Colm Feore's a neat dude, but it's the icing on the "these bad guys are pretty silly" cake to be reminded of Sanjay every time the big villain shows up. Though then again, if the Necromongers are in the business of mongering death, they would need a guy with a good marketing plan...

Scale is something that I maybe don't use to full extent in my home games. For someone who enjoys building fantasy worlds, I don't build many of them. For someone who really enjoyed Planescape, loved working on Umbral supplements for Werewolf, and wound up drawing on Champions in 3-D to close out his college-era Champions game, I actually don't muck around with multiverses very often. I have an idea or two for world-hopping campaigns, but they always lose out to the locally based things (and I've never actually run science fiction with multiple planets as implied, oddly enough — not even Star Wars!).

I think part of this is that it's damn difficult to adhere to the "show, don't tell" philosophy of GMing when you're talking about affairs on a grand scale. First of all, you have to watch out for the monoculture. I'll admit it, I'm one of those people who's irritated by alien races who have one language and one culture without some really well-thought-out reason for it. Now, it's arguably much more gameable to have those unifying races and cultures, but it hammers the old suspension of disbelief whenever someone starts talking about, say, "Klingon culture." I would like to think that Klingons would have roughly as many cultures as we humans did if they were around for a comparable period of time, and if you start counting with Sumeria and end up with our current modern mélange, that is a lot.

I work most comfortably at a smaller scale, I think. It's odd because I really enjoy the big-ticket superhero books like Morrison's JLA or Kirby's Fourth World, yet even when I'm doing epic fantasy it's never about saving the world. I like the emotion of a work like Princess Mononoke, where there's basically one forest and one town at stake, yet that story is epic. So, for that matter, is Beowulf (with "just" a mead-hall or two at stake) and the Odyssey (never leaves the Mediterranean, and the emotional context is a man wanting to return home). And emotion aside, there's a sort of real concreteness at the smaller scale: one statue is a solid detail, whereas a town full of statues is more of a general description, and a nation with statuary all over the place is a stereotype. I still enjoy cultural details like "there are many statues throughout this city" and "this culture is fond of sculpture, particularly out of sandstone," and I apply them, but it is more work. If you want the city to pop like the small town does, you need to describe, even name, more specific statues to make portions of the city as solid. Maybe I'm just lazy.

That said, sometimes you want, even need that larger sense of scale. It has a tendency to grip the players in a way that's unlike, but similar to, the clutching intensity of a very personal detail. It engages the sense of wonder, and that's a damn useful thing to be able to reach. Sometimes you want the improbably huge architecture, the vast metropoli teeming with people, the immensity of deserts or oceans, the vastness of space.

But still I find I like the small places. Moving the world is great fun, and there's that sense of wonder in the lever that's long enough, but the small places? Those are Archimedes' fulcrum. On them everything else rests.

Because it's possible that some people might have missed this, and that would be a shame. 

I'll admit it, I'm fond of the "alternate universe" trope. Fond enough of it that I decided to end my college Champions game by liberally borrowing from Champions in 3-D (the dimension-hopping supplement), and having the PCs wind up discovering that saving multiple realities was their purpose from the beginning... and also a handy rationalization for why they were such a weird-ass group of misfits and dimensional exiles.

But it's harder for me to use nowadays, even when I'm running a superhero game. Because I start thinking about probability. And the thing is, an alternate universe where "just one thing is different" is outlandishly improbable. Take your classic good guys are bad, bad guys are good mirror inversion. Unless the inversion starts with the birth of the oldest PC or NPC extant in the game, you have to wonder how the universe would have come out. If Nazi Germany were the good guys in WWII, how exactly would that have played out? If the universe has a higher predominance of really evil people, shouldn't more great-great-grand-ancestors have died out in murderous sprees, thus failing to sire their proper lineages of evil relatives? Maybe Ray Bradbury got to me at a formative stage or something, but it winds up straining my disbelief when an alternate universe features just one accurate analogue of a protagonist, because think of the odds. What are the odds that any of us could have come out different with just one different event in the past? That you would be a different person, with different DNA combinations or parents if, say, your great-grandparents had met two days later than they did? 

Thing is, with an infinite universe and all that, there's probably room for that level of improbability. In fact, you could probably argue that the "proximity" of a parallel universe is probably dependent on similiarities, so as stupidly improbable as universes where most of the players are the same are, they're closest to one another. The ones where things went very different are farther out, because the synchronicity draws parallels "together." Same thing with universes where the break point was very recent, I figure. And of course you can have parallel worlds that aren't really "worlds" in the sense of creation — realities spawned by artifact mirrors or inscrutable super-science or phenomenally powerful psychic dreamers or whatever. (Those are my favorites for "evil versions of the protagonists" scenarios; sometimes a mirror of opposition will be a lot more digestible than a freak wormhole, I'm just sayin'.)

I just wish that creators would actually talk about the odds a little more often. Because I realize we all accept the trope as genre fiction fans, but man, sometimes it'd be nice to see an explanation for why this insanely unlikely level of synchronicity is de rigeur. Because once you figure out why, theoretically you have some rationale to then do a story about that mechanic and its ramifications. More story ideas are good, right?

(And while I'm doing the math, maybe I'll figure the odds on a parallel universe where I exist but am not such a picky bastard.) 

The word "steampunk" niggles at me a little bit. I assume the etymology is such that it's a take on "cyberpunk," but it's an odd derivation. Does it really have punk ideals? Look at Girl Genius, for example; it's clearly of the steampunk genre, but it's not really very punky at all. There's not really the sense of rebellion against authority, the fever of angry youth — rather, there's an out-and-out sense of wonder, and one that's embaced with pride. The world is a mess, yes, but the heroes are people of almost traditional idealism. Possibly steampunk could be considered a punk rebellion against Victorian morés (and like that I start thinking of Victorian morays, never mind me), but it doesn't seem to be handled as such very often. People like the top hats and the cultured diction. Steampunk involves gentleman adventurers, and it's damn hard to be a gentleman and a punk at the same time.

Gamers are pretty bad for using -punk as a suffix with a very vague meaning. "Gothic-Punk" actually did consider what punk meant, back in the day, but "dungeonpunk" is an art style. Steampunk is used to describe a certain aesthetic of technology. I don't think there are "wuxiapunk" or "Westernpunk" or "spypunk" terms out there, but it's probably a matter of time.

If it were up to me, now, I'd use a different suffix. I'd want to see "-pulp" out there. The idea being that it would evoke the sensibilities of pulp novels and suchlike. We already have pulp science fiction and pulp fantasy and pulp spy fiction and pulp noir, all that kind of thing. There it exists as a prefix, because those are historically established genres. But honestly, I think much of what we call "steampunk" would be more accurately described as "steampulp." "Steampunk" is more fun to say, of course, and is now sort of a fashion movement, so there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. That said, I can't help but feel that there's some measure of value to the idea that "pulp" is a potential descriptor for a frame of mind. If used as a suffix, it could be shorthand for Exciting Adventure and Spine-Tingling Chills!

Take Street Fighter, for instance. I've long held that the RPG is an example of modern pulp: larger-than-life adventurers who exemplify certain broad archetypes, traveling the world and getting embroiled in mysticism, mad science and vicious criminal conspiracies. (Also you can play a cyborg gorilla in that game, which to me is a pretty good acid test.) You could call it "eightiespulp" if you wanted, though I suppose true eightiespulp would be Buckaroo Banzai and Big Trouble in Little China.

Try out some other genres. If "dungeonpunk" is a word, why not dungeonpulp? D&D needs little to no modification to justify the term. Some play it like "true" pulp fantasy already, but Eberron is an example of pure dungeonpulp, and I'm sure many others play the game with that kind of rollicking sensibility.

What would horrorpulp be? I'm gonna say Hellboy. Yes, there's clear horror, but there's also a love of jamming adventure, quips through gritted teeth, and yes, there's a cyborg gorilla in there, too. Multiple cyborg gorillas, actually. The old World of Darkness would also qualify in its more outrageous moments, n'est-ce pas? 

Cyberpulp? Shadowrun's almost there already. It still retains some of its punk vigor and stance on rebellion, but there are a lot of pulp elements infused in the world.

Post-apocalypsepulp? Ugly, clunky word, but... Rifts.

Now ultimately, I don't think this sort of thing could ever catch on. It's not immediately intuitive, and honestly people are already attached to their "-punk"s. But I like the idea, if for no other reason than it's another tool to brainstorm subgenres for RPGs and other creative works. What would a pulp graft do to a favorite game? Or is the -pulp already there, and is that why people love it so much? In the case of many of my favorite games, I'd probably have to say "yes." But then, I do have a weakness for gaming in that fashion.

Okay, just to make sure I've got all my bases covered:

Carrion apes: check.
Reaver baboons: check.
Man-eating ape: check.
Man-ape gladiator: check.
Demonic winged ape: check.
Two-headed mandrill demon: uh-oh. Could be overstocking the final encounter.

Rework demonic winged ape as "familiar" to priest, make two-headed mandrill demon the new main attraction of the final fight?

I'd better get to work.

(Note: This is going to talk about D&D, and a not-so-gritty, unabashedly heroic version of D&D at that. Yeah, I know, morally simplistic when I can do so much more, but I've already explained the premise of the semi-nostalgic Easter game, and with the promise of having to move back to Atlanta in near future, I'm gonna glom onto all the optimism and wild unspoiled lands-fantasy I can, because fucking Atlanta. I am not above going escapist in response to stressors.)

Wankery. It's kind of a goofy word for an unlovely process, isn't it? I was interested recently to see someone describe the process of world-building, specifically with regards to D&D, as such. The argument went something like this: It's a waste of time to detail stuff that hasn't been requested by the players, or to build setting aspects without specific players in mind. Creation just for the sake of the creative exercise is just so much intellectual masturbation.

I disagree profoundly, of course. Part of this is because I'm an inveterate world-builder, obviously, but I think that just gives me experience with why devising setting details even without specific player characters in mind is helpful. For one, there's the whole aspect of inspiration: world-building can give you ideas for games in the same manner that watching movies or reading genre fiction can. And with luck, they'll be less familiar to your players.

So, specific example. Easter game coming up, one I've mentioned before. Arabian Nights-inspired D&D. The overall quest is very find-the-MacGuffin, at the players' own request. I asked if they'd prefer to be mercenaries, treasure hunters, corsairs, fatebound or tribal defenders as a general hook, and one player suggested a "get the stolen MacGuffin" quest as a way to bring in all those concepts. Everyone glommed on it, so essentially my trek to the Temple of the Horned Ape is going to be tied into that MacGuffin hunt. Fair enough!

As I mused on it, I decided that I wanted this one-shot to represent a certain in media res snapshot, sort of like catching a random episode of an ongoing series on TV. The whole "the gem is stolen and the party comes together": that would not be played through, as I want to get to the action. So I advanced the timeline such that we would pick up with the PCs having run together for a while, probably having hunted down a couple of the thieves already. (Here I could not resist my love for Numbered Villains; nothing delights players quite like a checklist of enemies to trounce.) 

So I got the hankering to spend a few minutes on a frame story/mood-setter. In the process, I wound up devising details that would not impact the upcoming session. Time wasted on wankery, eh? It went something like this.


( (Embarrassing floridity) )


Is this world-building pretty much for my own sake? Yeah, it is, among other things. No need to devise a City of Locks for the backstory if the players won't visit it in-game. There's no info in there that's critical apart from "You've been at this quest for a while, it looks like they've divvied up their prize, and your next target appears to be in Hamaji," and that could be delivered separately. There are details in there not relevant to the game at hand, like the glass strongbox. Arguably, I could have been spending that time detailing things they'll see over the course of the game. I just spent the time devising details because it was fun, and I'm sure some would call that intellectual masturbation.

But yeah, I know my players, and two of them (admittedly the ones I was aiming at the most) were delighted. It successfully implanted the idea that this is how adventure is going to look in an Arabian Nights-inspired setting, and primed the mood. And the extra details help bring out the idea that these people are heroes, that this one-shot is a snapshot taken right in the middle of their careers. And, perhaps most tellingly, this was useful for my creative process: devising superfluous details puts me more in the mood to work on the important ones, and sets up chains of inspiration. If there are even any superfluous details at all, of course; Aileen and Kathy devour non-relevant details that make the world come alive like I was throwing popcorn to a dog, and the others enjoy them to varying extent. The "intellectual masturbation" argument relies on the idea that your players are not interested in the not-so-relevant details you like to create, but I'm lucky enough to have a group where that's not the case.

It just goes to show you: It's not wankery if there's actual penetration.

(hur hur)

I don't even want to think about how many times I've listened to the Persona 3 soundtrack working on Geist. But good goddamn, fire up "Adventured Act" or "Joy," and there we go. I like moodier "World of Darkness" music a little more often, which means there's also usually a lot of airtime for Brotherhood of the Wolf or Bram Stoker's Dracula or Interview With the Vampire, stuff composed to be background music for creepy World of Darkness-style action. But Persona 3 is, well... it's jubilant and off-kilter and bittersweet, especially to those who have played the game and remember what, say, the final fight was like. And it works. It's Geist.

I am at heart… if not an optimistic person, then a romantic one. I like morbidity, but I really like it when it's married to dynamism. So far I am happy.

Of course, right after Persona 3 comes The Shadow in my soundtrack list, courtesy of Will Hindmarch. Thankfully it is too late to add more silver-plated .45 automatics and broad-brimmed hats to Geist. You'll have to do that yourselves.

The tradition, when Easter rolls around and my parents do the rural hippie equivalent of the block party, is for me to run a Saturday game for any friends that show. And it's traditionally fantasy, too; horror I like for showcasing autumn, but I think raw fantasy is good for spring. It's kind of renewing. And it fits my belief that people find fantasy comforting because there were trees involved.

Two years ago, it was Azuros, and lots of hidden in-jokes (a hare-kin named Blackberry leading the PCs to where wicker men had been constructed with ovoid gems at their hearts entrapping friends: yes, I turned Easter baskets into wicker men). Last year it was kind of a nod to my friend Kathy (author of little things like, say, the Amanda fiction of Mage: The Ascension and Clan Novel: Setite), bringing old favorite college-era D&D characters back. You can call it an Easter resurrection if you like.

This time, screw theme. It's gonna be scimitars and sorcery. I love my Sinbad movies, even if I must do so in qualified fashion. For example, I'd really like a Sinbad movie with someone, I dunno, not purely Caucasian in the lead? Oh well.

The thing is, I really like the romance of Middle Eastern mythology and folklore. They have some fantastic archetypal critters and villains: the ghul, the djinn or ifrit, the wicked sorcerer, the prideful nobleman (you know, like that villain who married Scheherazade — it always freaked me out that the framestory for the 1001 Nights was essentially "Bluebeard gets a happy ending"). There are so many classic bits to pilfer: Death as a lovely woman, creative curses, bizarre and appealing talking animals, the whole nine yards. One of the reasons that I loved Al-Qadim so much — one of the best things ever done with D&D, the way I see it — is that it celebrated the exact same romance, and it did so intelligently. They set up a very well-done regional approximation of romantic Arabian fantasy, and then they included a variety of city-states and religions to fight the idea of monoculture. You like women heroes with 100% equality to men? Done. You want women in chadors to explore the more patriarchal aspects of the source material? Also done, a couple of cities over. It was an incredibly gameable romance, just what hits the spot.

Also, Aileen is looking at cooking something Persian or Mediterranean for the weekend to match. If there is a greater chance of couscous, hummus, kebabs, that orzo-chickpea-feta salad, or tabouleh to munch on in warm spring weather, damn right I'm running a game to inspire that kind of food.

Sundance died this morning. Aileen sat up with him all night, and although he was very weak, he insisted on going out into the rain on the deck one final time. He was mercifully unconscious for the last of it. The other two dogs, the girls, wound up almost as affected by it as we were when they suddenly realized that he wasn't just sick, he was dying for real.

Aileen put some jumbo Greenies in his Christmas stocking, and like a pharaoh, he'll be buried with them under the cherry tree down by the pond once the rain lets up.

I'm glad he's not suffering any more, even though I miss him terribly already. I'm not sure, but I think the worst part of all of this is how it rips away your little cloud of optimism and says "Who am I going to lose next?" Though even that's a good thing, I suppose; one of life's little reminders to appreciate who you have, two-legged and four-legged alike.

He was my pal. He loved me more than I deserved; there aren't many people who do deserve the kind of love he gave out. I feel like crap now that he's gone, but I would and will do it all over again. Even right now when it's hardest, I am iron-sure that it was all completely worth it.

Of sleep.

Last night.

For me.

Oh, sweet sweet bliss. I like that much better than the three hours of the night before.

1. Laura Lynn (Ingles store-brand) pomegranate/blueberry juice looks great in the glass, but the taste is pretty much exactly like drinking chewable vitamins.

2. Our human facility to anthropomorphize things is frequently scientifically unhelpful, but as a basis for language, spirituality, compassion and art, it's one of the most impressive things we have going for us.

2a. Case in point: werewolves.

3. Internet geek pop culture has a surprising paucity of P. G. Wodehouse in-jokes, homages and references.

4. If the "mainstream fantasy" image of the orc is not noticeably different and more nuanced in 10 years, I'll be surprised. Why? Blizzard, that's why.

5. Tattoo magic is not as common as you'd expect it to be in fantasy settings, and I don't think I've ever seen magic with a body paint focus. Surprising, when you consider just how hot the idea of Arabian Nights-style sorcerers/esses with hennaed spells and sigils across their bodies is.

6. Last week? Driving home through snow and ice at night, with a wind chill in the "oh man that sucks" area. This week? Highs in the 60s. February in Southern Appalachia is weird.

7. Seven is an interesting number. It would be great if you heard anecdotes someday about how children born on July 7, 2007 grew up to be peculiarly lucky.

8. It is extraordinarily fitting that one of the pages at TVtropes is "The Starscream." That perfect storm of a memorable name, an appropriately distinctive voice, and an unfailing devotion to the ideal of treachery pretty much nailed the ability to have your name immediately conjure up a dramatic role and personality.

8a. Of course, if we'd all grown up watching the animated adventures of Julius Caesar, then maybe we'd be talking about "The Cassius" like every generation before us.

8b. Particularly if Cassius wore a smart red, white and blue color scheme, and especially if he was voiced by Chris Latta.

9. You never hear anyone holding forth excitedly on the biological and behavioral aspects of skunks. Poor critters, few people take a casual interest.

10. For as crisp and lively a localization as Valkyria Chronicles got over here, the name "Marmota" still seems a bit off-center for an invincible juggernaut-tank.

11. Cities of the Underworld would be a really, really gripping show if the host weren't kind of a spaz. As it is, it's still terribly interesting, you just get the really neat bits interspersed with the somewhat wince-inducing spectacle of a hyperkinetic American shouting out incredibly obvious things to set the scene. "So, we're in a road! In Budapest! And those are houses!" 

12. The Legion of Superheroes model would serve nicely as a premise for an interesting fantasy superheroes game (or comic, I guess). I'd probably do it straight-faced, though there'd be at least an evening's entertainment if you went more "Owlbear Lad" and "Divination Lass" with it.

13. People who actually frequent tattoo parlors may correct me on this, but I hold that "Man's Ruin" is the best name of a tattoo parlor ever. (Particularly given the all-female staff thing.)

14. Thanks to fracture patterns, the ice that remains over the pond looks like a cross-section of a tissue sample. With ganglions or something. Shame I'm not a photographer; I'd have to go the long way and put together a thousand words to properly describe it.

15. You'd almost think from various media that there are only two phases of the moon: crescent and full. To be fair, those are very awesome phases of the moon. Still, when was the last time you saw a dramatic scene shot under a gibbous moon? 

16. The concept of the undead character implies a lot of interesting psychology, assuming it's not just a "metaphor for sexual desire" vampire or the like. It would be interesting to see something Sopranos-esque, wherein an ghost or some similarly driven undead individual who cannot pass on would explore the psychology of that state with a human prompter. Of course, odds are better we'd get a silly take on the concept. "Dr. Necromann, Psychiatrist to the Dead!" Shame.

17. MMOs are an interesting way to learn about RPGs, because they pull out all kinds of transparency toward the psychology of the player. For example, "progression." Totally accepted concept in MMOs, not really talked about much that I see for other RPGs, yet it sums up a certain type of player perfectly.

18. You would see more Protestant tortured antiheroes in the movies or TV if Protestants had confessionals.

19. We could use some more Germanic-tribe-derived words in English. Goths and vandals are swell, and some people like to use "Visigoth" as kind of a fun take on the word "barbarian," but wouldn't it be nice if there was a slang term like "jute" to mean, oh, I don't know, "disaffected would-be nihilist"? And nobody ever references the Ostrogoths...

20. The Renaissance: arguably a meme. If so, memes were definitely better in the old days, unless you think a rickroll trumps the Pieta.

20a. Except just to prove me wrong, there was probably graffiti all over Venice stating things like "Leonardo's tears are a sovereign cure for any and all ailments of the humours. Too bad he never cries."

20b. "It was once the Perfectly Straight Tower of Pisa, before Leonardo decided it was blocking his light."

20c. "Fusilli is fettucini that pissed Leonardo off." 

21. Another potential game idea that's been done for laughs but could also work seriously is taking the Pokémon model and playing it straight, with characters who use summoned familiars to fight, spy, adventure, things like that. Sure, Pokéthulhu is entertaining, but it'd be interesting to see what a creative group of players would do when given the opportunity to fashion unique familiars that serve as their primary enablers in the game.

22. It's interesting to see just how much ground steampunk has gained in geek and even mainstream mindshare for no better reason than "it looks cool." Not that that's a bad reason.

23. The swaying of a snakecharmer's cobra and the swaying of a dancer's hips have a lot in common. It still conjures a bit of a disconnect when someone is trying for the "sexy serpentine" approach to a female aesthetic and the lady in question has admirably wide and shapely hips.

23a. Would it be sexy for a woman to have a cobra's hood markings on the rear of her pants or skirt? I honestly cannot settle on an answer to this.

24. One of the best things you can do for yourself as a creator is to figure out which kind of blank page most compels you to draw or write on it, and what kind of pen screams to you to be used. Few things are as helpful as the urge to write or draw something, anything, whether it's good or not, just for the sake of using your pen on your page (digital or otherwise).

25. That said, there's a plaque on my father's woodworking shop that immortalizes a Tom Stoppard quote: "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful things... Imagination without skill gives us modern art." Or, for that matter, a crappy LJ entry.

HIGHLIFE!




(And that should meet my pop culture reference quota for the year.)

I managed to watch the inauguration thanks to going out to get blood taken. I saw it on a TV set up in the corner of a tiny little roadside diner, the kind where the menu's title page is hand-written in thick marker and they have a faded "Roadkill Cafe" poster on one wall not too far from the folksy kitchen adornments. There were maybe two other customers there when I came in, and none when I left. The volume was up notably loud, turned down only when it was time for the poetry and I went and paid for my cheeseburger basket. Outside it was snowy and bleak, with mostly pickup trucks and other vehicles indigenous to Appalachia out on the roads.

I am feeling incredibly American right now.

I read the Song of Roland a while back. It's an interesting story, and worth a read. It has some fun bits of heroism set out against a starkly racist background — or to be more honest, it's more about culture than race. Though the image of Roland at the pass is very impressive, it's a bit undercut by the insistence that the Saracens are devil-worshippers, hated in the sight of God, all that.

Then I read Orlando Furioso. And let me tell you something: the Italians have it all over the French when it comes to their Charlemagne romances.

It's become one of my favorites, really; it and Orlando Innamorato, to be perfectly honest. I was lucky enough to get a good translation of Furioso in which the translator decided against replicating the poetic form and instead turned it into prose in order to best do justice to the word choices Ariosto made. Eventually, I wound up getting a copy of Innamorato, and was worried that it wouldn't compare. And it's not quite as good — but that by no means implies it's not good. It is.

One of the things I like about the Orlando epics is that they're actually kind of progressive. Sure, you get virtuous virgins and wicked temptresses, but there's this basic love that suffuses the works. Bradamante is allowed to kick copious amounts of ass; Marfisa even more so. Heck, add to this that Marfisa is Saracen, a chaste princess turned warrior knight who winds up fighting on the side of Charlemagne because she is a virtuous pagan. There is the inevitable conversion at the end, but really it's pretty much a footnote; where Song of Roland emphasized the battle between religion, the Orlando works are about characters.

And oh God, the characters. "Saracens" are not, as a whole, portrayed as terrifying bogeymen as much as "the other guys." Rodomonte, on the other hand, makes Darth Vader look like a whiny schoolboy. (Picture me saying this before the prequels had come out for maximum effect.) The guy is a motherfucking Exalted: he runs around at top speed in full armor, leaping from battlement to battlement, slaying entire armies. He is fiery and unlucky in love, the kind of antagonist game masters dream of creating. Orlando spends much of the later poem driven nuts as a result of this wonderful building toward a breaking point — so sure his lady is pure, so sure she loves him best, ever in denial until he finds her secret sex-hideaway where she and her beau have written their plights of troth all over the walls. He's the best warrior Charlemagne has got, and as a heartbroken berserker he's a force of nature.

Of course, then there's Ruggiero. Having beaten a sorcerer-knight, Ruggiero is running around with a shield that is magic. It reflects light such that it stuns one's opponent, and so wearing it one is matchless in jousts. He covers up its reflective surface with a cloth, but after a few tilts the cloth start getting ripped up and it starts functioning. Ruggiero doesn't notice at first, he just wins some more. Then he later finds out that he's won the last few fights because the shield has made him invincible. Now you probably know what the average player character would do: invincible magic weapon, right? Not Ruggiero. Stricken by the thought that his own prowess is in question by winning in such a way, he ties the invincible magic shield to a heavy stone and throws the fucker down a well. Now that is a badass.

And then there's Astolfo. I wouldn't have a blood elf paladin alt on World of Warcraft if not for Astolfo. The English knight is just fantastic: one part brave and faultless, one part comedically short-sighted. He also gets to be epically heroic as well as a source of comedy. Perhaps the best example is when he flies a hippogriff to the moon — you heard me — where he discovers, among other wonders, great portions of men's wits that have gone otherwise missing, in the care of Saint John. (He's looking for Orlando's, you see, which are entirely missing at this point.) Astolfo muses a bit at how surprising it is that such great portions of wits are to be found on the moon and not in men's heads, from men that he knows by reputation. And he does get Orlando's wits back — but bless him, he also has the presence of mind to look for his own name. "He held to his nose the phial containing his wits and they just seemed to make their way back into place. Turpin asserts, it seems, that from there on Astolfo lived sensibly for a long time, until a subsequent caprice of his cost him his wits a second time." If you wonder why it is that I might devote a little time to a blood elf that is one part fearless hero and one part Bertie Wooster, blame Ariosto.

[Edit: I misremembered. Astolfo does not actually fly a hippogriff to the moon. He flies it to the summit of the mountain of Terrestrial Paradise, where he borrows the flaming chariot of Elijah and flies that to the moon. Apologies for my exaggeration.]

There's a reason I never got into Pendragon, I think; I never really went for the romance of the classically miserable, of courtly love that is only at its finest when people are in love with other people they can't have. I like swords and armor and quests and all that, but it wasn't until Orlando that I realized that the Italians basically agreed with me. Poignant love tragedies are all well and good, but there's something I find a bit more inspirational about a story where the hero and the heroine kick ass, and the moralizing is witty and tongue-in-cheek.

(Well, the part about the man forced to fight ten knights in one day and then "service" their ten widows at night, and if he's potent enough to achieve both, then he's allowed to keep his life — I'm not sure there's a moral there. Except maybe "Never make Stamina your dump stat.")

So, new brainstorming exercise I'm playing with. It's actually kind of a bog-standard question: "What is this character's greatest fear?" If it's "new" to me, then I'm probably behind the times, right? Probably. But here's the context:

It starts with a villain. Let's say he's a Scarecrow analogue, which is largely true; Jonathan Crane is one of my favorite Bat-villains, after all. Now, that means he has the power to rip open player characters' heads and actually show them their greatest fears. The trick here, though, is that frequently when you have characters like this, the resulting "let's get a visual look at people's greatest fears" is dreadfully dull. The comic-book solution is usually something like "henchman A is deathly afraid of spiders, henchman B is terrified of heights," etc. Heroes might not be afraid of anything at all (boring!), or they might have Very Heroic fears, like the fear of failing the people they love.

Given the medium of the game, particularly a heroic fantasy/superheroic/both sort of game, you run the risk of having these cinematic but not really compelling fears. Of course, compelling fears can be very freaky, but not necessarily symbolic. Take, for instance, a fear of having your teeth fall out. I think we may all have had nightmares like that, and if someone gave you a dose of fear-gas or phobiamancy and you started seeing your teeth fall like ripe berries from your mouth, it would probably freak you out. But does it say anything about the character? It does, but it's kind of a personal detail like your relationship with your childhood doctor. So it lacks the mythic aspect, in a way. Not at all a problem for a more serious game, but again, the context seems to ask for something a bit more... heraldic, maybe? Fears that magnify the myth of the character.

So, for instance, Geneon Alexandrius, the Scribe. Calligrapher and sorcerer, scroll-maker, bibliophile, scion from a family of librarians, "theme villain". Fire is an obvious fear: libraries burning, all that. But it didn't sit with me. Blindness, though — wow, that one hit me. Loss of vision would be crippling to someone for whom the greatest promise of creativity is a blank sheet of paper and a fresh pen. It also hits below the belt in true nightmare fashion because it's not a fear of pain, it's a fear of helplessness. Not that I'm arguing that blindness equals helplessness, mind — but to someone with his identity tied up in visual things, it might seem that way.

And now it's addictive. What do all my villains fear? What do the supporting cast fear? If said fear-blasting villain were to craft a personal gut-ripping nightmare for them, what would it be like? Would it make for an interesting scene? And if not, how can I tweak it?

It probably says something for me that I do this, and not heart's desires. I suppose I am Autumn at heart, and not Spring. Not so surprising. But then again, I do like Jonathan Crane. Heart's desires can wait for when I figure out how to build a proper wish-twisting genie, and let that sucker wreak some havoc on a game.

Because apparently the castle bundt pan wasn't enough. No, once she proved she'd actually use the thing, and served up slices of delicious crenelated cake to guests, that gave them reason enough to get her the pan for castle cakelettes. So apparently Aileen will also be the master of delicious, delicious wargaming terrain.

And on a wholly unrelated matter, Valkyria Chronicles is fucking awesome. But if you know what Valkyria Chronicles is, you probably already knew that.

One of the things that is tricky to wrap one's head around when one runs multiple games is that different games are built around different ideas of scenes or encounters. Storyteller, for instance, has got a very clear idea of how scenes make up chapters, which in turn make up stories. D&D, on the other hand, has been very meticulous about mapping out encounters as discrete things that are, in and of themselves, the basis of the game. You're expected to have a certain number of encounters before you rest, and one of them may be the big climax one, because resource management is one of the subgames within the system.

Or rather, D&D has become very meticulous about this of late, say, around the time of 3rd edition. Previously, it wasn't about rationing out things by encounter at all. Rather, the "encounter" operated on a different scale. Now, this is distinctly arguable, but I am inclined to believe that the original D&D experience — be it OD&D, AD&D 1e or the good old red box — set things up with a view toward the "encounter" being the entirety of the dungeon. The actual encounters within the dungeon were referred to as such, but they weren't really expected to always have clear boundaries. Rile up the hobgoblins in the watchpost by being too loud and maybe you're fighting the occupants of the next three rooms all in one hectic go. Or maybe you silence them quickly, loot the bodies, encounter over.

There's something to that, I think. Now, I will freely admit that game design has come a long way since the red box, and there are elements of old D&D best left behind (and indeed of even new D&D). But that organic blurring of boundaries between scenes and encounters is intriguing. Like Storyteller, the complexity isn't generally invested in the individual scene or encounter: the complexity comes from the entirety of the story, the whole of the dungeon, the full bore of the plot. Wandering monsters, as anti-narrative a concept as they are, are clearly part of the mindset of taking the long view. That's something that 21st-century D&D seems to have stumbled a bit on; by making individual encounters more detailed and complex, it's a disincentive to blur the lines, to turn a throwaway run-in with 4 kobold pallbearers into a running brawl with half the tribe or to bypass the carefully trapped chamber of the elite guard entirely.

Now, there's a critical weakness to the more organic style of gameplay that I favor — it's really demanding on your ad-lib muscles. Okay, maybe this isn't a critical weakness, because it doesn't stop gaming. It does make it more exhausting to run, though. My lord, though, do I ever find it satisfying. I like how things can branch out in unexpected directions. I like that it gives the players more impact on what's going on and what "encounters" might be cropping up. I wish I could do this with the resilience of my teenage (and also skinny, by the by) self, with all that dang vigor of someone whose metabolism is running amok married to all the guile and cunning you get over the years. Wishes not becoming horses any time soon, though, it's something to work around.

That level of complexity — that's a bugbear, all right. Too little complexity and players don't really have the kind of acute intellectual challenge you hope. Too few details determined ahead of time, and it may be harder to remember what you came up with on the spot last week. But time being the valuable commodity it is, too much is just not right. I sure do enjoy a meticulously planned encounter with a lot of rich detail, but there's so much utility in having the level of complexity be spread out over a "macro-encounter" like a dungeon, a political situation, or a hunting ground. It's a shame that D&D has moved a bit away from achieving both. It used to be really good at that sort of thing. By all means, there are other games, and I can still run even D&D in that fashion with a bit of forethought — but it would be nice if the biggest and most entry-level RPG was one that could more easily foster that organic approach in any hypothetical new players. Particularly if they're young. Because they're primed for that kind of creative energy.