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?

It’s a Nice Day for a White Wedding

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I must begin, as is often the case, with an apology dear readers. I know I have made brief mention before about my hectic schedule for the month of October. I’m smack dab in the middle of two weddings, one being a very close friend of mine and the other my brother’s. For those that have been through the ordeal, I’m sure you can understand how much work goes into them even if they aren’t your own.

I grabbed these photos off Google image search, as I’m wont to do. These are not mine and that was not my tux.

Consequently, this post is going to be brief. I’ve just returned from being a best man which was a mixed blessing. On one hand, it was a very unique experience. I have never been someone’s best man and it was a very humbling perspective to have. It also came with a fair degree of anxiety and pressure – albeit some of it was self imposed. Primarily, I had to give the best man speech which, I was informed, is often considered to be the highlight for a wedding. Ok, maybe it’s considered the highlight of the reception.

Either way, it was an expectation that I not only perform but also perform above and beyond the competition. For days I agonized over the content of my speech then fretted about the very delivery of it. Despite what people may think, writing does not give you a natural advantage in the public speaking department. Hell, acting doesn’t help much there either. Unlike the stage, when you’re giving a speech people aren’t expecting you to be presenting a persona. You are yourself, standing in front of a crowd of veritable strangers attempting to delight and entertain with the full knowledge that you’re expected to be a memorable presentation.

As I said, I had some worries.

Course, this wasn’t even covering the other duties. Though most of those were focused around sitting people I didn’t know either on the appropriate side. I liken weddings to battles. You have your two armies opposing each other and it’s vitally important that you get both to the field of battle in proper formation. Thankfully, I wasn’t in charge of navigating the turgid waters of familial relations. Which aunt sits where and beside who would have been far too much for me to handle.

So please don’t sue me if you own any of these.

And for the rings, that wasn’t particularly onerous. There was a brief moment, after I was forbidden to touch them once they entered my pocket, that I realized they probably didn’t want the rings presented in their boxes. So I quickly fetched them from their containers while the bride walked down the aisle. But everyone was too focused on her to notice that blunder so I felt pretty safe. During the hand-off I didn’t separate them properly but that’s what you get for not having a rehearsal!

Anyway, back to the speech. Aside from an astonishingly terrible Master of Ceremony performance, I felt the speech went well. I was a lot calmer after the father of the bride and mother of the groom presented. I don’t want to say anything terrible, but especially the father’s speech made me a little more comfortable in my own prepared material. He had mentioned to me earlier how he hated speeches and how people ramble on about how they first met the couple and yadda, yadda, yadda. However, as the bride pointed out, it wasn’t his day. It was theirs. And my speech was specifically geared for them.

It was filled with all the personal touch and inside jokes that make me… well, me. And I’m their friend, not friends to their family. So I basically turned to them as I delivered and though they may have been the only ones laughing at least they were enjoying themselves. And that’s all I really hoped for. All I really aimed for, to be honest. And seeing them happy on their special day was all the thanks that I could have asked for.

So yeah, I had been dreading that day but afterwards I felt better. I felt… something akin to happiness. It was a very nice wedding, all things considered. And the couple appeared quite pleased themselves. At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters.

This also came up in the Google search. Since I love Arrested Development, you get this still.

Now, I promise to have something more substantial and interesting later. I just want to point out that – even though I too am incredibly busy – I still find the time to post for you, dear site. I won’t abandon you or forget. Even if I am a little late…

More of the Same – Fallout New Vegas DLC

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“Ya know sometimes the journey beats the destination, and especially when your spurs go jingle, jangle, jingle and you meet some nice gals along the way.” ~ Mr. New Vegas

Review of Dead Money and Honest Hearts

So, I’m still working my way through a full second playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas. I’ve written before of my love for the game and spoken at lengths with those closest to me about it. It’s a wonderful little piece of design that highlights some of the points we’ve cover on this blog in regards to world building. While I enjoyed Bethesda’s Fallout 3, the expertise and skill that Obsidian brought with their spin-off just can not be rivaled. I like to compare them as such: Fallout 3 is a spectacle but New Vegas is a world.

After its release and my first time running through the deserts of the Mojave, Obsidian released four DLC (downloadable content) packs for the game (technically five but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend three bucks on a bunch of guns). These are almost closer to actual expansion packs of the nineties style of design. They’re pretty meaty additions themselves, typically sporting a couple of main quests, side quests, handful of NPCs and companions and entirely new locations chalk full of villains and loot. They are, from every angle of design, more of the same. And when I loved the original so much, that is probably the best praise I can give.

However, as they are still the same, both feature very prominent issues. So while most of this post will probably be detailing where things went wrong, I do want to stress that I’ve enjoyed both of them. They exhibit the intriguing thematic driven stories that draws me to Obsidian’s work time and time again with well fleshed out characters and creative transformations of real world locations re-imagined in Fallout’s post apocalyptic world.

But let’s get on with the show.

Dead Money is the first of the released DLC which I chose to play second. After searching the Internet, many people recommended that they be played in order, however as you’re about to start Dead Money it comes with a pretty hefty warning that the add-on was designed with higher level characters in mind. Being below the recommended level, I turned my sights to Honest Hearts first. However, the two are wholly independent so order between them is irrelevant whereas it is heavily hinted in both packs that the latter two DLC (Old World Blues and Lonesome Road) should really be played last.

But I digress.

My first issue with both DLC is their jarring insertion into the game. The moment they’re installed and you load up the game you are given a text prompt that these quests have been activated. Whereas with quests within the game you are required to at least learn about them through some in-game method, whether that be stumbling across clues or portions of the quest on your own or initiating them by an interested NPC who offers you the details and promises rewards. Personally, I would have liked to see both of them inserted in a more natural way. Both have associated radio broadcasts that could have triggered by proximity to their starting locations which would have been enough. Likewise, the end of each DLC features the same slideshow style narration that the main game ends with but it would have been better if they incorporated those slides with the final game’s show.

Of course, they weren’t, because their final design takes into account people who finished the game and just bought the content to play as extra instead of considering it as a part of a greater whole. Which is a shame, since both of them integrate into the greater New Vegas world.

Anyway, Dead Money has you discovering a mysterious broadcast that gives off tantalizing messages of a grand opening for an unheard of casino title The Sierra Madre. The sultry voice of Vera welcomes you to come and explore its exotic streets with an air of old world charm that has faded to all but a memory in the wake of the nuclear war that devastated the world. Seeking the source of the broadcast finds The Courier (the player) descending into an abandoned bunker and towards a radio left curious in a well furnished room. Approaching the device immediately proves to be a mistake as your vision blurs and the walls shake in your vision right before you collapse to the floor.

Queue the blackout.

You awake in a desolate town square looking up at a lavish fountain with the projected head of some old geezer. He quickly informs you of the situation you’re in. Namely, you are going to assist him in breaking into the beautiful building up on the overlooking bluff and your service is insured by the thick bomb strapped around your neck. Elijah then tells you that there are others in the villa with matching bomb collars and all of you are intricately connected to each other. Should one of your collars go off then so will the rest. He then pats you on the bum and sends you on your way to “gather your crew” as it were.

It’s immediately apparent that the game is pulling from the old fashion heist movies. Much of the design for the levels involves navigating twisting and confusing corridors and streets. You need to call upon the unique strengths of the others wrapped in this adventure with you in order to proceed. And along the way you begin to learn more about the other characters. Each has his own motives for being in the villa and they look hungrily towards the casino overhead. Greed and curiosity are thrown together as constant themes throughout the piece and more than once you’re questioned why you came yourself.

It’s all well done with my only complaints being a slight dissonance between the world and the gameplay. We’re informed that the Sierra Madre is a deathtrap, luring in its victims with the sweet promise of honey before clamping its jaws irrevocably around them. Unfortunately, the three characters you are assisting weren’t truly brought for those reasons. Elijah also spends much time complaining about the confounding greed that caused the previous failures with past victims. You have the overwhelming sense that this is a ploy that has been run again and again but with very little success. I would have really liked to see more evidence of that either through more footprints left by the ones before or even having some rival “thieves” still lurking in the dark corners of the villa.

Otherwise, the level design was really focused on their goal. Combat is less emphasized over survival and stealth. The world is designed to make you desperate. The collar around your neck is more than just a pretty souvenir. The transmitter is affected by radios which can set it off prematurely if you spend too much time in their presence. Furthermore, should one of your allies unfortunately fall whether from triggered traps or the swarming “ghost people” that stalk the empty streets then you are allowed only five seconds of frantic despair before your own head is popped like a spring cherry tomato.

Further emphasizing the survivalist aspect is the thick “Cloud” that hangs over the area. This blood red mist is a constant drain upon your health, forcing you to find whatever healing you can. You become a veritable pin-cushion after the number of needles that are required to keep you alive as you explore and perform the tasks needed to break into the Sierra Madre. There are even concentrated areas of the Cloud that will hurt you even faster creating a tough decision of whether the unknown materials lying inside are worth the trade-off of health required to get them.

The ideas and designs are all great. The problem is that the game is running on the Gamebryo engine. Unfortunately, this means that all this stealth/survival gameplay is wasted on a system that can’t really model stealth gameplay all that well. Too often are most situations best resolved by brute force. Once I had a large enough stockpile of munitions, I just fought my way through the ghost people filling the streets. Even more unforgivable, the game had an obnoxious tendency of just respawning more ghost people after completing objectives as if they realized that the stealth aspect was for naught but that these awfully limiting combat situations would be better. The problem is, the game wasn’t designed for such a strict restricting of weapons so my character – who was built around explosives – had to slough through the combats with weapons that were far inferior in his hands because of the way I’d been specializing him. Eventually, I got a weapon that let me two shot the enemies and I just charged them head on after that since I couldn’t be bothered trying to sneak (which I also wasn’t good at even when I was trying to use the items that would help shore up that weakness).

Furthermore, the game was built so that you could only have one companion with you at a time. This is incredibly cumbersome for a heist story, especially given the large focus on the other members involved. The method for breaking in was rather contrived (and remarkably easy when all was said and done which makes me wonder why it took so long for people to perform it). But once you broke into the Sierra Madre casino itself, you and your gang were immediately split up because the game just couldn’t run with all of you together.

The casino section was also aggravating since instead of the mysterious ghost people to deal with you had holographic security officers and a lot more radios. This forced a very “trial by error” approach to navigating the space that seemed to deflate the sense of a grandly schemed heist into a “run into the room, die in order to locate all the guards and radios then reload and repeat until the one exact path is mapped out.”

Which is unfortunate because the story surrounding the casino and its characterful inhabitants was really engaging. It was bogged down by its own game systems which, at times, made it a chore to play and drained the life out of it much like the omnipresent cloud drained your character’s.

Honest Hearts, however, was almost the opposite.

Honest Hearts has you answering the call for guards from a desperate caravan company called Happy Trails. They’re hoping to lead an envoy to the remains of Salt Lake City to re-establish the routes with the settlement of New Canaan that had inexplicably ended. To get there, the caravan master informs you that they are going to travel through the Grand Canyon.

As with Dead Money, your companions are told to go away and you’re informed that you are only allowed a limited amount of your own gear to carry since you’re expected to shoulder some of the caravan’s supplies yourself. It was a cute explanation for the loss of your gear but Honest Hearts didn’t benefit thematically from the restriction. All it did, once again, was make obstacles artificially more challenging because my character was not designed around the equipment they provided in that area.

Anyway, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that once within the canyon your caravan is attacked and everyone is slaughtered by a bunch of rather effective savages called the White Legs. After battling your way from the ambush, you meet a young man by the name of Follows-Chalk who claims affiliation with the Dead Horses (assuming, of course, you don’t gun him down because you first spot him at a distance and he looks really similar to the jerks that blew off your friends’ faces when you first arrive). Follows-Chalk mentions that his warband’s leader, Joshua, would like to speak with you and he becomes your temporary guide through Zion National Park.

Unlike Dead Money, there isn’t as great of an urgency for following the path and you’re given some freedom to wander around and explore the area. The Grand Canyon makes for a rather nice location even if it is swarming with danger in the form of wildly mutated Preying Mantises, Bears and some devil spawned insect called Cazadores. When you finally do meet up with Joshua, you discover that he isn’t some primitive tribal dressed in skins but a heavily bandaged man wearing a bullet proof vest and displaying remarkable skill with pistols.

He also believes in God.

The one curious thing about the Fallout world that I had never given much thought to was its lack of religion. It’s all too typical for science fiction and fantasy stories to shy away from real world faith. Its absence didn’t strike me as anything other than developers not wish to cause offence. Apparently, that wasn’t entirely the case with Fallout where its explained that in the years following the dropping of the bombs, recognizable religion as we know it had almost completely disappeared. The New Canaanites are the only faction to still lay faith in the old believes. This isn’t to say that everyone is an atheist (though many are) but most claims to supernatural or spiritual worship is typically reserved for tribal communities that are seen as far more primitive than the major factions vying for control (though there is a sort of religious reverence towards old technology in the Brotherhood of Steel, it is pretty understated).

As it turns out, Joshua is the Joshua Graham who is mentioned quite frequently in the main game. He was the Legate for Caesar’s Legion during the first assault on Hoover Dam. After their embarrassing defeat, Caesar had Joshua covered in pitch and thrown burning into the Grand Canyon as a warning to others of the cost of failure. And while little else is mentioned of Graham after, it becomes clear that though Caesar doesn’t speak of him again, he hasn’t forgotten him. The White Legs are a tribe of raiders hoping to join Caesar’s Legion and to prove their worth, they’ve been given the task of hunting Graham down.

But the interesting thematic elements are tied to the relationship between Joshua and Daniel. Daniel is a New Canaanite missionary, much like Joshua was before he joined with Caesar. Their conflict is based on the atrocities that Joshua committed while working with Caesar and how that experienced shaped each man’s viewpoint in the canyon. Joshua wishes to crush the White Legs and protect the home of the tribals who currently live in Zion Park. Daniel seeks to maintain their childhood innocence and evacuate them to a place the White Legs will never find them.

And this gets into my complaint of Honest Hearts. Ultimately, the story revolves around the tribals that live in the caves of Zion. The Sorrows Tribe are a rather naive people, even when compared to their contemporaries in the Dead Horses. They have little knowledge of warfare or how to defend themselves and even their survival skills are severely lacking (as Daniel was required to show them simple medicines and procedures to save some of them during childbirth). The interesting thing is that the origin of the Sorrows is explained not by their stories but through the hidden journals of a long dead protector referred to only as the Survivalist. It was an interesting method to convey their history and I found it more rewarding to search the trapped caves for his hidden entries than I was doing many of the other quests in Zion.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the writers weren’t as clear on their themes and Honest Hearts really lacks focus. It should have been all about the Sorrows tribe and made it clear that the fight was over their proverbial soul. I would have liked to see more debate between Joshua and Daniel, especially over religious matters. Here are two men of the same faith with vastly different views and opinions and I would have liked to see them justify their believes both to the player and each other. There also should have been a greater focus on the effects of your actions and decisions on the Sorrows tribe. Instead, we’re introduced to them halfway through the DLC storyline and you don’t get a lot of attachment to them in the little time left.

I would have liked to see them introduced much earlier. Possibly even have the Sorrows the first tribe you meet in the canyon. They should have presented the player with more quests and these quests outcomes should have affected the beliefs and decisions of the members. At the end of the day, I felt that the proper course for the Sorrows was to not baby them, as Daniel wanted, but to let them grow and decide what they should do for themselves. But that option wasn’t truly available in game. I couldn’t confront Daniel about his need to defend these people’s innocence as a way to justify his faith’s beliefs in a world so hostile to a peaceful religion. I also couldn’t confront the hypocrisy of Joshua’s bloodlust with the rest of his religion when really the personal conflict of the two missionaries should have been the undercurrents of all the interplays between the tribes.

At the end of the day, even with the length that they were, I felt both Dead Money and Honest Hearts had a lot of interesting elements at play. Both of them could have been expanded, possibly into their own full fledged stories themselves. So much of their writing was devoted to universal themes such as salvation, redemption, greed and trust that they had the potential for so much more. Even in their current state, they’re still damn good side quests. I can only hope that the next two DLC are just more of the same.

Playing to Win

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OK, ladies and gents it’s time for another rant hour on the old blog post. Today, I want to address competitiveness and this nebulous concept of “playing to win.” We’ve all heard it before. Someone will leverage the accusation towards another in an attempt to belittle or undermine their adversary’s performance in some sort of competition. In our modern times, the most common occurrence will be during a game – be it video or otherwise.

Now, it’s no secret that I am a competitive individual. When I enter a contest, I desire to win. I enter with the intentions of trying my best and, should my best not be good enough, I seek to improve myself so that I can perform better the next time I face adversity in said game. Which is to say, I like to win. But who doesn’t? It’s enjoyable winning and unpleasant losing. The very purpose of a competition is to allow there to be either outcome. The better the competition the more the outcome is determined by the skill of the participants within than outlying factors. So, I do play to win. As does everyone.

Now, there are some people who claim otherwise. There are individuals that would say “having fun” is more important than winning. To this, I agree. But as I already established, winning is fun. I’m no philosopher but without the proper education in Game Theory, I’m certain that even if there is no tangible reward the average participant in a game strives to win. It makes sense on a basic level. Why would you participate in a game if you weren’t attempting to achieve the victory condition? I don’t set up a chessboard with the intent of creating the Mona Lisa with my pieces while my opponent is trying to capture my king. By engaging in the activity, we are entering into an unspecified contract to abide by the rules towards a singular victorious goal that is established by the activity itself.

This isn’t to say that these goals are immutable. Often times, games have a simplistic win state (“taking the enemy’s king”) that are complicated by the various aspects of the game (“getting past the pawns”) while avoiding the loss state (“losing my king”). There is no way to achieve victory in chess by your first move alone. Even the shortest win condition of two moves requires a very specific response from your opponent that is incredibly unlikely to occur the more experienced they are. Thus, it is often to my benefit to break down the distant and difficult win state into more immediate and advantageous goals that will make the final win state easier to achieve. My immediate goals could be something like “control the centre of the board” by having more pieces threaten the most squares in the middle while removing or preventing my opponent from doing so. I could also have the objective of “take the enemy’s queen,” a piece that is far more versatile and consequently more powerful than any other piece on the board.

In fact, this deconstruction of the win state is necessary for improvement. If I am only considering the final victory condition and move blindly towards it, I will be ill-prepared to deal with my opponent’s secondary and tertiary goals. I will concede those minor victories to him, likely obtaining little in return and increasing the difficulty of achieving a win as more and more small loses pile up. Furthermore, these secondary goals make incredibly complex games easier to understand and easier to analyze.

Dota 2, which I have made posts about before, is an incredibly complex and strategically challenging game. There is a huge overhead of knowledge required of the player between the staggering amount of interactions between the 110 current hero pool and the multitude of items that can be bought. Furthermore, the design of the game creates an ever changing balance of power between the accumulation of gold and experience on these different heroes with everyone one of them benefiting slightly differently. The win state, however, is very simple. The game ends with the destruction of the team’s “Ancient” – a large, impressive looking structure in the middle of their base. However, if I were to just pick a random hero and charge towards that structure I would invariably lose. Partly because the Ancient is invulnerable so long as it is protected by its tiered towers and partly because I would die well before I got anywhere near the base. This would “feed” both gold and experience to my enemies with each successive death giving them an ever growing advantage over my team that would eventually become insurmountable.

Thus, to succeed at Dota, it is imperative that objectives be broken down into far more manageable goals in order to win. A player needs to focus on their “laning” which requires them to outplay their opponent in the lane during the early portion of the game. Instead of focusing on destroying the Ancient, they’re looking at gaining an early advantage in gold and experience against the one to three opponents sharing the same space as them. If they are unable to secure an advantage themselves, they should look to either call in assistance or seek to help a teammate in another lane on the map. Once an advantage has been raised, whether through better farming of “creeps” for gold and experience or through a kill advantage against their opponent, they can then move on to the next objective of destroying the outer tier 1 towers. This provides more gold for the team and gives them greater influence over the map for them to slowly move in on the primary objective of the Ancient.

This breakdown of the game, as mentioned, also assists with learning. When looking back at a victory or loss, it’s natural to wonder how one team became victorious. If you merely look at the win state, it is impossible to see how it was achieved. Only by examining the secondary goals, their successes and failures, can you really analyze the play and learn where the biggest mistakes were made. The turn five loss of the Queen could have been the move that spelled disaster. The four deaths before five minutes to the enemy’s mid player could have jump started a surge in the enemy’s strength that spiraled out of control. By further breaking down secondary goals, you can see areas where you can improve. Perhaps your poor placement of pawns led to you losing control of the space that led to your Queen’s capture. Maybe your last hitting on the creeps allowed your opponent access to their second spell which gave them first blood and enough gold to purchase a bottle to hold runes in. You can examine these small mistakes and know where you can improve so next time you’re in a similar situation you are prepared with the knowledge of how to win them.

I want to make a few brief closing points on win states. There are some games with nebulous win states but clear loss states. Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t truly have a defined end goal. You don’t necessarily “win” D&D. Generally speaking, there will be an adventure with individual and party goals that you and the players are working towards. But because of its reactive nature, Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t really stop if you achieve or fail those goals. Likewise, even its loss state of death could just be a stumbling block depending on whether your Dungeon Master turns the story into some archetypal myth involving you or your party descending into the underworld to wrestle back your soul from the Lord of the Dead. Consequently, D&D is driven purely by its secondary goals be these a few job posting in pubs or a player’s desire to see the fall of a tyrannical lord.

And there is an exception to the statement that all players strive to win. There is a minority whose win state isn’t the established one of the game. These players are classified as “trolls” and their win state is self determined but usually set as creating as much animosity or grievance in their own teammates. They will do everything in their power to undermine their own team’s chances to win, deriving fun from the aggravation and frustration as they force a loss on their teammates. Consequently, these players are typically banned from participating when identified. Also, it is my personal opinion that these players will partake in this behaviour on throw-away accounts while maintaining a main account in order to participate in the established dynamic of the game but I have no evidence to back that up.

We’ll just call it a strong hunch.

Rollplaying Part 1

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Once again, I get busy and my co-contributors demonstrate that I am the glue that holds this place together. Actually, that’s not accurate. I’m more the glue that keeps the wheels turning… except glue would have the opposite effect.

Let’s just say I’m the one that posts the most when he’s suppose to.

So yesterday was Thursday and meant to be our second day of Derek’s Ikan Light campaign. I was counting on these D&D sessions to give me plenty of material and ideas for blog posts. That was until Felicia got sick and the game was cancelled. Now, apparently, Derek is spending most of his day trying to extract his stomach out his mouth and my dreams of actually playing D&D have been only so much smoke and mirrors.

Well, God damn it all, I’ll write about it anyway!

In my brief experience with the genre, I’ve found that there are generally two types of players that join into tabletop RPGs. They go by many names but I’m going to affectionately term them roleplayers and rollplayers. I, myself, am the former. I got into RPGs way back in the day through play by post message boards and mIRC chat channels. These were free-form roleplaying communities where rules were light and the focus was more on a bunch of people interacting in a shared world. I have fond memories of this wild frontier. There was a game I played that was essentially Robin Hood. I say essentially because while the thread creator had the full intentions of making it about the classic woodland bandit, a bunch of us ended up taking the game wholly in another direction. Typically with free-form roleplaying, most groups or topics start as a sort of collaborative fanfiction. Generally, someone will begin with a call for fellows to join them in a popular world and the familiar characters will be doled out like a sloppy meal at a food kitchen to the first unwashed miscreants to get their hands on their childhood favourites.

Double Portrait of a Brother and Sister by Cornelius Ketel (1548-1616)

Even at a young age, while I enjoyed the practice of joining these self-indulgent fantasies, I had a penchant for creating my own characters even if the world was not my own. Presumably, having this in a developed world created the necessary “accepted rules” which each of us as creators would play by but that is neither here nor there. The point is that when I joined the Robin Hood thread, I chose not only to ignore joining Robin’s merry band of nitwits but threw my lot in with the Sheriff of Nottingham. Of course, it didn’t feel right playing the eponymous character (especially since the Robin player had already written him in a few of his posts) so I started to develop the deputy. Because every good sheriff needs a deputy. Only, I was all too prepared to have mine play the role of the villain.

My first post was a despicable introduction of abuse of power and megalomania. He terrorized Maid Marian, extorted peasants, berated and whipped subordinates and smeared the good name of the sheriff at every possible turn. The introduction of this character had a rather unexpected effect on the game. Suddenly, the focus was immediately redirected from the sheriff and King John to trying to deal with this abhorrent individual. The characters and events began to drift away from the classic tale and many of us began to fight out this grand struggle between minor and imagined characters that was far more compelling and gripping than the one between Robin and the sheriff. This struggle was made all the more difficult and gripping beneath the one universal rule of free-form roleplaying – you may never write a fellow player’s character’s actions or do irrevocable harm or damage to them without their permission. I couldn’t, say, just march a contingent of soldiers into Robin’s lair and murder him in cold blood. Likewise, none of his band were capable of just hunting my deputy down and slitting his throat alone and unloved by his fellows.

Portrait of Ferdinand Alvarez de Toledo by Willem Key (1515-1568)

Instead, the battleground played out between NPCs. I arrested and imprisoned loved ones and those closest to my enemies. They worked vigilantly to discredit my name with the sheriff and king as well as prepare the peasants to resist me whenever I showed up. I don’t remember how it ended but I think part of my final downfall came when a new player arrived to take the role of Maid Marian.

What’s important about this rambling tale, however, is that all of this was possible with only the barest of rules. Since every member of the group was focused on “playing their role” the entire crux of the game revolved around the interplay between player actions, decisions and goals. Nothing was scripted and there was no rewards for us other than developing a damn good yarn between all our meddling hands.

I’ve always approached RPGs with this sort of attitude. I spend a lot of time developing my character, understanding the world and imagining the desires and goals of the person I play. I don’t really care for the mechanical creation of a character. Stating, powers and abilities represent a tangled mess that interferes with the creation process. Instead of just creating a “despicable deputy” I’m forced to consider what skills he has four more ranks in than not, how many “agility points” he has for blocking damage, whether he has enough strength to lift his longsword or not and on and on it goes. And while these limitations can offer additional fleshing that you wouldn’t consider otherwise, more often than not it is almost entirely devoted to elements that don’t form a character but a mechanical automaton.

Which brings me to the rollplayer. My friend Jeremy is one of those other, alien players. They are most excited delving into the systems of the game, learning the intricacies of the combat and skill checks. They derive more pleasure from creating extensive leveling plans, stating out all the perks, feats, proficiencies, powers, spells, abilities and other goodies that they anticipate receiving. Their character isn’t the vengeful victim of the crimes committed by a rampaging deputy in his unswerving hunt for outlaws in the forest. Instead, they are playing the 4/5/1/3/6 Rogue/Shadow Dancer/Shapeshifter/Divine Matriarch/Gooblygook. They create killing machines meant to defeat whatever challenges will be thrown at them, delighting in the combination of powers delved from the obscurest supplement or magazine that can destroy even the god statelines themselves!

Soldiers of Fortune by Francisco Fernandi (1679-1740)

And don’t get me wrong, there isn’t any right or wrong way to play these games. They’re obviously designed for both styles. There are reams of comprehensive rules for managing combat and challenges between individuals. Whereas a duel between people from the Robin Hood adventure would essentially be a few days of colourful riposting and parrying, the conclusion of the combat will inevitably be a draw or well established before the two participants strike the first blow. The classic dungeon delve would fall completely apart in a free-form framework. And those challenges are the ones that rollplayers delight in the most.
Whereas, I am quite happy playing an entire session without throwing a single die. Obviously, not everyone is the same and it’s probably more accurate to say players fall on the spectrum of roll-role playing. And it is the duty of the DM to figure out the perfect balance for the players that she is running for. Sometimes, group dynamics make the games really difficult to balance if you have a collection of extremes. I’ll never truly enjoy combat in tabletop games. Likewise, some players will never enjoy social intrigue and politics. But if you can get a group together that share the same interests and have a DM that likes running and developing adventures in that style… well, then you will have a damn good evening that leaves your players eagerly anticipating each session and writing long, rambling complaints whenever they get canceled.

Going to the Chapel

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So, I have a bunch of weddings coming up and I’m using my mulligan today to skip on my post. Sorry folks, but I have a lot of work to do and not enough time to make a proper blog entry for the day. I apologize for this and hope to return next week with some more of my ramblings.

Pretty But Dead

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Pretty But Dead – Why Breastplate Doesn’t Include Breasts

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Look upon this travesty and despair!

So this weekend there was apparently a marathon of bad children’s movies. One that happened to catch my attention was Percy Jackson And The Butchered Greek Mythology. I was intrigued by it partly by my sister’s mention that she had attempted the books and partly because Heather is an avid fan. How bad could it be, I wondered.

Well, pretty bad. But that’s not what I want to discuss today. Instead, I’d rather talk about a very specific, nit-picky detail that has farther reaching cultural infiltration. Specifically, when Percy arrived at the awkwardly titled Camp Half Blood there was a greater crime committed than horribly mangling the most culturally saturated mythology in the Western Hemisphere. I am, of course, speaking of Alexandra Daddario.

Though, to be fair to the young actress, it wasn’t her rather lackluster performance but more the costume she was squeezed into. Despite the impracticality of traditional sword warfare in a modern world riddled with guns, for some bizarre reason every single girl at this camp had been issued a custom fitted leather cuirass complete with delightful boob pouches. Granted, this design for women’s armour wasn’t a unique creation of the Percy Jackson movies. In fact, this type of armour design is rather ubiquitous in modern times.

I mentioned how ludicrous this armour was which prompted a rather curious response from my family. “Women aren’t men!” they proclaimed, “and they can’t wear men’s armour. That would be uncomfortable.”

Well, of course it would be uncomfortable. Armour has always been uncomfortable. There was a kid in my high school who was really into the Medieval Ages and had a hobby of creating chain mail shirts. He was kind enough to lend me a finished one that he had fashioned for the day and I walked around school with it on. And I can tell you, the thing was heavy, cumbersome and restricting. But had I got into a knife fight, it probably would have spared my life or at the very least a few extra knife holes.

See, the sole function of armour is to deflect blows and edges from striking and piercing your fleshy bits. It’s not designed to be comfortable or a fashion statement. They’re basically giant metal shells that people wore if their lord valued their life over the handful of arrows that the enemy would drop you with. Having two large mounds in the middle of your chest is going to do the exact opposite of that. Those big pretty hills are going to be directing blows right into your chest instead of away thus increasing the likelihood that an attack pierces the metal and kills you.

Female_Leather_Drow__Armour_by_I_TAVARON_I

Female Drow Armour designed by I Tavaron. See more at his deviant art page: http://i-tavaron-i.deviantart.com/

As such, function has always trumped form. In fact, the concept that a woman’s shapely bits would even need special pounded pouches in the outer metal plates is rather ludicrous when you consider traditionally what was worn underneath. Warriors didn’t just throw a naked brigandine over their body. They wore a rather large padded jacket called a gambeson in order to cushion the body against the metal, absorb some of the kinetic energy of a blow and to reduce chaffing. Straight from wikipedia: “It was very insulatory and thus uncomfortable, but its protection was vital for the soldier.”

Over this, you would then wear the aforementioned chain mail shirt. Then you would finally wear your breastplate, cuirass, brigandine or what have you. If a woman managed to keep her shape through all that then surely she would make even the Venus of Willendorf jealous. Even more worrisome, if a woman fell over in one of these metal bodices, the pressure of the impact, increased by the weight of the armour itself, could very well crack her sternum which could lead to damaging your heart and lungs. These breasted plates are less protective shells and more metal death traps.

To give the misguided designers a bit of credit, however, I can only assume that they were inspired by the classic Grecian muscle cuirass commonly depicted in Roman and Greek art. Here we have finely articulated pieces included nipples, navels, abs and defined pectorals. Surely if the Ancient Greeks wore these then they must have been real. Except, archaeological finds of relatively unadorned cuirasses suggest otherwise. Considering the muscle cuirasses were typically depicted on generals and emperors suggests that these were strictly ornamental pieces used to display the idealized physique than actual armour suited for combat.

If ancient men can have them why can’t modern women, you sexist!

Unless, of course, ancient smiths were secretly trying to off the management during combat with faulty design. Which, if ancient bosses were anything like modern ones, might not be too far fetched.

This, of course, isn’t to say that you can’t take the unique physiological differences between men and women into consideration when crafting and creating armour for either sexes. It just depends how much you care about them being fitted and alive over pretty and dead.

And not a breast to be seen though she’s got quite the upper shelf, if you know what I mean.

Tolkien’s Strangulation

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I have sad news. I tried to do an easy post today only to discover that I’ve already thrown up all my D&D stories. I have something I can dip into when I get busier with other work but, alas, I have nothing for the moment. What does that mean for you, intrepid readers? Simply that you’re going to get more poorly written, rambling, stream-of-conscious essays.

Which brings us to today’s that I’m tentatively calling:

Tolkien’s Strangulation:

The Dominance of Medieval Fantasy

Kind of cute, isn’t it?

This blog is rather dominated by the creative process with an emphasis on world building. As such, there’s going to be a natural bias towards fantasy writing. Fantasy, of all genres, is perhaps the most focused on creating new worlds. I’ve made mention that I believe it’s one of its biggest draws. Which isn’t to say that its brother genre – science fiction – doesn’t have an emphasis on world building: just that fantasy’s is greater. I think this arises from fantasy’s use of magic. Unlike science, which is heavily based on our own understandings of the natural laws and phenomenon of our world, magic and its existence fundamentally changes the fabric of an imagined universe. In science fiction settings, we can generally assume that gravity works as it does in our lives, that the basic principles of of chemistry and physics apply and that the laws that govern the natural world function according to shared fundamental principles. If you look at a world like Mass Effect, while it does include lots of supernatural and fantastical elements, it spends a great portion of time justifying those elements in a framework closely mirroring our scientific knowledge.

The result? We end up with pages of lore dedicated to explaining how faster than light travel works, how species are capable of psychic abilities and the chemical composition of ‘omni-gel.’ In contrast, if you look at something like Harry Potter, there is almost zero consideration for how the universe itself functions. Even taking place in the modern world with the dominance of the scientific method, there is little understanding for why spells require wands, latin and specific hand motions. There is no great detailing about the ecological impacts that dragons and giants would have on their environments and why these mythical beasts must be kept from non-magical eyes. None of its fantastical elements are justified within its own universe and each element is treated as a new spectacle to awe and entertain. It’s only explanation is that “it’s magic” and that’s all that seems required.

It’s remarkable how lovely these medieval fantasy settings are. It’s almost as if people forget the time period was called the Dark Ages for a reason.

There is a natural expectation from the readership that magic is unknowable. It is the stuff of stage magicians and the whole draw is that it can dazzle and entertain. Hermione sets paper fluttering by with a simple announcement of “Leviosa.” Gandalf chases off a flock of mounted ring wraiths with a beam from his flashlight staff. And I don’t even know what the hell is going on with the Game of Throne’s but apparently it involves women and lots of sex. Wizards, by their nature and mastery of this unknown force, are generally mysterious characters themselves. They rarely are the major actors in their tale and instead take a supportive role, guiding and mentoring some shmuck that is more relateable to the reader instead of just waving his arm and solving the crisis himself.

One need only think of Gandalf from Lord of the Rings to see all of this encapsulated. Now, I’m fairly certain given Tolkien’s desire for creating a modern myth, Gandalf drew heavily upon such classic figures as Merlin and Odin. But this isn’t called “Viking Strangulation” and that’s because so much of fantasy’s tropes are dominated by Tolkien world creation that it’s obvious where most of the inspiration is coming from. Before Tolkien, elves were obnoxious wee folk that lived in dirty holes. Dwarves most certainly weren’t the drunkard, beard loving, elf hating midgets that we have now and halflings weren’t even a thing in old mythology. The success of the Lord of the Rings had such an impact on the genre that the majority of its literature is essentially a reiteration of Tolkien’s world.

Because of the influence of mythology, his world is very rooted in the medieval time period. Though there is little representation of the complex peerage system or the dominance of a centralized church, the technological development of the world is approximate to that time. This led to the development of the Medieval Fantasy subgenre and a quick look over any fantasy section in a bookstore will show how ubiquitous this is. Which is fascinating to me since fantasy is no more beholden to medieval settings than science fiction is to alternate realities of the modern era. Lacking such a domineering figure as Tolkien, science fiction seems liberated to explore as many different stories and themes that it likes. A brief look at some of the largest contributors to the field demonstrate it’s variety. Star Wars is as different as Dune is as different as Neuromancer is as different as Ender’s Game is as different as 2001: A Space Odyssey is as different as The Time Machine.

And then you look at fantasy: Lord of the Rings vs A Game of Thrones vs A Wheel of Time vs Name of the Wind vs Eragon vs Assassin’s Apprentice…

And on and on it goes.

Frank Frazetta art.

It’s a fascinating situation especially since fantasy is arguably more successful than science fiction. Though, to be fair to the genre, urban fantasy is making a large impact now with things like Twilight and Harry Potter having such financial pull (though you could argue that these are are just spawned from Narnia’s success). My only point is that this ubiquitous isn’t necessary. Fantasy isn’t behooved to remain stuck in the Dark Ages. There is no reason that fantasy can’t cover a score of time periods and locations. A setting like Planescape is completely fantastical and even though it is a Dungeons and Dragons setting it is almost entirely alien to any of its other products.

As such, my writing has been leaning away from the standard fantasy tropes. I have my D&D shorts but my novel is fullblown steampunk set in the middle of the 1800s. I ideas for a fantasy story based solely on Native American mythology, tropical island settings, ancient Greek settings, dark modern setting…

There is a wealth of options available once we stop thinking that fantasy means pointy eared elves, knights in shining armour and endless princesses that need rescuing.

War Never Changes – Fallout and the Monomyth

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War, war never changes.

Except when it does.

It’s a bit of a slow news day so I thought I’d spend today discussing something that I love. Followers of this blog will surely know that both Derek and myself are avid fans of role-playing games. They’re a remarkable mode for gaming and storytelling, often harking back to a time of pulp science fiction and fantasy when stories were meant to tickle the sense of wonder and excitement in its readership. Derek has made comment on how early Dungeons and Dragons, as envisioned by Gary Gygax himself, was focused on fantastical scenarios and peoples that placed the player in a traditional hero’s role.

This set-up is considered rather rudimentary as time goes on, the material reaches a greater audience and tastes mature for more complex narratives. This bleeds down into story designs as the classic hero’s journey is forced to adapt and change to its creator’s desires and fans demands. Fantasy and science fiction, perhaps more than any other genres, have a long history of tapping into the primordial hero’s journey and it is no surprise that games derived from that material share prominent elements of its design.

Speaking of pulp, you can’t get more Frank Frazetta than this.

And while there may be some contention and criticism of Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” that spawned the idea of a generalized Hero’s Journey, there is some use in its structure. The journey, as envisioned in its most simplistic form, begins with an unremarkable member of a tribe receiving a call to adventure. This typically represents some dire need to the community that necessitates the hero venturing forth from his known world into the unknown often receiving advice and assistance from mentors and supernatural entities in order to descend into a transformative period characterized by trials and challenges that culminate with the death of the hero as he knowns himself only to be reborn and return with whatever plot device he was sent to retrieve in the first place.

Thus, Campbell envisioned the standard format for mythology and you can see the basic structure in many common tales from The Hobbit to the original Star Wars. For today, I want to focus on a single video game series in particular.

Fallout was created by the now defunct Interplay Entertainment and is set in a post-apocalyptic 23rd century retrofuturistic world. The visual design of the series is characterized by 1950 cold war Americana which plays upon the period’s hopefulness for the potential of technological improvements to our lives combined with the paranoia of global nuclear holocaust caused by the same technology. The first game follows the protagonist from Vault 13: underground nuclear holdouts built to shelter society from the impending fallout of global war. For generations these people have lived underground, waiting patiently for the devastation from the war to clear so they can emerge and begin rebuilding society. Unfortunately, your Vault’s water supply begins to break down and the protagonist is selected to head out into the wasteland to find a replacement before his community dies from dehydration.

Now, I never played the first game and only the first hours of the second but I did read up on their stories. As you can begin to see, Fallout 1 begins with the classic hero’s journey setup. However, one interesting thing about Science Fiction is that, more often than Fantasy, while the stories draw on the monomyth the structure and themes are more often to be criticized and undermined. In Fallout, after the player successfully discovers a replacement water chip for the Vault and saves the world from a mutant army and its master set on global domination, he is denied returning to his home. The Overseer is fearful that the journey has changed the hero too much and worries that his experiences would destabilize the community so he exiles him in order to maintain order.

I’m fairly certain all these pictures belong to the Fallout IP. I don’t know what that means in terms of ownership, however.

Fallout 2 begins much the same. Years after the first, you discover that the protagonist of the first game created a primitive village called Arroyo. At the start of the game, the village is undergoing the worst recorded drought in memory and the village elder recruits the protagonist – the direct descendant of the first game – to search out a Garden of Eden Creation Kit in order to terraform the earth and make it more bountiful. Once again we have unremarkable tribe member being called forth by fate and circumstance to venture from home to rescue his community. And much like the first game, this structure is subverted when your entire village is kidnapped while you are away. Course, this story ends a little more traditionally with the protagonist helping his people.

Likewise, when Interplay went under and Bethesda scooped up the rights to Fallout to make the third installment, we return once again to the monomyth structure. You are a child of a very prominent scientist in a Vault near Washington D.C. Fallout 3 was interesting in that the prologue was spent with you growing up in the Vault before reaching young adulthood to discover that your father has disappeared one night and the Overseer for the Vault has gone mad from this abandonment and sent security after you. Here, we see the undermining of the monomyth pretty quickly as you’re chased out from your community and you spend a majority of your time searching for your father and answers for why you were exiled.

While the Hero’s Journey concept was very influential in guiding some creator’s like George Lucas with Star Wars, there is no denying that the idea has some flaws. First amongst them is the gross generalization of so many rich and varied stories into very stripped components as to lose their flavour. But the monomyth further promotes almost anti-populist ideals as, inevitably, the hero upon return is elected into a social elite and his myth is performed as justification for the standing of the current ruling class. More than anything, the Fallout series challenges to this structure undermine the authority of the leadership. In the first game, the Overseer’s “reward” for the hero’s work and loyalty is exile. In the second game, the primary antagonist is the President of the United States who is determined to unleash a virus that will kill all mutated organisms in America to restore a level of purity that his community can rule (and they must test this virus on your people first to make sure it works). In Fallout 3, not only are you chased out by the Overseer who is paranoid that you and your father are seeking to destabilize his rule, but you also learn that all Vaults were designed as cruel social experiments wherein humanity’s survival was pushed aside in order to test scenarios like some vaults being composed of all men or the outcome of calculated system failures on community morale and cohesiveness. Almost universally, authority is portrayed as cruel, paranoid, manipulative or just downright ineffective. And this isn’t even touching on the fact that the setting itself already underwent a global nuclear war – the very definition of a worldwide failure of leadership in the modern era.

Unless I put the keywords Fallout and the monomyth right beside each other, Google gets angry.

This theme reached its height of complexity with Fallout: New Vegas. Now, players were cast as a free agent – a courier with a simple task of delivering an innocuous chip to one of the few surviving cities to not be devastated by nuclear bombardment. New Vegas is the surviving area of Las Vegas still powered by the functioning Hoover Dam and run by the excessively reclusive Mr. House. Only, things aren’t peaceful in the Mojave Desert as both the NCR and Caesar’s Legion are waging a bloody war with one another over the area and its resources. For the first time, players were no longer tied to a Vault beginning and the cruel failures of the past governing regimes. You would expect this liberation from the monomyth set-up to perhaps avoid criticism of authority. However, as you begin to explore the Mojave Desert and interact with the three major factions, you start coming across criticism of each group. NCR is seen as a bloated and corrupted bureaucratic nightmare where the prosperity and wellbeing of its citizens is pushed aside to pursue individual greed and narrow-sighted victory against their enemy at any cost. Caesar’s Legion is a brutal amalgamation of the various wasteland tribes seeking order through a very strict application of the ancient Roman army standard complete with cultural assimilation, slavery and unyielding military hierarchy. Mr. House is just plain crazy (as well as an iron handed manipulator who forces obedience to his reformations through business contracts enforced at the end of an army of unwavering robots).

I don’t think it comes as any surprise that the most popular ending is the one that eschews all factions and strives for a liberated New Vegas.

In this way, the Fallout series has used the mythical Hero’s Journey as a form of social criticism of authority. It’s a brilliant use of the format, taking the natural benefit of the early stages to introduce the players to the Fallout world by establishing a rather peaceful sense of normal (either in the Vault or a small village). Then, by natural exploration of the elements of the monomyth, the developers examine the moral authority of rulers and questions whether people in charge truly deserve the encompassing power that they wield. More often than not, it’s the smaller communities that eschew these more centralized governments that are the most idyllic. Goodsprings in New Vegas is a functioning community with no clear rulership and a pleasant and satisfied people. Rivet city in Fallout 3 follows in the same lines, relying on co-operation between its scientists and military for safety and well-being. Arroyo in Fallout 2 had an elder but its governing structure was nowhere near as striated as the Vaults.

When I first started playing the Fallout games, I thought it’s little tagline about war was cute if a little shortsighted. Surely, on its surface, war has changed as the battle being fought between Caesar’s Legion and NCR is certainly nowhere near the level as the war that brought about the end of civilization. But then, when you sit back and examine the motives for these wars, you find that it’s all the same. The smaller communities like Goodsprings and Arroyo never initiate these wars. All these conflicts are fueled by power hungry leaderships striving for more than what is necessary.

And in that sense, Ron Perlman is right: War never changes.

Burden Of Knowledge – Roleplaying In Fantasy

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Well, Derek continues to struggle without the conveniences of modern life and thus deprives me of material for my blog posts. Much like him, I had planned to spend a few days here and there giving my own impressions of his campaign as well as the development of my character. Dungeons and Dragons is a curious little game that can serve as practice for characterization and character growth and can teach tricks and techniques that are applicable to writing. In fact, both my sister and I have used previous role-playing sessions as the basis for shorts where we explore our character’s thoughts and feelings of the events that transpired in a little more depth.

Basically, a D&D session contains all the necessary components for writing a scene. It has multiple characters with different motivations, action, tension and resolutions. For the budding author, the great thing is that you don’t have to worry about the others. While playing, you just have your own character to deal with. And often times you will be just as surprised as your character by the decisions of the people that share your table and your party.

The Negotiator by Horace Vernet (1834)

But all role-playing has some weaknesses. The player must draw upon the skills of an actor if they wish to truly play their character. They must separate their own self from their persona. This is an incredibly tricky proposition, one that requires practice in order to succeed. Otherwise the player’s own knowledge, experience and bias will bleed into the game. This “meta” knowledge is generally considered to be undesirable, though it can often serve a positive function that I may address in a future post.

I don’t want to go into the whole issue of meta-gaming in this post. It’s just important to have a basic understanding as I address my primary concern for today. As followers will know, Derek has been very informative in describing the world of Ikan’s Light. This is more than just filler content that he can copy and paste for his daily submissions. It helps to give the players an understanding of the world and some of the cogs that make it turn. Unfortunately, from a player perspective, there is only so much he can cover whether that be due to brevity or mystery for the campaign’s storyline. This creates a gap for the reader in their understanding of the world. A gap that doesn’t exist for the actual actors within it.

This leads to what I’m tentatively calling “the burden of knowledge.” The formation of an individual’s personality is so reliant upon the experiences and information they have gained through their life that almost every study of an individual will necessitate the exploration of their childhood and known world long before whatever events drew them to prominence. When we look at Hitler, we don’t just discuss the Beer Hall Putsch and beyond. It’s fairly well known that Adolf Hitler originally had aspirations of being an artist until the fickle hand of fate would direct him down a path of infamy and people ponder how things would have been different if he’d succeeded.

Interior of the Nieuwie Kerk in Delft by Emanuel de Witte (1651)

Likewise, the characters in role-playing campaigns didn’t spring suddenly into being when they crossed the threshold into some musty tavern’s hall. Awhile ago I posted a short story about my character Kase van der Nevel. That was an attempt to try and understand the background of my character a little better, especially since I am trying to avoid the sort of stock characters I often fall into playing with these games. In that story, I covered an episode from Kase’s past but though it wasn’t told through his eyes, I spent time developing some of the individuals and interactions he would have during his youth. Though it may be the briefest glimpse into his history, I hoped that it would give a bit of insight into his character. In it, I established things like his relationship with his mother and community.

But in writing this short I came across a troublesome issue. I was stumbling around in a world of fog with just the faintest outlines of shapes to guide my path. Most of my description and references to history were vague or not intrusive. I was just a visitor to this world and I hadn’t the knowledge to properly know what life in Kase’s village would be like. I didn’t know its history beyond the few paragraphs provided for the Dalmistig province. It would be rude and unproductive to invent my own history for the area since Derek is the arbitrator for the world and any conflicts are resolved solely in his hands. I can’t know the history of Dalmistig beyond what Derek provided since I don’t know how much he’s developed and how integrated it is into his world.

I’m going to make a confession. Authors have no idea what they’re doing. There isn’t some grand codex that details how you go about making a story. There are lots of guides but those are merely suggestions by those that have come before us. At the end of the day, writing is a very personal craft and each individual has his own method that works for him. However, I have no doubt that there are many gaps in the history and community of the misty hills if only because it is physically impossible for Derek to have detailed and outlined every single aspect. I know there is room for mutual creation in this world. I just don’t know where that room is.

Interior of a Protestant Gothic Church by Emanuel de Witte (1668)

Unlike most collaborations, one side here has a very prominent advantage. I can’t know the depths of Derek’s knowledge or where the actual holes rest that are waiting for me to plant my own posts. All players work at a deficiency compared to the Dungeon Master. Which is to be expected. The DM puts in far more hours of preparation for the adventures and campaigns and their grasp of the world is expected to be more advanced so that they can dazzle players with exciting new locales and events as well as resolve any questions or problems that arise from the players’ end.

And this puts the player in a tight spot. They can’t just run off, making up what they need for their characters without running the risk of contradictions. They also don’t have insight into a lot of the true history and culture of the worlds they’re stepping into. How then are they expected to play their characters in way that is nature with this deficiency? A player is like a visitor arriving in Japan, trying to seamlessly fit in with their culture and ways with only a collection of books and t.v. shows to work off. In the end, they can’t hide their true origins.

For me this problem is an ever growing one. The more fantastic the world becomes, the less grasp I have on it. A game like Vampire the Masquerade has a built in mechanism to ease this burden of knowledge. The games take place on Earth with most players coming from the human populations which have all progressed along analogous lines to modern times. But in Ikan’s Light, the world is so vastly different that there is no prior knowledge I can rely upon for my understanding.

Now, what is the ramifications of all this rambling? Most people don’t take issue with it and role-playing games are certainly very popular despite of it. For me, it has a direct impact on character personality and decisions. Most players, I would hazard, play characters similar to them or their interests. These ‘stock’ characteristics are likely drawn upon through campaigns and across different worlds. I don’t need to know the minutia of Kase’s life if he thinks and acts like me. But the more drastic departure from my own demeanor, the less I’m able to rely upon my own experiences to direct his actions.

Embarkation of a Queen by Agostino Tasse (1615)

As I mentioned, my hope for Kase is to explore a personality far different from what I’m used to. I want to bring to life an individual that is shaped by tradition and has wholly committed himself to a belief that he has no capabilities of understanding. He is a faith based individual, throwing aside his own personal expectations and bowing before the commands of a higher power. Critical and independent consideration of conflicts and events are an alien method and I really want to examine that sort of blind faith people can put behind a cause.

It’ll be an interesting challenge, I think, and one I look forward to when it finally begins. And while I wished I was more prepared going into it, hopefully Derek won’t mind my own personal tendency for world building and filling in gaps of his world. At the end of the day, role-playing is all about challenging yourself through exploring a strange world in the shoes of another, striving not for your own needs and desires but someone else’s entirely as they struggle against the conflicts arrayed against them. Even if that person doesn’t even exist.

The Stars Were Right – An Elder Sign Review

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As informed, I spent last week assisting Derek move his things across the street. It was a labourous endeavor despite the assistance of a car and all parties involved were thoroughly exhausted afterwards. But fear not, intrepid followers, I did drop one of his boxes in my glorious rebellion against his tyrannical posting rules however I think that the point had been lost.

I shall strive to find some other method to communicate my displeasure.

While there, however, Derek felt it necessary to spend his government funding and award us with a delightful evening of a card game called Elder Signs. It was flavoured and stylized after Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos which won me over. Derek was convinced by its 7.9 ranking on boardgamegeeks which is, apparently, rather good for the site.

The game is pretty fun, I have to admit. The flavour and mechanics really conjure the right feel for a Cthulhu game and I enjoyed the fact that it was a co-operative challenge that tested the players against the board instead of each other. My only complaint, and it would be a big one, is that the game is far too easy. Especially for something dressed up in horror trappings.

You see, there are certain expectations one has when they pick up a Lovecraftian game. Yes, we’re looking for weird, tentacled beasts and insane cultists. Alien worlds and indescribable horrors are a necessity. But there’s a certain feeling that we’re trying to conjure with all these unspeakable monsters. Lovecraft was and always will be a horror author and if you can fill your audience with a sense of dread then you are missing the point of Lovecraft’s writing.

Now, I feel that Elder Signs can be easily fixed with a few houserules and tweaks to its mechanics. There are elements in place that should work to build a sense of unavoidable doom. The aptly named Doom Track is perhaps the best mechanic and only needs more elements that move it along and force players to deal with challenges that they aren’t properly prepared for in order to work. Course, there are some other balance tweaks the game could use as well. Every player is dealt a random investigator and each possesses a unique talent or ability which they bring to the board. There is the Nun who ignores half of the ill effects of midnight cards and can’t be weakened by locations that lock away dice (dice are used to defeat challenges and resolve combat so each one denied makes each challenge more difficult). Other investigators receive greater rewards when completing challenges like the Magician who draws an extra spell when rewarded or the Scamp who gets additional common items.

But then you have the author who always rolls the extra dice when tackling an otherworldly challenge. Before we played, Derek and I thought she was perhaps the most useless. However, after a few rounds, it become quite clear that the otherworld challenges have the greatest rewards and the author essentially makes them a walk in the park, bring victory closer in great leaps whenever you draw a portal onto the board.

Deesis Range: The Saviour by Andrey Rublyov (1410)

And then there is the Scientist.

The Scientist is a curious investigator. She has a fairly balanced split between her health and sanity (because what is a Cthulhu game without the ability to be driven insane?). But it is her ability which makes her truly shine. She is immune to fear effects from any challenges which, arguably, didn’t play a great deal in our three games since we generally avoided them or threw the Scientist at them to complete them. But more importantly, she prevents monsters from spawning on her round allowing her to tackle the challenges which give a mix bag of positive and negative rewards since she removes the concern for accumulating additional elder signs (the quest coupon the players are attempting to gather in order to lock away the Old Ones) at the expense of making the other challenges more difficult.

I like the character as her special ability is both strong and very characterful. But Kate Winthrop brings to light a greater weakness in the overall Cthulhu world than just making balance in a card game difficult. It is her scientific skepticism which makes her such a good investigator against the Elder Gods and it is the same scientific skepticism which locks Cthulhu safely away in the 1920s.

For I think there’s more reasons why we don’t see a lot of Cthulhu stories beyond Lovecraft’s times and not just because other authors are paying respect to the grandfather of the style and the period he wrote in. Lovecraft was obsessed with the cosmic horror – an idea that life was wholly incomprehensible to human mind and that the plumbing of the universe’s secrets would ultimately lead to such revelations that would lead the explorer into madness. Forbidden knowledge is rife through his work and more than once scientific study and its failure to address the mystic and occult has led to a protagonist’s unavoidable defeat.

But this concern over science isn’t that surprising given that he was writing at the turn of the century. The world was undergoing a great upheaval in scientific thought. Einstein’s theory of relativity essentially upended the entire field of physics, tearing to shambles the established doctrines and leaving uncertainty in its wake. Furthermore, the coming of the World Wars were heavily influenced by technological developments and the machine gun’s use on the field of battle produced unheard of casualties to a population unprepared for modern war. In that day and age, no doubt technology looked like some horrific instrument quickly tumbling from man’s grasp and the further they delved the less anyone seemed to know.

This is, however, in stark contrast to our current age. Einstein’s relativity has become so widespread as to be taught in high schools. The breadth and depth of human knowledge is greater than at any single point in history. We understand more. We develop more. We research more. I feel that there is no coincidence between the rise of the Information Age and the apparently neglect of Lovecraftian horror. So much of Lovecraft’s creatures and world relied upon the unknown and the hidden that as we become more educated and enlightened we dispel the dark shadows that clung to the corners of our knowledge. Uncertainty washes away and in this new light we find not terrifying creatures to behold, the strings and fates of man wrapped in their tentacle appendages.

Which is a bit of a shame, really. Despite Lovecraft’s personal flaws, there is a source of wonder and excitement in his stories. True, they seem almost quaint in their crafting of horror. People driven mad by things that to the modern eye seem so much more manageable. What place does a wandering mountain of a monster with tentacles for a mouth when we live in a time when a single bomb can destroy an entire nation? A simple look at our own current media portrays science as this indomitable force capable of overcoming any obstacle that arises. In Pacific Rim, we had invaders from another world being thrown down before the mechanical might of giant exosuits. Independence Day saw the collapse of a technologically superior race through the application of a computer virus (a clever spin on War of the Worlds but nevertheless demonstrating that even technological horrors are brought down by our own scientific mastery).

Science isn’t something to be feared but embraced and there is seemingly nothing to fear from it save itself.

So, Kate Winthrop represents something rather curious in the Elder Signs. The game seems less about a group of investigators racing to lock away an ancient evil before it escapes and destroys existence. Instead, it almost feels like we’re looking back at a battle that was already fought. And this race was not between the investigators and the forgotten gods but between Cthulhu and Kate. It almost seems inevitable now that the Ancient Ones end would come. And I can only begin to imagine what horror they must have felt as Ms. Winthrop turned her microscope upon them.