Author Archives: Kevin McFadyen

About Kevin McFadyen

Kevin McFadyen is a world traveller, a poor eater, a happy napper and occasional writer. When not typing frivolously on a keyboard, he is forcing Kait to jump endlessly on her bum knees or attempting to sabotage Derek in the latest boardgame. He prefers Earl Gray to English Breakfast but has been considering whether or not he should adopt a crippling addiction to coffee instead. Happy now, Derek?

I Made A Thing Part 1

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Late post because Rogers Internet is awful and was down all weekend. What can you do?

I was cleaning up some things and stumbled across my old Summoner Wars Alliances box. Yes, this is a Summoner Wars post but the rest of my work is rather disinteresting so deal with it.

I’ve been pretty quiet on this little board game despite spending quite a number of posts covering my thoughts and feelings on it. As it turns out, I was gifted a whole bunch of Netrunner for my birthday and, as such, I’ve been transitioning to picking up that little hobby. I suppose you can expect more discussions on that game design in the future… once I start wrapping my head around it. Alas, Netrunner is a lot more complicated than Summoner Wars so it might take some time before I feel I have any input to make on that game. But between Netrunner and the day-to-day business of life, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to focus on the Summoner Wars. As such, it has started to gather dust quite a bit sooner than I would have anticipated. Thus, imagine my surprise when I opened it up and recalled that I had been busy tinkering away on the little thing.

Thus to the title of this article–I’ve made a thing. Specifically, I’ve created a custom faction for the game.

This started with my misguided attempts to tweak some of the shipped products I wasn’t particularly happy with. Primarily, I was trying to adjust the Tundra Guild so they weren’t quite so disappointing out of the box nor as reliant on cards that I didn’t own in order to stand a chance. As I’ve mentioned before, Summoner Wars is a rather simple game with straight forward systems which makes comparisons between factions and mechanics a lot easier to analyse than in something like Dota 2. Speaking of which, that’s coming up…

Anyway, after coming up with my own variant of the Tundra Guild, my sister was quite eager for me to take a stab at one of her favourite factions–the Mountain Vargath. I don’t know why she likes the little blighters but their performance in our games had always been underwhelming. I wasn’t originally going to tackle the challenge but once I started tweaking the Tundra Guild I struck a wellspring of ideas and couldn’t resist toying with her request.

I’m not going to post the products of either of those, however. They ended up being sufficiently different that I felt it was more appropriate to simply go ahead and treat them like unique factions all on their own. So, I created a “reinforcement pack” for my newly christened Sylvan Vargath and even went so far as to make a second summoner. It is this deck that I wish to post because I feel that it has the freshest ideas as I was unshackled from trying to tweak existing mechanics and concepts. I was free to explore any design space I cared for and after playing with them a little, I think there’s something valuable in what I produced.

Do note, I have not sufficiently tested these cards to say they’re balanced. As mentioned, our interest in Summoner Wars has waned to the point that we don’t really play it anymore. Which is a pity because I think there’s quite a lot of opportunity available now that we’ve broken the gate on personal modifications and house rules that could take the game into really fascinating areas. Anyway, this is my disclaimer that I wouldn’t try and sell this deck in the state it’s in. There’s probably a bit more number tweaking left to truly align it with the rest of the game. But here’s what I made and my thoughts behind it.

Accessed from http://www.wga.hu/framex-e.html?file=html/a/altdorfe/1/1satyr.html

Landscape with Satyr Family by Albrecht Altdorfer (1507).
Obviously, as a custom creation, I don’t have any art to go along with these cards so you’ll have to use your imagination. I did find art for the cards but that’s obviously under copyright so here’s more classic paintings!

Andrasteia (2R-6W-Inescapable Night)

Inescapable Night – Enemy Units that start their turn within 2 spaces of Andrasteia can only move up to 1 space on their turn.

Well, no better place to start the preview than the summoner herself. I designed Andrasteia with all the tweaks that I made to the original Mountain Vargath in mind. She was, from inception, a second summoner so a number of her design elements take into account the abilities and play style of that first faction. It may make explanations a little more difficult but I’ll try to be as clear as possible when explaining my thought process.

First thing to notice is that Andrasteia has the standard summoner statistics. If I had taken a census, I don’t remember it now but I wouldn’t be surprised to find the majority of the summoners in the game to have six health and two ranged attack. Normally, this wouldn’t be noteworthy except I want to draw specific attention to Andrasteia’s ranged attack. Since I was trying to create a faction that my sister would like, I was restricted into trying to create a deck whose primary strategy would align with her preferred play style. Which is to say, the Sylvan Vargath have to be a rush down deck. My sister likes moving pieces across the board and pummeling her enemy’s face. Unfortunately, this strategy is one of the weakest in the game. One of the more successful implementations of it is the Cave Goblin Frick. But he relies on zero cost commons and extra attacks to overcome the inherent advantage a defensive player gets with instantaneous reinforcement and superior positioning. I couldn’t just copy the same formula but I also had to make sure that I didn’t inadvertently make something that would be better at defence than offence.

Thus, I focused on the Vargath design of goats and came up with the idea of ‘The Herd.’ The way the original summoner works is by making a very tight, compact phalanx of troops that are so robust they can weather a passive enemy’s defence but were near entirely melee focused so had to rush towards them if they stood any chance of winning. In the original deck, there is but a single card with the bow symbol and it’s an overpriced champion. In this deck, I decided I’d give the sole ranged option to the summoner herself. Part of this bled from a thematic perspective. The original Sylvan Vargath are all about camaraderie and cooperation. Andrasteia, I knew, was going to be the faction’s dark half. She was the outcast and, as such, she would eschew all the noble ideals of her society. Whereas the first summoner wants honourable man-to-man combat, Andrasteia was all about pitiless results and brutal efficiency. Thus, she didn’t want to be in the thick of the battle like her predecessor but nor did I want her hiding in a corner either. I wanted her to be in the middle of the board, a design space wholly neglected at that point.

So how do I balance that? Well, giving her a ranged attack will keep her from the very front lines. But I needed something that would encourage her to creep out of the furthest row. Enter the Inescapable Night.

Phew, what an ability. To be honest, I’m not one hundred percent satisfied with it. The purpose behind it is to lend some sort of superiority when the Sylvan Vargath get into their desired board state. Specifically, once they’ve locked their opponents down in melee combat, they need some sort of bonus that puts things more in their favour. Typically, melee units have far greater attack power and health, so they’re more likely to win one-on-one engagements. Unfortunately, it’s rare that combat is ever one card against one. Part of the difficulty of a rush down faction is that ranged units will add extra dice against melee targets. Especially when you’re taking the fight on their side of the board and giving them more territory to maneuver in. This is compounded further by events and card abilities.

Inescapable Night toys with that. Units caught within that short bubble around Andrasteia aren’t going anywhere.  With properly positioned bodyguards, it makes it really difficult for opponents to flank or surround Andrasteia. It also–as the name implies–makes fleeing from her very difficult. In some instances, it becomes impossible. This is to play up the design idea of Andrasteia’s cruelty. So it’s trying to hit both flavour and design goals. Only issue is, I’m not certain it really makes it. The problem is, extend the radius on the ability and it will be too powerful. Make it too short and it’s nigh useless. I’m not certain there are enough spaces in Summoner Wars for Inescapable Night to hit that sweet spot. I erred on the side of making it too short otherwise the ability could win games all on its own.

This is certainly one aspect I’d like to re-examine and tinker with before I declared it final. But as a design concept–hindering the opponent’s movement in order to grant yourself an advantage–I kind of like. It also means that in certain late game match-ups, Andrasteia can be a titan on her own as weakened summoners will be unable to run away or attack from a distance in order to achieve victory.

But what good is a summoner without some events?

Pitiless Retribution (3) – Add 1 wound to every enemy Unit adjacent to a wounded Sylvan Vargath Unit that you control.

I feel that the most successful melee factions are ones that out wound their opponents. I suppose that could be said about every faction since wounds are the only way to win a game of Summoner Wars. More specifically, to overcome the positional advantage of ranged units, melee units should be able to wound on average more often than their ranged counterparts. The power of ranged units is that they get to–essentially–make a free attack against their enemy. If both cards are throwing equal number of dice, the ranged unit will win through greater successes because they’ll get more attacks to make. This arises because there’s no penalty to a ranged unit engaging a card in melee distance. Typically, ranged units have lower attack than their melee counterparts but with the numerous different cards released, there’s a number of factions that shore this weakness up rather handedly. Fallen Kingdom Warlocks, Sand Goblin Shamans and Javelineers are examples where this “balance” doesn’t hold. This wouldn’t be an issue if melee units had more tools and that’s where Pitiless Retribution comes in.

The Sylvan Vargath hold to the Vargath design of having hardier commons than normal. There’s not a single one health unit amongst the lot of them. This means they’re more apt to get into melee range (especially if you start to consider the reinforcement cards I created). Pitiless Retribution punishes every failed wound from the enemy. With three in the deck, you’re apt to draw one and, depending on timing and positioning, it can be quite a lot of free wounds. In practice, it’s closer to Greater Burn. You’re most likely to play it when you can achieve two wounds. Unlike Greater Burn, however, you can’t place them on the same target. Alas but another design goal was to push more towards common focus gameplay.

There’s a second element I want to draw attention to and that’s the wounded Sylvan Vargath trigger. Keep an eye on this as it’s a central theme to the Andrasteia deck.

Shroud of the Mother (2) – Any Common Sylvan Vargath Unit you control which is not adjacent to an enemy Unit may be placed adjacent to a Unit within 2 spaces of Andrasteia. 

Positioning, positioning, positioning. The first Sylvan Vargath summoner looked at being a good rush down faction by granting units extra movements over their opponents. I think every melee faction is going to need extra help in getting their forces into the enemy’s faces if they want to succeed. Shroud I wanted to tie into Andrasteia’s darkness and give some thematic idea that she’s pulling her forces through this malevolent night and attacking from all angles to confuse and disorient her prey. I also wanted to grant this ability as much flexibility as possible. It can be great for reinforcing a forward push with freshly summoned units (assuming Andrasteia is in that sweet middle board spot) or it can save stranded members of The Herd that may have been isolated–assuming they aren’t already engaging their opponent in mortal combat. Finally, it needed the added flexibility of transporting units right beside Andrasteia in case she does get surrounded by being in that dangerous territory close to her enemy’s walls.

With only two in the deck, however, it’s not really a card you can rely on. It’s tempting to carrying it in your hand but it can also doom you to stuffing your draw while you wait for the most opportune moment to play. I think this finicky aspect of it keeps it balanced despite it being a super charged Fall Back.

Outcast’s Mercy (1) – Do not play this Event during your Event Phase. Instead, when Andrasteia wounds an enemy Unit, you may play this event to remove up to 2 wounds from Andrasteia and place them on her target.

Yikes!

What I always wanted from Summoner Wars was for one off events to feel really “ultimate.” I wanted these cards which you can only ever have one of to really impact the game like your opponent just lay down his trump card. That’s not what we have, though. Instead, things like A Hero is Born are the sort of standard for single events. They’re basically auto builds since they’re so niche in their application that the one magic far outweighs whatever ability is lost from not playing.

Thus, Mercy is meant to bring that wow factor. This card is an auto two wounds (so a Greater Burn) plus a heal wrapped in one. I knew I needed some sort of healing, otherwise frontline summoners simply don’t stand a chance without a huge health pool. I do like that Summoner Wars is very strict about its healing options for summoners, though. Essentially, this is a game whose economy is in wounds. You have to have hard restrictions on who can abuse that. Most discourse circles around the game’s costs in magic but really, all magic is funneled towards creating wounds. Mercy gives you a four wound swing on the most valuable unit. It also, once again, strengthens Andrasteia’s late game potential. If the match comes down to a slug fest as Mercy hasn’t come out, you’ll probably lose the showdown.

It’s also an ability that does nothing if Andrasteia isn’t wounded. You need to be hurt in order to give hurt, reinforcing that theme again and again. This is a card that will stuff your hand because its potential only increases as the game goes on. Statistically speaking, you need nine dice in order to drop Andrasteia in one turn and those scenarios are very hard to create. But leaving a wounded Andrasteia is asking yourself to get a large blow back on the following round. I love when things can create hard decisions for players.

Accessed from http://www.wga.hu/art/r/rubens/32mythol/32mythol.jpg

Two Satyrs but Peter Paul Rubens (1618-1619).
I don’t like anthropomorphic creatures but I didn’t want to completely remove the connection to the Mountain Vargath either. I settled for a middle ground, creating my Sylvan Vargath as satyrs. This, naturally, necessitated naming them all with Ancient Greek names.

Glimpsed Fate (3) – Do not play this Event during your Event Phase. Instead, when a Sylvan Vargath Common you control adjacent to Andrasteia is placed in the opponent’s magic pile, you may place a Child of Nyx from your Conjuration Pile on that space if able.

Child of Nyx (1M-4W-Being of Night)

Being of Night – At the end of each player’s turn, place 1 wound on a Unit up to 3 clear straight line spaces from this Child of Nyx. If you cannot, place 1 wound on this Child of Nyx.

Yes, Andrasteia has a conjuration pile. Yes, I lied about Andrasteia being the only ranged unit in the game. Yes, the Child is amazing.

Honestly, this card seems bananas. Even looking at it now I still think it’s ludicrous. But I wouldn’t change it. It’s the strongest conjuration with four health but that is a hefty challenge to get it on the board. Just take a moment to appreciate all the triggers that are needed:

1. Friendly Sylvan Vargath Common – restricts mercenary usage and champions

2. Adjacency – only playable if you’re getting swamped or you’re playing with bodyguards thus positioning needs to be exact.

3. Opponent’s Magic Pile – this only occurs at your enemy’s behest.

Point three is really key here. Anyone that’s played against the faction before will have the prior knowledge to know that any wounded unit hugging the outcast is looking to summon in a baby. This can be played around. And since Andrasteia has no ranged units, the onus is on the Sylvan Vargath player to make the scenario too drastic for the enemy to not want the child to be summoned. However, since its ability triggers at the end of both player’s turns, you have that double edged sword effect. You can get two wounds from this guy on your turn–one of which can’t be avoided–but your opponent can arrange his units so you get hurt at the end of his turn. This guy is a wound spitter but he’s indiscriminate about who he spits on.

Also, since the unit has to die beside Andrasteia, there are a number of scenarios that can arise where Andrasteia takes the first wound from his appearance.

Obviously, it’s not all bad, however. Four wounds for no magic is a steal (well, one magic from playing the event I suppose). As I mentioned, he’s a potential three wounds per the Sylvan Vargath player’s rounds too (one for each end of turn and his own attack). A 3/4 for 0 is silly good. Also, those auto-wounds can really benefit you as well. Remember Mercy needs Andrasteia to be injured, so soaking a few of the Child’s hits is fine. You can also set up Retributions from units the opponent wasn’t wounding. We’ll also see another beneficial interaction in the commons where self wounds add more benefits.

Really, the Child brings home the whole deck’s design. It plays with the economy of wounds like no other and it generates those wounds at a ludicrous pace. But those trigger conditions are not to be underestimated. It is tricky getting them out on the board. And you really need to bury any delusions you have of three of these guys dominating the field. The event will clog your hand, especially if you’re trying to set up the other tricky to trigger events in the deck. Plus, these things do nothing against walls and will kill themselves after a certain number of rounds. They feel so strong when you pull them off but it doesn’t take long for you to realize the downsides of the card and how it can be abused by both you and your enemy.

Tune in next week to see the meat of the deck: the champions and commons!

Never Stop Running

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Alright, the website has been a little remiss but I want to point out it’s been seven years since Derek posted. So, no matter how neglectful I get, Derek’s worse. But that’s probably a good metric for life in general.

Part of the problem with posting is that I have so very little to write for you, world. Life is. Unfortunately, until I become an international man of mystery, that means that the day to day drudgery is rather dull. It’s also the middle of the summer, so outside of me constantly complaining how hot it is, there isn’t a whole lot of culture to comment on.

Unless people would like to listen to me complain about the latest blockbuster release and why it’s bad and everyone should feel bad for enjoying it.

Well, today I do have something to comment on and it is tied to summer and heat. I’ve recently finished Harebrained Schemes’ original Shadowrun Returns reboot. This was my splurge purchase during the always excitingly disappointing Steam Summer Sale. At the very least, Derek was forced to pick up Dungeon Siege III so there’s that to look forward to on the horizon.

I should give full disclosure that I knew absolutely nothing about Shadowrun when I picked these up. Mostly, I’ve been salivating over the Xcom sequel news and broke down on this purchase because some people advertise it as Xcom-lite. It has nothing to do with Xcom save for sharing a similar combat mode so I won’t spend much time on the comparison. I merely want to paint a picture of my humble beginnings before digging in.

Accessed from http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/234650/header.jpg?t=1432226421

Shadowrun Returns belongs to Harebrained Schemes, Fantasy Productions and whoever else is involved.

Shadowrun Returns is a kickstarter game based on an apparently successful table-top roleplaying series. Honestly, I had never heard of it beyond some luke-warm first-person shooter that was released eight or so years ago. If I had to describe what Shadowrun is, I’d say it’s a bizarre mash-up of Netrunner and Dungeons and Dragons. Which is an unfair comparison since it’s suppose to be a riff of Neuromancer and Dungeons and Dragons. Poor Gibson, you likely hated this derivative drivel and already your contributions to the genre are being pushed out. I feel a little sad, except I don’t remember Neuromancer very well and, quite frankly, your contributions beyond that haven’t really been as influential. But when you birth a genre with your first novel, it’s unavoidable that everything following will be overshadowed.

Perhaps there’s an article on that somewhere…

Nevertheless, Shadowrun is cyberpunk and, unsurprisingly, it was birthed during cyberpunk’s heydays of the early nineties. This is when all those delightfully pessimistic attitudes and themes of the eighties started to bear fruit: the wide-spread technological upheaval of the world wide web became a reality, corporate interests like Monsanto demonstrated moustache twirling villainy in regards to genetics and the environment and science started tearing apart DNA with the cloning of a sheep and the Human Genome Project. It was like we were on a crash course directly into the heart of Blade Runner. So when you take two popular forms of entertainment from the era and squish them together, it doesn’t shock anyone that the attitude of the one created during that time dominates the colouring of the other.

So, yes, Shadowrun unabashedly rips from Dungeons and Dragons with its wide-spread usage of fantasy tropes. We have elves, dwarves and trolls on display bearing all the hallmarks of a good Tolkienesque heritage with our surly stout dwarves and tall but haughty elves. Dragons are kicking around too, leaning very heavily on that hoarding aspect of Smaug and the Lonely Mountain. All of this is given that delightful gritty eighties twist, however. Dragons look to hoard their wealth the corporate mergers and acquisitions. Cybernetic enhancements give street warriors new strength but cut them off from the natural powers of magic and shamanism. Even the titular shadowrun is a branch of society devoted to the balance of corporate power–a black operation committed against an organization in order to steal data for a mysterious client who has a rather nasty tendency for being a rival corporate interest.

There’s that bleak dystopic inevitability on display. The little people are lost to the power shuffles of the mega-rich as they war over research and development for products that have zero intention of ever being released to a global market. The corporations are the new government, made explicit by the fact that there’s (apparently) no such thing as a police force. It’s all private security and para-military organizations exchanging blows within slick lobbies and office buildings. Society itself is stratified into two layers: the “free” people that make up the poor or unaffiliated shadowrunners and the corporate wage-slaves that do the grunge work of whatever corporate people do. Given the strong nineties anarchistic bent, Shadowrun Returns keeps its lens squarely on the romanticism of the unaffiliated shadowrunners and if you aren’t putting bullets or spells into hired security muscle then your unarmed corporate workers are always innocuously absent from the scene.

Shadowrun Returns is an interesting little project separated into two distinct entities: Dead Man’s Switch and Dragonfall. The first comes across more as a proof of concept. This is clearly the kickstarter game and its story seems more cobbled together as a demonstration of what can be done in an engine that appears to be very user content driven. Dragonfall, on the other hand, is a much more directed experience and a completed package you’d expect from a studio release.

And yet, I’m not entirely sure which I like best. They both have a different feel to them, carrying separate strengths and flaws. Overall, I’d probably give it to Dragonfall for being a more complete experience but I’ll try and give a brief run-down of both.

To start, there’s a persistent issue I have with both games and that is in the developers underlying assumption that the player has any idea of what Shadowrun is. I didn’t, and I had to consult online wikipedias in order to grasp concepts and terms which were thrown casually and haphazardly around. Part of the issue arises from the fact that Dead Man’s Switch is very cyberpunk that understanding the disparate fantasy elements is neither intuitive or apparent. Dead Man’s Switch focuses squarely on the player, its story following a very film noir arc of a lone individual trying to solve a murder. The player is hired, amusingly enough, by the victim himself who had the dead man’s switch installed to essentially release a video contacting you about his demise and promising a vast sum of money if you can locate his killer. You were both associates in a prior shadowrunning troupe but the game gratefully leaves your relationship and motivation for this investigation up to you.

So for the first half of the game, you’re basically playing private detective. Unfortunately, you’re playing private detective in a world that keeps yammering on about “shadowruns. leylines, otherworldly spirits and metahumans.” None of these terms are explained or even made clear in context, though the game is far too gleeful to remind you that this takes place on planet Earth and very specifically in Seattle. You can’t really use any of your real world knowledge to navigate this, however, since Seattle is (or maybe) half split with some magical kingdom called Tir Na Nog? I don’t know and the game doesn’t care to tell you though it does go through the effort of saying these things exist anyway.

Acessed from http://www.harebrained-schemes.com.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/directorsCutKeyArt1920.jpgDragonfall is far better about explaining what shadowrunning is and who shadowrunners are. Its greatest strength is focusing on delivering what this conceit is for the player as the majority of the game revolves around you doing disparate jobs often obtained over shadowland bbs communications (which I’m guess is the game’s equivalent to “the deep web”). You have a handler and a staple number of runners to chose from for your missions and there’s some back and forth between different employers and their conflicting aims. The structure of Dragonfall is way better at introducing important elements of the world–like the aforementioned meddling dragons–but this comes at the sacrifice of Dead Man’s Switch more stylistic presentation. There’s a fair bit of character that’s lost in the do a mission, cash it in, get hired for next mission structure. And while I liked the inclusion of more permanent members for each of your jobs, I found their execution was a little too predictable. After every mission you saddle up to your companions and work through the prerequisite snippets of their life story until you learn enough to go on a personal loyalty mission and get them upgraded for the final fight. It’s very BioWare in its execution and it comes across as more cold and sterile than Dead Man’s Switches characters who show up briefly and only to perform missions personally relevant to them before they wander off.

The biggest hurdle for both games, however, comes in their final acts. Dead Man’s Switch does a massive heel turn in terms of narrative halfway through when you unexpectedly solve the murder but there’s this greater “massive conspiracy” underlying it all. This conspiracy involves Lovecraftian horrors and seems more concerned with a bizarre departure from the more focused personal tale to reframe the entire game on a horribly stereotypical “save the world” plot. Dragonfall, while initially couching the game in very obvious “big world problems” from the onset still tumbles into a story that’s more aligned towards some epic fantasy narrative that is far too discordant with all the quiet shadowruns and personal tales that lead up to it.

I think this is where the game and conceit really falters. At the end of the day, Dungeons and Dragons isn’t cyberpunk. It’s epic fantasy. You don’t get personal tales of a lowly merchant or peasant’s day to day struggles beneath cruel but not villainous magistrates. You kill sorcerer-kings. You fight gods. You hop between worlds and stop the ascension of mad liches. In Dungeons and Dragons, every day the world is threatened and adventurers need to pop up and rescue it. You are a powerful, enabled force that reaffirms truth and justice can make the world a better place against inextricable evil.

There’s no room for dystopia in D&D. Likewise, there’s no room for hope in cyberpunk. Not on this grand scale. No matter what you do in Shadowrun, you’re always reminded, at the very end, it’s rather irrelevant. The dragons and megacorporations win no matter what you do because they have all the power. You can be the biggest, baddest mage but it means nothing in the face of billions of dollars of net worth. You can hack all the servers you want but you won’t move nations with a single phone call. Taking out an entire corporate branch is basically chopping off the head of the hydra: two more are only going to spring forth elsewhere.

Shadowrun tries to strike a balance between this optimism and pessimism but it’s never well executed. The world is too cyberpunk for the dungeons and dragons power fantasy to really fit. It comes across as hollow and ultimately silly. Shadowrun is at its best when it’s going full tilt on its cyberpunk influences but that makes all the mages, orcs and spirit nonsense stand out in such bizarre relief. You can take the best parts of Shadowrun and strip them of all that Tolkien flavour and they’d be just as good. The elves and dragons don’t add anything.  It doesn’t even try to use fantasy races to explore social issues since you still have Turkish, African and Chinese elves, dwarves, trolls and whatnot. There is racism driven by these fantastic races but it doesn’t work when amongst those races you have real life issues of ethnicity and culture that has, seemingly, been magically forgotten in people’s prejudices.

I really liked Shadowrun Returns. Truthfully, despite all my complaining. It’s a solid roleplaying game in a market where roleplaying games have fallen from favour for distilled, cinematic, BioWare-tinged nonsense. But what I really like about Shadowrun is that it’s basically Netrunner with a bunch of silliness tacked on. It made me realize that I just want a pure cyberpunk roleplaying game free of the genre tropes of epic fantasy. If I could have a personal focused story of a ragtag group of vigilantes trying to get by beneath the oppressive omnipresence of a faceless, uncaring corporate world then I would be in heaven.

Harebrained Schemes has announced the next instalment of their Shadowrun series. It takes place in Hong Kong. I’ll definitely be picking it up since the games have been improving with each iteration. And they’re good fun. Mindless but good fun. I’ll still be playing a decker, however, hoping to fulfil that dream of being a world renown hacker that trashes the corporations secrets and exposes their filthy agendas to an ultimately uncaring world. It’s just half of those secrets are going to end up being sex scandals with dragons.

I, Spy

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I saw the new Spy.

It’s a Melissa McCarthy movie.

Accessed from http://cdn.film-book.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gold-melissa-mccarthy-spy-movie-poster-01-2025x3000.jpg

Spy is a Chernin Entertainment, 20th Century Fox and Feigco Entertainment movie directed by Paul Feig. They own it, not I.

Actually, that’s not accurate. As Derek described it, it’s someone trying to do a two hour Archer episode focused solely on Pam and Cheryl. Which, on one hand I really like Archer but it’s a bit much for two straight hours.

I make reference to it being a Melissa McCarthy movie since the only point of comparison I have is Bridesmaids. I liked Bridesmaids but there’s a tendency for that type of humour to devolve into the lowest common denominator kind of jokes. Which is to say there’s a fair bit of toilet humour or people falling down shticks. The toilet humour was definitely prevalent in Bridesmaids and the people falling down rode strong in Spy.

It’s also a movie that is quite fond of swearing. I’m not a Victorian prude but that gag certainly wore itself out much faster than the movie thought it did. Jason Stathom’s character nearly hinges on basically being loud and obscene for most of his moments and there’s a second act turn when Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy) relies on some quick improvisation to rescue her rather flimsy cover and goes with a foul mouthed body-guard explanation which overstays its welcome.

Overall, it’s an okay movie. I had some laughs with it, at it and then at the audience.

What it is not, however, is a good satire of the spy movie genre.

I think that’s the biggest disappointment for me. Granted, I knew little about the film and it wouldn’t have registered at all on my radar had I not heard that it was scoring so well on critic reviews. It’s hardly the first to take jabs at the genre which holds James Bond as one of the defining movie franchises. Even Kingsman takes many a potshot at international espionage and men of mystery.

Generally speaking, I find that spoofs of the spy genre end up falling a bit flat. The best of the bunch–in my opinion–is Archer and it keeps itself going by leaving a lot of the spy elements as dressing and dipping in and out of a half-serious, half-joking action motif. The few other success stories follow a similar pattern: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Red or even Burn After Reading. They certainly have a lot of tongue-in-cheek moments but they still treat their narrative with just the right amount of gravitas that it doesn’t devolve entirely into a Three Stooges type slapstick farce.

And I think that’s the tricky part of doing spoofs of spy movies. As I’ve mentioned, James Bond is really the big flagship for the genre but–and I say this as a massive James Bond fan–the series is half a joke. It’s filled with its own cliches and tropes that it pokes fun at enough times that it’s often times a parody of itself. It’s hard to satire something that’s already making fun of itself and certainly hard to keep it up for an entire original piece.

The best satires usually work by pointing out the flaws of genres or trends which are popular and unaware of their own weaknesses. Murder by Death and Clue work as great spoofs of the mystery detective genre because it takes all the dowdy seriousness and spins it on its head. It can stick its tongue out at the irritating habits that crop up in those genres. like detectives taking incredible leaps of logic, confusing final reveals designed solely to bedazzle its readership or the oft times mindless pile of bodies that accrue in an investigation because the original works pull those tricks again and again without even being aware of stereotypes they’re fulfilling.

The spy genre, unfortunately, doesn’t have these ubiquitous elements to lampoon because they, themselves, are not ubiquitous. Sure, we can make fun of James Bond tropes but those tropes aren’t universal amongst the handful of spy movies that get released. For example, a common scene to parody in these types of movies is the James Bond gets new equipment from Q moments. And while there’s plenty of standard elements amongst the Bond series for how these scenes play out, you’re not going to find them anywhere in things like the Bourne Identity, Cambridge Spies or Argo. But sure enough, the scene crops up in Spy like clockwork, focusing its time on pointing out how ludicrous a meeting with some technowizard like division would be in a spy agency despite the fact that it’s almost always played for cheese laughs in the Bonds in the first place.

Thus what ends up happening is that the laughs feel rather cheap. It’s a lot of going through the motions in Spy without really bringing anything to the table. A number of the jokes also hinge on the fact that Melissa McCarthy is a large woman and puts emphasis on how “gross” that is, either through constantly giving her undesirable and socially outcast cover identities or filling her gadget gear with things like haemorrhoid wipe pads.

It’s very American in its comedy, so if we’re not talking about stool solvents or rodent scat, we’re dropping vulgarity for the sake of padding out dialogue or flashing photographs of a person’s genitalia. And when you’re right out of ideas about what to do next, have an incredibly awkward and incongruous celebrity guest appearance and milk that for a few empty laughs more.

Which is a shame, because there is a workable concept in there. There’s a couple of times when Melissa McCarthy does do some decent action-spy elements that, had it been a greater focus, would have worked better. There’s a scene where she gets her handler to cut the power to a casino so that she can take out a squad of armed thugs in the dark without blowing her cover which, had the movie decided to lean on that trope more, I feel could have been a stronger narrative.

Accessed from http://i.ytimg.com/vi/mPyYEqYSo9A/maxresdefault.jpgOn the other hand, this could simply be me just wanting there to be more spy movies because it’s a genre that’s basically died out. This movie certainly found its audience and is pleasing someone despite how cheap it is most of the time. It could very well be a case of “not for me” with a side dash of “wanting what’s not around any more.”

But I don’t think I’m alone. Sure, Archer is hardly the definition of high-brow comedy but it still works. I think there’s interest in the spy genre outside of slapstick American comedy.

We’ll probably have to wait for the superhero craze to die out before that sees a resurgence though. The action genre is pretty dominated by that subculture for the moment and they’re unrelenting in their stranglehold on the comedy-action scene. One day, though… one day.

Narrative, Video Games and You

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Accessed from http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/2008/11/25/fallout3_dogmeat.jpg

Fallout 3 belongs to Bethesda Studios, Zenimax and whoever.

“Let’s go, pal.”

These immortal words set the world on fire. At least, they did in my small corner of the intertubes that deals with video games as fans the country over rejoiced at the announcement of the long awaited Fallout 4.

You see, over the last week the video game industry has been holding their annual trade fair show: the Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3). This is little more than console developers and big publishing studios’ chance to put out a metric tonne of advertising and build hype for upcoming titles meant to push units and sales. It’s big. It’s glamourous and it’s entirely not for me.

You see, I’m a PC gamer which means I primarily enjoy my little hobby on my personal computer instead of utilizing one of the many handheld and dedicated machines built to solely play these morsels of amusement. I am primarily stuck to this “one console” lifestyle due to an element of cost. It’s not financially feasible for me to purchase every single platform which can run these video games and so I stick with the one that has the broadest options and the lowest cost. The fact that I need to have a computer anyway makes this a no brainer in terms of decision making.

As a PC gamer, however, E3 has spent most of its years quite joyfully ignoring me.

I don’t begrudge them by any means. The show is what it’s meant to be: a massive marketing ploy funded by the big companies willing to throw enough money at it. I pay a little attention to the trade fair for the select few games that would be ported to the PC a year later.

Well, this year things were different! This year they had a PC conference! And then they went and promptly showed multi-platform games that are primarily console focused and will be ported to PC later. Needless to say, I didn’t watch.

I did hear that Bethesda finally announced Fallout 4 and I did watch the trailer.

And now, here we are.

For the world’s quickest summary on the Fallout franchise and why I’m discussing it now: Fallout was originally a isometric role-playing game produced by Interplay and developed by Black Isle Studios back in the days when Interplay existed and Black Isle Studios was still around. The franchise was inspired by Wasteland which, in turn, was inspired by Mad Max in dropping the player into a world ravaged by a massive nuclear apocalypse. The primary difference between Fallout and Wasteland is the visual aesthetic. Wasteland projected a world that was created when the bombs landed during the grim and gritty 1980s. Fallout envisioned a world lost in the far more incongruous 1950s.

Needless to say, I’ve enjoyed Fallout more than Wasteland because of the anachronistic element that, for the most part, was better executed in the original Fallout and Fallout 2. However, Interplay died as video game companies are wont to do and the IP sort of floated in limbo for many years until Bethesda snatched it up.

Bethesda then released a rather successful third person shooter/action role-playing game Fallout 3 that, outside of sharing the visual elements, setting and lore had really nothing else in common with its prior games. It was… ok. I enjoyed it when it first released but it’s certainly not aged well. It’s a mixed bag made all the worse by the fact that Obsidian Entertainment got to do a spin-off of sorts in Fallout: New Vegas.

Accessed from http://games.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/dialogue_wheel.jpg

Mass Effect and its wonderful wheel belongs to BioWare and EA and whatnot.

This ended up being everything that Fallout 3 was not. I loved it and you can read my reviews on its DLC somewhere in these archives.

That’s a long story short. So what does this have to do with the opening quote?

Well, Bethesda’s reveal trailer for their next instalment ends with the protagonist uttering those lines to his faithful canine companion.

And that has me in a furor.

I do not like voice acting. It has been an ever expanding and ever popular development in video games. People praise it for increasing their immersion with the medium. Companies spend big bucks hiring named actors to read a handful of lines so they can advertise that Sean Bean or Patrick Stewart or whoever is in their latest release. The player then gets to listen to upwards of twenty to forty hours of Nolan North voicing the main character and then a handful of three or four people voicing every single other person that you meet. Which wouldn’t be a problem if you only ever meet three or four other people but by the time you’ve come across your third city populated with the uncannily same voiced citizens you either wonder if the world has developed instantaneous transportation or why mimicry seems to be the past-time of choice for its minor characters.

I understand the love for voice acting. It lets people forget for a moment that they’re playing a video game and buy into the illusion that they’re playing a really lengthy movie. The problem is that video games aren’t movies and shouldn’t ever have made that their goal.

Now, I’m not going to try and argue that voice acting can’t bring value to the medium. One of my most cherished games is Baldur’s Gate and it has voice acting. It has some of the best and I can’t help but still recall some of the more powerful speeches given by its primary antagonist and just how spot on the actor delivered them. But for every Baldur’s Gate, there’s a dozen Deus Ex games where it’s distracting, aggravating and possibly controversial.

And much like everything else, the real use of voice acting needs to be focused on playing to the medium’s strength rather than trying to co-adopt techniques from elsewhere wholesale without any concern for its impact on the product. This brings me to the reason why I loathe seeing voice acting. In role-playing games–a genre that’s already well beyond a movie’s experience as those that are twenty hours in length are generally considered “too short”–the addition of full voice acting for every character heavily detracts from the main draw of the game. For every line that needs to be voiced, there is way more than a dozen of lines that have to be cut due to file size and cost of production reasons. Voice acting really bloats the memory usage of a game and pushes against the technological limits that our current computers can maintain. It also puts monetary strain on developer’s budgets that now have to pay actors for every line delivered. So, to increase the ever popular “immersion” of a play, the developer must sacrifice options and length.

If I’m ever given a choice between depth of experience or “ermersion,” well I think my choice would be rather clear.

The irony, of course, is that people always bemoan how the modern role-playing games are often filled with cliches and shallow plots. Well, part of the reason for this is your demands to have everything voice necessitates that your options are extremely reduced down to an inconsequential option between three “attitudes” that all say the same but let you say it nicely, neutrally, or dickishly.

However, even if we were somehow able to handwave away the practicality of voicing every piece of dialogue and somehow made it a non-issue (whether through the magic of technology or accepting that unvoiced is superior) it, ultimately, wouldn’t address why video game stories can’t compete with novels.

The real reason plots are paper thin and contradictory while characters are shallow and stereotypical is because there is no environment in the video game industry for producing great stories. Unlike a novel where the focus is placed primarily on character interactions, motivations and world pressures, the onus first and foremost for games is being games. Thus, the majority of the development is placed on rendering and bringing to life all the game systems, physics, lightning and technical doodads that bring a digital environment to life. We’re looking at an industry that has teams of hundreds of people working to create a project. How many of those are going to be writers? Probably less than 1%.

Accessed from http://i.ytimg.com/vi/He09JaBVZdE/maxresdefault.jpg

Deus Ex belongs to Eidos though it’s best Chinese voice acting is still in Ion Storm’s hands.

And if we chose to solely focus on role-playing games, the genre that arguably has the most people working as writers in it, things become even more bleak. While we will have more people working together to give words to voices scattered all across the wasteland, the sheer organizational and manpower requirements necessary to fill them all with good voices is practically impossible. The reason that novels work is because there are few “cooks in the kitchen” so to speak. You can keep consistent voice and tone when you have one or two people overseeing it. When you need three writers just to fill one city and start including the writers that are tasked with creating the companion characters, major quests, major locations, minor locations, minor quests, primary villains and whatnot… well the number of competing voices starts to create a traffic jam of different hands in the pot.

So, yeah, I’m disappointed to see Bethesda opt to create their new game with a voiced protagonist because it places an emphasis on writing that they never were capable of achieving in the first place. Having actors try in vain to bring non-nonsensical writing to life simply makes the experience awkward. On the other hand, Bethesda doesn’t really have the ability to make a strong story experience without voice acting either so it’s really a moot issue in the end.

So what’s the solution? Ultimately, I don’t know. I know I’ve been scaling back my expectations and I’m no longer looking for improvement in narrative and writing within video games. I think that expectation was wrong in the first place. I’ve ranted before about how the nature of television creates poor story structure and it’s unfortunate that video games share a similar fate. This isn’t to say some of it can’t be interesting, however. I still enjoy Obsidian’s work and there are a handful of talented writers in the industry. The simple fact is, however, when someone says they want a game with a “good story” and I hear a person reply back with “well, read a book” I don’t think I’m going to argue that response.

Our expectations for what makes a good story simply cannot be met in a digital space. However, I do think there is room to grow. The one element that video games beat out all other mediums is in that dreaded “immersion” factor. Nothing else lets you get in there, get your hands dirty and shift the pieces around quite like video games do. So, perhaps in the future there will be a way to really deliver some truly reactive and compelling writing. Until then, however, I think we’re going to have to simply smile and enjoy the few nuggets that appear and get repeated over and over again.

Because war, war never changes.

Darkly Dreaming

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Sadly, I have no interesting thoughts or musings to share with you today, world. I’m busy working, recovering from a rather eventful weekend and haven’t had anything noteworthy happen in the last few days to write some comment on.

I suppose I’ll wax on about my current work.

Accessed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnos#/media/File:Waterhouse-sleep_and_his_half-brother_death-1874.jpg

Sleep and his Half-Brother Death by John William Waterhouse (1874).

I’m picking away at a short story that was, ultimately, inspired by a dream. It’s a little trite, but every now and then I’ll have a narratively interesting and coherent midnight imagining that could actually be turned into a decent story. I think if we looked over the long history of the human race, we’d find that dreams are a common source of inspiration. There’s just something about the completely unhinged and unhindered way our minds work while in the throes of Hypnos and his three children that produces some wonderfully strange and bizarre ideas.

This particular idea seems appropriately spawned by a dream as well. I’ve commented before on my experimentations into the horror genre. As a classification of fiction, it has a rather curious relationship with science fiction and fantasy. It’s like that awkward half-brother that everyone isn’t entirely certain belongs but recognizes that he can’t be put anywhere else. One of my favourite horror authors is the much celebrated Lovecraft who, purportedly, got much of his Elder Mythos from nightmarish inspiration. My story revolves around similar elements of Lovecraftian horror. In particular, I always enjoyed Lovecraft’s masterful use of uncertainty and the disquieting effect the unknown can have on an individual.

There are short falls to his fiction, however, and part of that crops up in the aftermath of his exciting tales. While it’s a running trope in Lovecraftian fiction that relatives and like will usually take the the charge of a prior individual in the fight against the Elder Gods, this usually extended until the troubles facing the protagonists were solved. The colour out of space is banished. Unspeakable things are sealed away. Individuals are driven mad and locked away, the terrible artifacts or locations which became their undoing are confiscated or destroyed.

And the story ends and the world moves on. For all of the Cthulu Mythos’ intervening of concepts and beings, rarely do the personal mysteries or intrigues are ever examined further.

Ultimately, I was left with the curious idea of what it would be like to be one of these relatives waiting in the wings for their turn to be drawn forth by destiny to deal with the supernatural horrors pressing in from elsewhere. Only, their chance never comes because their kin did succeed in tying up those unsettling little plots on their own. Thus, the family is left with only so many questions and not a single answer in the desolate ruins of the dark battlegrounds on which an unknowable war was raged. They could feel something was certainly wrong, the disappearance of their relatives prime amongst this. There would be the ever present touch of things just being a little off. But, ultimately, there would be nothing to discover. For how could we hope to make sense of a Lovecraftian horror when even those that see them can not.

I’m not entirely certain if this story will succeed. Primarily, it has an unsatisfactory conclusion–something which shouldn’t hold a horror story back but… we’ll see. There’s no grand revelation. There’s no turning point for the protagonist where they learn of the fate that almost befell the world had their kin not given the most noble of sacrifices. There’s really… well… nothing. Nothing but a sense, a feeling. It’s that ephemeral sensation of the last disappearing gossamer threads of a dream which we dreamt so wild and vividly but is chased away by the searing light of the morning’s rays. We wake, having only the barest gasp of what was or could have been and by the time we can find someone to share these feelings with, we have already forgotten.

The Dust Settles

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Alright, world, this is the last Summoner Wars post for some time, I promise. Just bear with me.

After my review of the new Alliance Master Set expansion for Summoner Wars, my sister and I ran a tournament to pit the old against the new. Course, with upwards of twenty different factions, that’s far too many players to do the round-robin format that we’ve been perfecting with the smaller releases. Over time, we’ve accumulated several of the single releases to add to the fourteen decks in the master boxes which leads to quite a bit of variety and a staggering number of potential match-ups.

The original goal of the tournament, aside from getting more games in against each other, was to create a comprehensive “tier list” of the factions fueled by actual tournament results to represent what we felt was a sequential list of the base factions and how strong they were relative to everyone else.

Yes, I shall continue using this image until the damn thing comes out

Summoner Wars and its art belongs to Plaid Hat Games and Cupidsart. Find Alliances at their website http://www.plaidhatgames.om

Of the first goal to get more games in, the tournament was a resounding success. We had forty different battles in a double elimination format where the participating decks were seeded based on a loose ranking system estimated from their performances from past tournaments. Our brand spanking new factions, the Cave Goblin Frick, Mercenary Rallul and Jungle Elf Abua Shi were estimated around the middle. This gave as best a randomized format and, with a double elimination arrangement, no one deck would be removed from a single bad match-up. In order to motivate each other to try our best with whoever we used, the winner of the prior round would have first pick of the two scheduled opponents. Naturally, we favoured our favourite factions but it became increasingly clear that the better decision was to try and pick the more powerful faction in a match-up in order to assure the success of our few favourites in later matches.

So, the first issue of the tournament, of course, relies on the fact that my sister and I have different playstyles and prefer different summoners over others. There’s enough variation in Summoner Wars for some factions to perform better with a player that is more inclined to play to their strengths. Vlox, for example, requires knowing all the abilities in your deck and being able to set up scenarios that can prove favourable with a fortunate draw if you can keep careful count of what your deck can do and the probabilities of drawing the card you need to copy next. I enjoy this sort of predictive logic puzzle whereas Kait is far more reactionary and comes up with the best plays based on the cards in her hand on those on the board.

But while our original goal was to find out which faction was truly the strongest, it became rather obvious that this is the wrong way to look at the match-ups. Since our tournament did not allow deck building (for the simplicity of us not owning all the different cards while avoiding the awkwardness that would arise from within faction match-ups and arguments over who gets to draft the elephants), it only took the end of the first loser’s round for us to realize that what a deck was capable of did not matter nearly as much as what a deck was capable of against its current opponent. Some decks are just inherently better geared at beating other decks as could be demonstrated with the match-up between the Demagogue (a slow, late game focused faction based on very powerful but few units) and Frick (a fast, early game focused faction based on a ton of cheap, weak but overwhelming units). The results of our little experiment yielded some rather surprising victors that spurred a number of interesting discussions. Here are our results:

1. The Warden

2. Abua Shi

3. Krusk

4. Selundar

5. Frick/Tundle

7. Endrich/Rallul

9. Glurblub, Immortal Elien, Mugglug

12. Demagogue, Marek, Moyra, Tacullu

16. Geirroth, Hogar, Melundak, Sunderved, Vlox

Notes: the order within a “tier” is not indicative of anything, they’re only listed by alphabetic order. Don’t worry too much about the Geirroth entry, it was a custom deck to test some ideas and prove a point.

On one hand, if you’ve read the reviews for the different factions in the Alliances Master Set, it should come as no surprise that The Warden ranks top in our Summoner Wars throw-down. He’s the only faction to go entirely undefeated, though there were a few very close games. What should be more surprising, however, is that fourth place Selundar and third place Krusk. Krusk was ranked eighteenth going into the tournament but my sister apparently had a Renaissance when it came to understanding his deck as she mopped the floor with him in several rather aggravating battles. Selundar is more surprising since, outside of tournaments, any time we play with the deck it always falls apart.

But I think Selundar underscores our dissatisfaction with the whole concept of tier lists for this game. As I’ve mentioned before, the game is very chance dependent. Lucky rolls and lucky draws will determine quite a large portion of a game’s outcome when played between two individuals of matched skill. That might seem intuitively to be obvious–if both players are of equal talent than surely outside factors will decide the outcome of the match. Unfortunately, with Summoner Wars, this isn’t the case. You can be in a very strong and commanding position and have all that taken away because you end up rolling nine misses over two turns while your opponent successfully hits with theirs. Due to the nature of the tournament set-up, Selundar benefited quite strongly from Lady Luck. His first match was against Vlox who, by all accounts, is one of the worst decks in the game and soundly beat him. His next match was against Mugglug, a deck that should have trounced him soundly. However, timely Into Darkness’ cleared the board of pesky and expensive Savagers while Kait’s draws saw most of her Vine Growths stashed at the bottom of her deck. Couple with that some extraordinarily unfortunate turns on her rolling and the Swamp Orcs were sent quickly to the lower bracket. Another set of poor draws saw a very close game against Frick finally go Selundar’s way before his luck ran out and he got eliminated in a hilariously one-sided match against Krusk.

Thus, in order to balance the heavy effect of chance on the game, we would be required to play these tournaments over and over again for results to normalize. Such a thing is not going to happen because we’re only human and time is a limited commodity for us. And even if we were, I still don’t know how valuable the results of a tournament could mean. Whereas Selundar got through on some fortunate rolls and forgiving match-ups, two top contenders in the Demagogue and Tacullu were eliminated rather quickly because they faced much harder opponents. Abua Shi, much like Frick, is very fast and early-mid focused and knocked the Demagogue immediately to the lower bracket. There, the Demagogue faced against Tundle as a showdown between the two late-game heavy-weights. Variance once again struck and Demagogue was eliminated.

Analyzing our results, we debated amongst ourselves how we could organize these games to show who was the strongest and baddest in Summoner Wars. But the more we bickered, the more we realized this was an unhelpful way of viewing the game. While its easy to tease apart the factions that stand at the top and bottom of the list (Warden is obviously stronger than Vlox), there is an issue when you address the vast majority of the decks that reside in the middle. How do you rank Tacullu and Krusk? Going by these results, Krusk is clearly the better deck. However, if we went by our first tournament, Tacullu was head and shoulders above the Sand Goblins. Really, the more helpful discussion was circulated around who does better against who. It’s really self defeating trying to say whether Krusk is #3 in a list or #8. What do those placements mean? Is he just better than all those below him? Would we expect him to dominate the likes of Mugglug, Tundle or Frick? Both Kait and I would argue otherwise.

What seems more helpful is discussing the real culprit of matches–the odds of a faction beating another. That’s what it is ultimately about. If I sit down with Krusk in my hands, it seems more valuable to think and discuss how well his specific match-up is against my opponent’s Mugglug than trying to simply compare ordering on a list. Perhaps Krusk can beat Mugglug a majority of the time but he loses to Abua Shi who in turn loses more often than not to Mugglug. It’s more a game of rock-paper-scissors. It seems silly to try and make a tier list over which is the best choice in that game. Rock isn’t inherently better than both scissors or paper and saying that it’s number one is, ultimately, meaningless in a discussion in that game.

The best these results can do is point out systemic issues in certain decks. Once again, these sort of lists are better at finding the poles–those that do unerringly better than everyone else and those that doing far worse. Vlox, Hogar, Melundak, Marek and Sunderved stand out as consistent underachievers over multiple tournaments. Whereas The Warden seemingly stands above the others. Course, how much is the next pertinent question and that’s one I don’t have an answer. Further testing and analysis would certainly be required. The Warden could simply be marginally better than the top performers. He certainly feels that way. His victories against Endrich in the Alliance tournament and Abua in this one weren’t obvious sweeps. The same can’t be said for those on the bottom.

The nice thing about Summoner Wars, however, is that this isn’t the end of the story. With the potential to deck build–to a limited degree–there’s a possibility that the shortcomings of many factions can be addressed by replacing their lackluster components. After the tournament, we’ve certainly been playing with more crazy decks carrying combinations that seem to make some of them a lot scarier in more match-ups. We’re currently working on a possible custom tournament format to test some of these decks and hopefully we’ll have some more ideas to share on this game in the future.

Hell Hath No Fury

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Confession time: I have not seen a Mad Max film before.

Shocking, I know. Somehow, through my formative youth, I managed to not once have any installment of this series grace the screens of the collective households in which I was raised. Granted, it is an Australian series, so maybe my family was simply holding fast to a “No Foreign Film” policy. Or–more likely–they were simply not popular enough to pierce the isolating cultural bubble of small town Canada. We only had one movie theatre at the time and–from all reports–said theatre has long since closed after I had moved from those alpine heights.

Image accessed from http://theralphretort.com/wp-content/uploads/2015_mad_max_fury_road-wide.jpg

Mad Max: Fury Road and all rights and images belong to Warner Bros., Village Roadshow Pictures, George Miller and all the rest.

Well, I have rectified this injustice over the weekend by seeing the much lauded Fury Road. I was quite excited to see this film after watching a trailer before a movie I’ve long since forgotten. An action movie, that takes place on a single road, in post apocalyptic setting and simple, unabashed back-to-back action? I could not sign up any faster. Alas, I hit a snag when the only friend I had that held any interest wandered off on opening night and saw it without me. My family were all less than enthused to see this film and so I had to search through my achingly meagre list of friends to find someone willing to indulge me and my lust for violence and carnage. Thankfully, I found someone. I can summarize the good and parts of Fury Road as thus:

Bad: It was in 3D.

Good: Everything else.

Alright, that is not true. However, I feel it adequately sums up my feelings about the movie. I can’t help but be reminded of Dredd (the 2012 release) while watching Fury Road. Similar to the Judge Dredd reboot, it wasn’t some over-the-top narrative mess that tried to be more than what it really was: that is an over-the-top action movie. Action movies have a tendency for injecting too much gravitas into their hearts. Movies like the Mission Impossibles and Die Hards kind of get lost in their own convoluted narratives as they attempt to keep the audience guessing about what the hell is going on in the story while jumping from set piece to set piece. Dredd stripped all of that away, keeping its story focus square on the single day in the life of the Judge as he went about breaking up an opportunistic drug cartel that had overtaken one of the megalithic apartment complexes in the Dredd universe. There wasn’t grandiose flashbacks of Dredd’s past, there wasn’t overly dramatic explanations for how the villain was going to change the face of the world, there wasn’t deep and evolving character arcs for the characters. And it all simply worked. You know almost as much about Karl Urban’s gruff Dredd by the end as you do at the start. Which is fine. This is an action movie, not a character drama. All we need to know of the character is expressed through, appropriately, his actions.

Image accessed from http://cdn.filmschoolrejects.com/images/Fury-Road-Guitar-680x388.jpgFury Road follows the same formula. As I said, I’ve never seen a Mad Max film so I knew nothing about the character. At the end of the day, I can boldly say I still know next to nothing about the character. The basics are explained as quickly as possible (world went to shit, Max lost his family and is haunted by that loss) and then the action just starts. Within five minutes of the film, we’ve been introduced to a character and then a car chase followed up with a failed escape attempt. Within fifteen minutes, we’ve been introduced to all the main characters before yet another car chase begins (Note: I didn’t actually time this, all these are estimates). There’s no plodding about before we kick of the action. There’s no long narrative overlays to explain this strange and violent world. There’s no rehashing of whatever the hell was covered in the prior three movies of the series. This is it. Here we go. Welcome to Fury Road.

It may be strange for someone like me–someone who loves narrative and character–to adore this approach. And that’s one thing I do want to cover explicitly. While the action is centre stage to the performance, it doesn’t come at the expense of either these two elements. Simply put, Fury Road shows its characters and story instead of telling it. I learn quite a lot about Furiosa, Nux and Angharad without requiring long soliloquies or lengthy pauses to communicate clumsily their personalities. Often you’ll get the advice when writing that one should “show and not tell” without any real indication of what that means. I would point to Fury Road as an example. George Miller lets us know quite a lot about Furiosa and Max without saying any words. There’s a scene where Max is holding the Imperator at gunpoint, along with her entourage, while he systematically searches through the entire cabin of the giant warmachine for every hidden firearm. That Max keeps his weapon trained on unarmed civilians tells us a lot of his practicality over morality. That Furiosa keeps way more weapons around her than necessary tells us a lot of her preparation and fear of being disarmed. That Max fails to find the knife kept in the gear shift and Furiosa checks it the moment he leaves gives us indications for the faults of either character.

The movie is full of all these moments. Perhaps the most interesting and best use of this is with Nux, the fanatical lackey of Immortan Joe who has perhaps the most complex character development throughout the entire piece. When we were first introduced to him, his interactions with Max and his fellow outriders was so well done that I hoped he wouldn’t be some nameless mook to just fill up a few minutes of screen time before being murdered in spectacular fashion. I was more than pleased to see that wasn’t the case. Typically, important characters have grandiose introductions and that this one character could be introduced in such a fashion that you’re left unsure whether he is important or not was–simply put–quite elegant.

Image accessed from http://www.squaremans.com/images/FR1.jpgSo, yeah, Fury Road isn’t just some “stupid action movie” though it’s got lots of wonderful stupid action in it. The set design–if one can really call it that–continues this subtle but extremely effective means of conveying character through subtle indicators. Near every vehicle that rides onto the screen is personalized for its driver. This is important when we start into several of the three faction skirmishes in the movie, giving the audience an immediate shorthand for who is who while explosions and car parts fill the air. The different gangs are given their own aesthetic that helps differentiate while the main bosses of the three pivotal cities (Gas Town, Bullet Town and I can only assume Water Town) ride in on their own unique chariots that convey their personal philosophies. The boss of Gun Town drives a converted muscle car with tank treads, trading efficiency and speed for military bulk. Gas Town, on the other hand, is more concerned with appearances and driving a large and impressive vehicle than something that’s truly combat ready.

And that stereo/war-drum contraption was utterly fantastic! Of course, the main warmachine is designed with various hidden compartment and entrances–another quick shorthand for the unexpected and surprising routes its drivers develop across the feature–while maintaining enough complexity to be the main set for the majority of the movie.

Of course, I feel that I can’t properly comment on Fury Road without making some comment about all that feminism hoopla prior to its release. There was clearly much attention given to the fact that a prominent feminist author was involved with the script or worked on set. Honestly, you wouldn’t really notice and I feel that’s kind of the point. Furiosa does not really stand out as some sort of highly crafted piece of philosophical propaganda. Amongst the likes of Ridley Scott or The Bride of Kill Bill fame, there’s nothing really different about Furiosa. She’s isn’t some sort of bra-burning femi-nazi who constantly shouts for equality or women’s rights. She’s just a woman trying to do what she feels is right in a world that’s gone utterly mad. She’s a product of her upbringing and heritage which has turned her into a capable fighter despite the loss of a limb. And while it makes her rather cold and stand-offish, this is hardly surprising given how long Max holds people at gun-length. Had there been no mention of feminist involvement, I suspect no one would really think anything of Furiosa other than her being a damn good action hero.

And she is a great action hero. She is essentially the central figure of the movie (it is called Fury Road after all), as Max has presumably gone through his character growth in his first movie. Some of the most annoying clichés of serialized fiction is this pressing need to constantly put the main character through the standard “hero’s journey” of character development. There’s only so much that someone like Max can learn in a world as crazed as the one he occupies. After awhile, him constantly getting some sort of moral lesson from all his gallivanting becomes very eye-rolling. I’m always a fan of shifting these sort of character developments to new faces who have the opportunity to learn the lessons the main character simply can not.

Image accessed from https://belgianfilmfreak.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/2015-mad-max-fury-road-wallpapers.jpgSo, while Fury Road wasn’t two and half hours of pure car chase shenanigans, it simply and effective delivers on every other expectation and hope that it’s all the better for it. It’s a fantastic movie and I can see immediately where all the inspiration for Wasteland and Fallout derived. It’s so good that I’m going to try and get a hold of its prior installments… just as soon as I find someone to watch them with me.

Big City Heart

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So, continuing on our tour of late 2014 reviews, I have recently seen Big Hero 6 by Disney Studios. I hadn’t any intention of watching the movie, especially after feeling rather chilly towards the children’s entertainment giant and their lacklustre Frozen mega-hit which served to demonstrate just how out-of-touch I am with the rest of the world. It also didn’t help that whatever fledgling interest I may have had for the flick evaporated after having to sit through Guardians of the Galaxy.

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Big Hero 6 belongs to Marvel, Disney and a bunch of other people and stuff.

Yes, yes, I hate super hero movies–or as I like to call them “Stupid Hero Movies”–and was quite frankly ready to give popular blockbusters a skip since it seems the public is going through a really weird phase and I feel it’s safer to hunker down and wait it out. Of course, avoiding the megalithic reach of Disney and his cold, dead fingers is a near impossible task, especially as I have a habit of speaking to a number of women in my life. I was assured–quite voraciously I might add–that both Wreck-it-Ralph and Big Hero 6 were great movies. People even dared to go so far as to recommend I watch them even after I expressed my disdain for the unanimously adored flick about the Swedish girls and their boring life.

You’ll notice I didn’t write anything on Wreck-it-Ralph and that’s probably for the best.

Big Hero 6, however, is the more noteworthy of the two. I’ll jump right to the point: I think it’s “okay.” The biggest failings of Big Hero 6 is that it’s a Stupid Hero Movie released in a climate where movie-goers are tripping over costumed weirdos every other weekend. Narratively, it does nothing truly new or extraordinary. If you try and tease it’s characters and plot apart, it unravels rather easily. It’s competent, which is perhaps the best thing I can say. But it’s competency arises from it re-treading quite beaten ground at this point.

There is one thing, however, that Big Hero 6 does fantastically. Perhaps more than any other movie I’ve seen recently, and truly the only reason I kept at it and look at it fondly, is that the world of Big Hero 6 is just so damn interesting.

For those not in the know, Big Hero 6 was a comic at one point in time–thus explaining it’s unfortunate plotline. However, it takes place not on Earth. Well, more accurately, it does not take place on any reasonable facsimile of Earth. One thing that stupid hero movies do–and must do in order for the picture to work–is spend a gross amount of time grounding their comic book worlds in a very recognizable and verisimilitude world. We’ve long passed the days of George Clooney’s Batman nipple suits and a Gotham City that looks like it was ripped straight from Lovecraft’s most hideous cyclopean nightmares. The X-Men movies set the stage for comic book adaptations that are filmed with an intense grounding in our day-to-day familiarity and it has apparently produced a “gritty and realistic” aesthetic that has resonated with movie-goers. Thus, Nolan’s Gotham is very clearly New York. Iron Man unabashedly lives in Malibu.

Accessed from http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/11/117787/4434289-6379007271-tumbl.pngBig Hero 6, however, is not. It’s location is San Fransokyo–some curious and compelling hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo. It’s a world that’s strange and captivating. I found it hard not to get sucked in as we’re pulled over the Golden Torii Gate Bridge, the once familiar landmark carved into the iconic images of a Shinto shrine’s entrance. Great wind turbines bob in the air, tethered like enormous balloons and painted to inspire the recollections of the flying Koi during the Children’s Festival. Red lanterns hang from street cars while enormous neon signs in bright katakana fixate to the sides of downtown skyscrapers. The movie is very indulgent in its wide spanning shots of this inventive skyline where the old and the exotic are mixed into something almost familiar.

It’s really a brilliant mix of cultures done in such painstaking way to make the seams tying the two together indistinguishable. This extends to the main characters and their obvious Japanese heritage despite the movie’s stylistic renderings. Tanaka and Hiro are undeniably American for all intents and purposes, even as the engage in robotic sumo competitions or advanced robotics.

The best character of the show is the city itself and it’s a shame that something more couldn’t be done with it. Ultimately, the backdrop isn’t used for any clever thematic or even stylistic blending. The main villain runs around in a kabuki mask without drawing on traditional kabuki elements or traditions. There’s a heavy use of robotics throughout the film–echoing Japan’s leading edge in the field–without actually exploring any themes of robotics (displaced human workforces, moralistic questions of advanced artificial intelligences). There could have even been some exploration of the universality of the human condition by pulling on the shared elements of American and Japanese mythology and history but all of these things were missed.

Accessed from https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/38/fe/97/38fe97c9aa8b5eb44bc987266232d501.jpgAt the end of the day, Big Hero 6 is a bunch of stupid action with some shoehorned morality shoved in at the last second that makes no sense. But it’s world creation is very intricate with painstaking detail done to even the smallest references. It’s a visual feast just as much as it’s a cognitive snore. I think it showcases just how samey and unremarkable this super hero phase really is. At any other release, at any other time, this movie would have been fantastic. As it stands, it’s kind of forgettable in a vast sea of similar faces. It’s a shame they couldn’t take this setting and do something really fascinating.

As is, it’s a really brilliant example of some clever world-building. Check it out for that.

Murphy’s Law

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The great outdoors are anything but great. I do not understand the appeal. It’s hot. It’s bright. And at any moment a tree will just shower you in its reproductive bits.

It also smells.

At any rate, what better way is there to discuss Christopher Nolan’s recent movie Interstellar than making a post on it nearly six months late. There’s a certain poetic irony about covering a film about time dilation and relativity and dredging up its existence long after people cared about it.

But I only saw it recently so, whatever. This is happening. Get used to it.

As some a priori information, I’m a big fan of Nolan’s work. Even before the Batmans launched him into the public sphere so astronomically, he had been creating films that entertained and intrigued. Even when I wasn’t fully on board with the final product (Insomnia), I could still appreciate what he was trying to do. And, generally, speaking, he was doing things no one else was.

For that, I love his output. He’s a director that focuses on themes and ideas more than gaudy explosions and cheap thrills. Not to say that he doesn’t have them at all. Memento has plenty of exciting scenes interwoven around it’s basic premise of a man with anterograde amnesia, what with his involvement in crime and murder. Insomnia still follows a detective and his hunt for a despicable serial killer. It’s just that he flavours these clichés and tired conventions with a fresh perspective or novel idea.

For this reason, I’m a big fan of The Prestige and Inception which I think are both examples of Nolan at his best. That they were some of his most recent work, and occurring while he was still making blockbuster comic book hero movies was all the more intriguing.

Thus, I was excited to see Interstellar when it was announced. Unfortunately, it had fallen victim to Hollywood’s recent attempts at starting a hype train and I “learned” about the movie a year before it was even releasing. My issue with such advance marketing is, by the time the movie actually comes out, I’ve already forgotten about my initial interest and almost never see it in theatres. I’m not that invested into the movie industry to plan my entertainment around release schedules and whatnot.

So, here we are. Me having just finally seen the film which everyone has already discussed and reached their own conclusions about with nary a helpful voice to raise to the topic. Well, I have my thoughts and I’m going to share them regardless of whether these points were mentioned before or not.

Let’s start with the big picture.

I’m pretty luke-warm to Interstellar. It’s not Nolan’s worse (which I still maintain is a distinction which belongs to Insomnia) but it isn’t his best either. There were a number of elements that I enjoyed and about an equal number which I did not. That’s perhaps the most vague description one could possibly give for a film.

But before I go on my huge whinge fest, let’s discuss those elements that I enjoyed. There’s something really interesting about the opening of the movie. The way it’s present and the slow reveal of information I found to be a compelling way to introduce a world set far into the future and very different from our own. The documentary talking heads ground us in a video framework of which is all too familiar to anyone that has stepped into a museum. We’re simultaneously greeted with a recording format that immediately conveys a sense of “past” and familiarity while the subject matter is weird and captures our attention. What is this dust that seems to settle everywhere? What is this blight that’s affecting the neighbour’s crops?

The basic premise for the setting is initially shown as so mundane that we are almost slow to realize how science fiction the work really is. You don’t realize that this story is taking place in the far future, after some inexplicable war/population collapse and a possible post-apocalyptic time. However, the tragedy of whatever has occurred (and thankfully the disaster is kept hidden to allow our imagination to fill the blanks) is conveyed in understandable imagery that evokes memories and studies of the Great Depression. We know things are bad without needing characters to list generically how bad things really are compared to the world in which we actual live.

There’s a real elegance to how the audience begins to learn of the troubles facing the planet yet also realizes this takes place in a time far removed from our own so when we do reach the titular interstellar portions, it doesn’t seem to come out of nowhere. What’s more, I absolutely love the way that artificial intelligence and advance robotics are integrated into this future. They’re relics of that same indescribable past, with many of them slowly falling apart and descending from the skies as their computational innards decay and bring them down to earth. Then, the survivors scoop these old relics up and re-purpose them as automated farming tractors.

Oh, and this information is revealed while the main character and his offspring are heading to parent/teacher interviews.

It’s unfortunate, then, that all this time slowly introducing the world truly feels like a waste later. It’s so well crafted that I found it really frustrating how little of it is important for the narrative. In fact, the elements that are key to the rest of the story–Murph’s mysterious ghost and her father’s interaction with the “paranormal activity” happening in her room–is probably the least interesting and most shoehorned part. The magic bookcase serves blatantly as a story deus ex machina, required solely to move the plot forward because there was no elegant solution present.

Even more maddening is, in the later acts, when the Nolans attempt to bring the story back to these humble beginnings as part of an overarching plot. It really exposes how the whole backstory for Matthew McConnaughey’s NASA astronaut is made really flimsy in order to give the character wide-spread appeal and make him “relatable.”

Accessed from http://www.hdwallpapers.in/tag/interstellar.html

Interstellar belongs to Paramount Pictures, Christopher Nolan, Legendary Pictures and a whole slew of other people that aren’t me.

Truly, the story doesn’t really begin until Farmer Cooper and his precocious daughter are sent on some wild geo-cache trip given by co-ordinates provided by the magic bookcase in Morse code. There, we discover that the fabled NASA research institute wasn’t abandoned but went underground (for reasons) and Agent Cooper is press-ganged into joining a rather rag-tag and dubious mission through a recently discovered wormhole to find a world on which humanity could relocate.

It’s at this time that we’re presented with the weakest explanation for how the planet is going to shit. Some mysterious disease is killing off all the delicious vegetables and possibly eating the nitrogen in the atmosphere and/or the oxygen and pooping out nitrogen? Michael Cain doesn’t spend a lot of time making the excuse clear and it’s hard not to think–as he waxes to great lengths about the difficulty of space travel and the effects on time by relativity–that it wouldn’t be easier to… you know… cure the blight. Maybe in this unmentionable disaster all the biologists were killed or something.

Anyway, after delivering the first of many repeated quotes of Dylan Thomas’ pretty forgettable poem, Cosmonaut Cooper is convinced to pilot the last remaining spacecraft on earth since he’s the only one alive to have done so (even though his last mission barely left the atmosphere). Course, we learn later that he isn’t really necessary, since twelve other shmucks flew ahead of him, and it’s hard not to wonder why all the fuss is made about him joining a mission that has been years in planning and quite happy to execute without anyone even being aware that he existed.

This ends up being a troubling trend of really poorly conceived or explained character motivations that pop up continuously for the rest of the movie. With great reluctance, Cooper agrees to this mission even though he knows it will take a lot of time and he’ll likely not see his soon to be orphaned children grow up and become adults. He hops on board with Catwoman and a pair of disposable extras and rattles his way into space and the great beyond, all the while maintaining some ineffectual stoicism that’s meant to make the audience feel pride over the fact that the world is going to shit and only those unrelenting Americans can ever truly keep it alive. Or something. There’s a few moments where it feels like I missed having my accompanying flag to wave throughout the film.

Once we get to space, we hit Interstellar’s second strength and that’s in creating absolutely gorgeous visuals. Nolan really hits the cgi cinematography as we’re transported through wormholes and explore some really alien planets. In fact, it feels a lot of the time like I’m watching some futuristic Blue Planet series and the only thing I’m lacking is Attenborough’s soothing voice-over. We learn… things while the spaceship meanders on its ten year journey with the crew kept in cryogenic storage so we don’t have to hire another actor that looks like old Matthew McConnaughey. Presiding over this delegation are two robot companions who are perhaps the best members of the crew and certainly my favourite characters.

Once we’re through the blackhole, the band of adventurers have to decide on three returned signals over prospective planets that they want to visit which will become humanity’s new home. Since Nolan wants to play with time as a theme, they hit up the closest one first–and the one where even if the mission were to progress according to plan would also take upwards of seven years, relatively speaking to Earth. And while the planet is pretty cool, the action on it is pretty dumb and the explorers find that after their little foibles have been resolved, nearly twenty four years have elapsed. That’s twenty four years of aimless puttering around space “learning all we can about blackholes” and still struggling to come up with a half-decent pesticide at home.

Grumpy and forlorn, the crew then hit up the second planet on the list because they’re reluctant to indulge reason because the characters would rather quibble over nonsense like “the power of love” than actually doing their mission. Here is the movie’s most egregious offence. Since there hasn’t been any truly villainous entity for us to hate, we’re introduced to Matt Damon that decides to spend the next twenty minutes needlessly twirling his moustache than actually following a compelling plot.

Interstellar’s best strengths are when it’s not following traditional movie structure. It’s weakest moments are whenever it falls back on “established wisdom.” A lot of the action beats and “raising the stakes” moments are forced and illogical. The cheap emotional manipulation is some of the laziest I’ve ever seen. There’s lots of arguing and misdirection that’s entirely unnecessary all so we can have a “third act twist.” It’s the farm opening all over again, where the film structure motivates the plot instead of the internal character designs and desires.

By the end of the film, it’s hard to shake the ever growing pile of “Whys” accumulating as you watch. Why did the random third guy on the water world stand outside the ship even though he was the first to return to it before the water mountain descended? Why did their fourth member of the crew spend twenty four years bombing around on a ship when he knew even a five minute delay–certainly a reasonable amount of time considering the away team is searching an entire planet for a single individual–would cost him a few years? Why did Michael Cain spend his entire life “working” on an equation that he’d already solved when he could have just plainly told everyone the situation and still got enough people to volunteer (he did get twelve for the original mission so he only needed three more).  Why did Matt Damon program a bomb in his robot co-pilot and why didn’t he just outright tell them he lied about his data when they showed up to thaw him? Did he think they would shoot him with their non-existent guns? Did he think they’d leave him behind even though their mission is to desperately save humanity and they already wasted all their fuel getting to him? Like… what was the plan?

Accessed from http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--_e8pORXq--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/n9pfhv8aeop2wjicqdk3.jpgAlso, the tesseract was stupid. I’m certain plenty of people have argued over it when the movie first came out. I can’t help but feel that this was the weakest “interesting” element of a Nolan movie. Future humans built a time machine but only for Cooper to radio his daughter random zeroes and ones recorded by the robot TARS. And they did it in such a manner that Cooper would be the instrument behind all the random messages delivered from Murph’s Magic Bookcase trusting that “love will lead the way” was a good enough lampshade to explain away all these lingering questions and arbitrariness.

It’s a shame, too, since the movie is strongest when it’s following a hard science fiction route and eschewing traditional story elements. The most powerful “human” scene is after a few minutes on the water planet, Cooper and Catwoman return to their ship to discover that their loved ones back home have lived their lives in the intervening minutes. We didn’t need pointless deaths to feel sad when you have your secondary characters literally ageing before your eyes. We don’t need Matt Damon to try and kill everyone in some weird mad struggle to open an airlock (speaking of which, how does an astronaut know how to make a bomb but not open an airlock?) when we could have easily had more powerful and interesting conflict by the team bickering his selfishness and the cost it accrued to them and their mission.

There was plenty of ideological debate to be had without Michael Cain having to intentionally lie about his plan to rescue the people of Earth on a magic spacecraft. It seemed like there were a lot of missed opportunities in Interstellar as the story shot for the lowest hanging fruit. What we ended up with was morsels that were rotting on the vine instead of the delicious treats that were just within reach if only we had dared to go just a bit further.

It was pretty though.

The Golden Jester Jabbers

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Well, my month of Hel has ended and spring shines it’s welcoming, cheery light upon my workstation yet again. With a pile of work cleared from the timetable, I am now able to return to the blog and provided new, exciting content. To celebrate this occasion, I have decided to post an old short story from elsewhere.

It’s at least new to here!

This is another little short to further develop my character in Derek’s D&D campaign. Little did I realize that 5th edition includes a reward mechanic for this narrative nonsense I perform pretty regularly in my role-play groups. Every one of these little stories nets me an Inspiration Point. I don’t really know what the value of them is but I intended to collect as many as I can! As a quick reminder and overview, this is my ex-Cultist character Kaliban who was born and raised in the most generic fantasy world conceived by mankind. He, however, was lifted from that world and thrown into the most bizarre setting conceived by mankind as Derek loves running Planescape stories. It seems, poor Kaliban, has found some solace in the strange and overwhelming metaphysical planes by developing a rather questionable addiction to alcohol. Thus, whenever he gets a little too drunk, some unfortunate member of the adventuring party receives his unwanted affections. In this case, it is our royal half-genie Barou Nariah who, from my nearest estimations, is essentially a female Johnny Storm (the Human Torch) from Marvel’s comics. Also, she’s a princess. Or a duchess. Or maybe she’s just a snob. It’s sometimes hard to tell.

***

“You can say what you will about dwarven hospitality but there is one front upon which they will never disappoint.”

Lady Nariah stirred. The dark corners of the Ironridge tavern were considerably less so with the stouthearted genasi illuming them. The gentle wick of the faintest twisted threads along her scalp gave birth to flicking tongues of hungry flame which spat jittering shades upon the walls. The wood was painted in the soft gold and orange of her cast-off illuminance, making it somehow richer than it was in the empty spaces where she was not.

Her eyes were like twin rubies fed with an unquenchable inner flame as they focused on the tattooed man that slumped within the chair opposite her. He had but two flagons in either knuckle, the sticky sweet contents rolling off the too full rims in frothing rivulets along their stone sides.

She watched without response as both vessels clattered upon the table and one was pushed her way.

Her guest did not wait for her to join as he raised his flagon into the air, gulping greedily the contents with an unquenchable throat. He was not a large man but his thirst appeared insatiable as he finally lowered the tankard with but the shallowest amount left to slosh along the bottom.

“It wasn’t the most uncomfortable night I’ve ever had but it’s a far cry from the most pleasant. Makes you almost yearn for those echoing halls of the Nursery, doesn’t it?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Quite the metaphysical query,” he said, swaying upon his seat. The eyes amongst the dark pits of the inked skull were blood-shot and bleary. They had difficulty focusing on Lady Nariah, seeming to flitter about the shadows which writhed and prostrated themselves before her presence. He seemed almost distracted by the empty corners of the private alcove, as though he stared through Nariah into a place far from this small wedge of the Outlands.

“I suppose I am here because some being willed it so. What is our mortal lives but the discarded intentions of titans too absentminded to notice our existence? We’re the shuddering, shivering crumbs of meals the giants forgot they ate, collected in the cracks and crevices of the world shadowed by their majesty.”

“No,” Lady Nariah said, with a shake of her head. “What are you doing here?”

Her finger rapped upon the table for emphasis. The tattooed man merely squinted at her as though he expected duplicity in her question. Comprehension was lethargic but eventually his eyes widened with his mouth.

“Ohhh, sorry Lady Duchess. Didn’t catch your meaning.”

“I really wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“But it’s your name!” he hiccoughed.

“Truly, it is not.”

“There’s no shame in it,” he levelled a shaky finger as he paused to finish the contents of his flagon. “We make no choice of our beginnings and there’s no reason for us to hold it against another. When we came mewling into this world, it is not by our design which hands hold us close. It doesn’t make you any less of a person. Your deeds define you—not whoever borne your birth.”

“Call me Nariah.”

“Ok, Lady Duchess Nariah.”

“No. Just Nariah.”

He shrugged. “Very well, Just Nariah.”

Kaliban by Me and really lazy.

Kaliban by Me and really lazy.

Kaliban’s head dipped and it took a moment for Nariah to recognize it as a reverent bow. In the meanwhile, Kaliban attempted to drink down the liquor long vacated his grasp before turning single-minded eyes towards the second tankard he’d brought.

Nariah’s fingers were around its sides, pulling it close before the drunk could finish transporting himself into his desired stupor.

“How did you get these anyway?” Nariah asked, too aware of how thirsty his eyes appeared as she lifted the drink to her warm lips. “I was under the impression Thia kept tight your spending allowance in these establishments.”

A rakish smile broke his mouth. The zombie raised a finger and thumb, darkened by the black shadows of the bones contained within the pale skin. It was as though he were inverted, with nought but his innards worn as a macabre dress to masque the individual lurking beneath. With a twist of those gory digits, a thick coin appeared.

Nariah could not help but gape. Surely, she had seen some of the tricks this strange little man could perform. But such manipulations were surely of a magical means.

“That can’t be possible!” she exclaimed. “Illusions do not work on the Outlands.”

And he cocked his head to the side as if to dare her an explanation for the conjuration. He raised the coin to Nariah’s brilliant hair as though testing her eyes for the indistinct outlines of a beguiling enchantment. However, it wasn’t until he brought the object down upon the table’s edge, the hard ring of solid contact refuting Nariah’s better judgement.

His grin widened and he sent the single shard of silver spinning along the wood. The lilting echo of its revolutions were near as thunder to Nariah’s incredulous ears. Her hands abandoned their post as she fetched up the whirling disk. She could feel the cold singe of actual silver as well as the hard sides of an honest coin.

If this were a trick, it was a damn good one.

But the coin held up under even intense scrutiny. For all her wits, it was real.

It was then that Nariah caught Kaliban lifting a full mug to his lips. She turned to her elbow and found his prior empty tankard by her side.

“Of course. I should have suspected legerdemain.”

“It’s warmed,” the zombie said, blowing softly upon his reclaimed drink. “As to your query, I am here because you are.”

“That is hardly an answer,” Just Nariah said, leaning back in her chair.

“And I am hardly one to provide,” he returned. “I am a nobody. I am nothing. I bear less worth than that silver piece in your possession.”

“That’s not true,” Just Nariah said.

“But it is. Look upon our glorious companions. There’s valorous Bill, a folk hero in his own right. Thia the brave whose courage defies her humble starts. Dire Araven has performed deeds which send shudders down the spines of those far from knowing her. Then is a marvellous survivor, wrapped as he is in personal enigmas and curiosities. Wise Halbeck has seen more than most us combine.

“And then there is you, glorious Nariah. You are but a goddess amongst us lowly worms—a being so radiant that she is a sun unto herself. Who am I amongst these heroes? Who am I amongst such majesty?”

“You are too hard on yourself.”

“So common an affliction. But look upon the truth.”

His fingers twisted again and within them now was the darkened shard of his sensing stone. Its vermillion skin was lifeless and dark as the eye which Kaliban held to it.

“I am but one of many to have held this rock. I am but a brief glimmer in the eye of its experience. Many have come before me. Many will follow after. In the annuls of its life I am worth not even a margin for the purpose I serve. My existence is of no concern to it for it shall far outlast whatever meagre accomplishment I may feign performing. Those who peer into its eyes will not desire my name. They will whisper Bill. They may search for Then. They will long for Just Nariah. But none will desire Kaliban.”

“You cannot know that.”

“There is little I know,” he whispered. “But of this, I am certain.”

Nariah shifted in her chair as the tattooed man stared into the crystal. She said nothing, however, before he spoke again.

“It seems unfair that I bear a name—a pretence of importance—when it does not.”

“Then why not name it?”

He stirred from the drunken melancholy, looking towards Nariah. The sensing stone chimed as it was placed upon the table.

“How could I?”

“Well, what do you think it should be called?”

Kaliban shrugged.

“If I knew that then I wouldn’t need to find a name.”

“It’s not like you’re naming a child,” Nariah said. But the look in Kaliban’s eyes was deathly serious. “I don’t know. Name it something pretty.”

“Nariah?”

She frowned.

“No, don’t name it that.”

“How about Lady Duchess?”

“No.”

“Lady Duchess the Just?”

“Why not name it after someone in your life. Someone from your life before the Young God’s Club,” she added with a hurry.

The zombie gave thought.

“Who?”

Nariah shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone important.”

“Important?” The question seemed genuinely puzzling to Kaliban. “What did you name yours?”

“I did not name mine.”

“I see.”

“But if I had,” Nariah said before he could slump into more mournful silence, “it would be after someone that meant a lot to me. Someone that had a lasting impact on my life.”

“Louhi.”

“That’s a… wonderful name. Who is that?”

“The first person I’ve ever killed.”

He stared at the stone and Nariah could sense no hint of irony in the statement.

“I… beg your pardon?”

“They say your first is always the most important. It is the one you remember. The rest, they sort of blur together, right? I don’t know. I wouldn’t know. I do remember her though. She was a devotee of St. Cuthbert. A Chapeaux, as it were. Nothing really extraordinary. Hardly a few months inducted into the fold. I still can’t puzzle out why she was targeted. But she was. Perhaps the ease of getting to her was a safe way to test my skills.”

And his eyes were lost again amongst the shadows that danced around Nariah. She could not see the images that haunted his eyes. She could not see the visions that gripped his mind.
But they were all too real for him. Fuelled, as they were, by the divine hands of a dead dwarven brewer, those memories welled up like bile from a mind all too ready to purge the sickening weight from its gullet.

He stood in the rain before the small chapel. It’s golden edges had lost their majesty beneath the oppressive weight of the smothering black clouds. Upon the stained glass of the centre window in its solitary tower was the image of a crumpled, simple hat. The glow of a candle behind its panes was meant to represent the undying flame to beckon the faithful to the comfort of the halls. Now, that dying flame was laughable in its resistance to the drowning storm.

His clothes were heavy. That was what he remembered most. He carried nothing else with him but the cotton drank deeply of the pelting rain and it felt as though he carried the weight of all the silent sins of the order. With languished steps, he approached the front.

The iron knocker was cold to the touch though its voice was nearly lost to the growling thunder. He called twice before there was an answer. A click of the latch told him none expected visitors that night. The explanation was quick to his lips before he even saw who opened the door.

“Forgive me but my waggon has broken down along the road. I spotted brigands amongst the hills and with the approaching storm I had little choice but to run. I have nothing to offer but my thanks in exchange for some small reprieve.”

It seemed like fate that it was bright green eyes framed amongst chestnut curls that received him.

She was young. He knew this. She was but an initiate—a nobody to the order. Even if the order knew of the dark attention it drew, none would worry over her fate. But while he had been thoroughly briefed, he had never truly given any thought to the information. Now that he stood before her, he could not ignore that they were of the same age.

Her eyes were immediate about his person, searching for some sign or symbol. He had none and his only response was to draw back his hood and offer the meekest smile.

She blushed. He did not understand at the time. What could he possibly evoke that would warrant her modesty? He appeared so humble. Just a young man, ill-suited for a body not yet properly proportioned for his years. He was but the barest steps from childhood and it showed. While he was tall and gangly—near a head over her—he still carried the soft, rounded contours of the cherubim.

“Yes, of course. All are welcome in the halls of the Common Shepherd.”

That’s all it took. A weak excuse and an awkward smile. The door opened and he was granted entry.

The disciples of St. Cuthbert could not have known that death had knocked on their door.

He waited out the storm. The members of the Chapeaux are known for their kindness towards wayward souls. In the morning, he insisted on repaying their generosity. They, of course, accepted. He expressed interest in the halls and history. He enquired constantly but always politely. He gave furtive glances to the girl and in little time she was appointed his caretaker. They spent long hours attending the garden and the duties about the shrine. They spoke at great lengths: her about the time before the order and him about his travels and trading aspirations.

They were all lies, of course. It was a pretty sort of dance—the kind only suited for the young and awkward. She paid lip service to her calling, goading him towards accepting the tenets. He flavoured his enthusiasm as interest in her rather than the great Bludgeoner. For three days he ingratiated himself amongst their number. In three days, his honeyed words at night began to sway her heart.

They stood beneath the mighty oak lit with the silver touch of a round moon. There, in the darkness, they promised themselves to the other. Their hands were shaky and anxious as he leaned in and rested his lips on hers. They writhed like worms, overtaken by the passions of youth, though neither ever shed their clothes. There would be time for such things. But first, she would have to leave. They would have to leave. It was the only way it could be.

He waited in those old robes as she quietly gathered her worldly possessions. They no longer held the smell of that dank storm. They were no longer stained with the dirt of his trespasses.

She was but a shadow as she flitted beneath the dying eye of the chapel’s candle. He took her pack upon his shoulder and, hand-in-hand, they darted from the road and into the woods. For a time, they listened to the flap of the nocturnal predators hunting amongst the boughs. For a time, he considered the life promised in her hands.

They stopped for a small cave beneath a rocky outcrop. He laid down the pack and then they lay down together. He indulged in that blasphemous flesh again, the taste of her tongue doing strange, profane things to his body. She reached for his robes, pulling fervently at the fabric. What she uncovered gave her pause.

He had his marks and in the twilight of their escape he had put no effort in masking them. The moon shone bright and boldly upon the twisted inked form of the worm amongst the darkened bones of his chest. Did she gasp? He thought she did. He remembered that she did. But a niggling doubt always took root in the back of his mind. As he withdrew the dagger and pulled it across her throat, bathing his hands in the warm ichor of her life, he couldn’t help but think she had said nothing at all.

“Deep within the Welkwood there is a cave, its entrance long overgrown with brambles. Half buried in the soft earth is that skeleton which disappeared one night with a boy. Her flesh fed the plants that would never bear her epitaph. For such a shallow grave will never proclaim, ‘Here lies Louhi.’”

Nariah watched the skull as it rested on weary hands, staring absently at the flicker of her hair.

“You… probably shouldn’t call it Louhi.”

“You’re right,” he sighed. He held up the stone. “She isn’t worthy. It’s all lies, anyway. You remember more than your first. It gets easier, for certain. I wept not a tear for Louhi. If anything, she was noteworthy in how unnoteworthy she really was.”

“Death does not define us.”

And he looked at her, completely unconvinced. “It defines us all.”

He reached for the remainder of his drink. But her fingers were on it first. Their touch was brief, and it seemed that his truly didn’t long for the tankard at all. They squeezed but Nariah’s were spry. She and the flagon were plucked from the table before he could truly relish the moment.

“I think you’ve had enough,” Nariah said. “You’re going to need to be able to walk tomorrow. We have a long road ahead.”

He watched her retreating back until the last glimmer of her orange hair disappeared like a gutted candle. Kaliban then turned to the stone and picked it up.

“Phyte,” he whispered to the stone. “For the first. Truly, I am sorry.”