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Posts Tagged ‘gaming’

Only in a game . . . .

I think I’ve said before that one of the things I love about RPGs is the over-the-top b.s. we get up to, that I would never put into a story. Like tonight, when a French artificer, a Haitian capoeirista/houngan, and a Japanese-American onmyoji (this totally sounds like the setup to a joke) stole three camels, one of whom is a reincarnated lama in hiding (the pun was intentional, and IC to boot) from a Tibetan peasant, and left in payment a gem nicked out of the fifteenth-century Kazakh tomb of Tamurlane’s chief wizard.

I would never mash those elements into a story together. But it’s fun.

Next week, we break into the hidden basement of the reconstructed Ganden Monastery to steal an angelic artifact from under the noses of the communist Chinese police. Wish us luck!

Reincarnation

An exchange with kitsunealyc has got me thinking about one of the aspects I really love in Changeling: The Dreaming, namely, the fact that the premise incorporates reincarnation as one of its fundamental elements. The faerie souls are born into a series of mortal hosts, and sometimes they remember their past lives, which means you can have all kinds of fun with patterns and echoes and change over time.

Hell, that was the precise notion that set the ball rolling for Memento.

And it makes me wonder — who out there has written fantasies that make use of this idea? Not just reincarnation, but remembering past lives, telling a story where the fixed and mutable characteristics of a soul are a central part of the tale. Katharine Kerr’s Deverry books come to mind, and Jo Graham has started a series of history-hopping fantasies that appear to feature the same souls incarnating as central and peripheral figures in various periods (the Trojan War, Ptolemaic Egypt), but those are the only ones I can think of offhand. The Wheel of Time, I suppose, but that’s one of a billion ideas swirling around in that series, and it doesn’t get the exploration I’d like to see.

I had fun running the idea in Memento, and I had fun playing with it via Ree, my long-term LARP character. What’s it like to remember — in your early twenties — that you generally don’t live to see your twenty-fifth birthday? What does it mean for friendships and enmities when the universe hits the “reset” button on your lives? How can you take something that appears to be a fundamental part of your nature, on a metaphysical level, and work around and with it so you don’t repeat the same mistakes you always have? I have no idea what kind of story I could use to explore those notions again, but I suspect I’ll think of one eventually, because clearly my brain isn’t done with it yet.

So where can I go to feed my brain? Kerr, Graham, Jordan — who else?

Speaking of short stories

The Story That Is Not Allowed to Call Itself “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” No Matter What It Thinks:

The Zokutou site is down. Sadness.

Anyway, this is not the story I thought I’d be writing this month. It was going to be the ghost-prince story. But that one has grown Significance that I’m not quite sure what to do with, so it’s composting a while longer, and in the meantime I’m writing something I forgot to include on the previous list: a piece that I think is my first attempt at a genuinely humorous story.

(Short form is, it’s a silly take on D&D-style fantasy. It has nothing to do with summer camp, but like “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” it belongs to the micro-genre of Distressing Letters From Your Wayward Offspring.)

(Oddly enough, the quickest way to make D&D-style fantasy funny is to take it seriously.)

I’m very much making this one up as it goes along. Though I should figure out soon what was up with the temple roof thing, and also where the rest of it is trying to go.

I have a week to figure it out.

creative whiplash

I’m not sure whether to be amused or distressed that I game with a group of people who, confronted with a horde of zombies headed for Tiananmen Square, decide that the best of all possible responses is to show up with a tank.

Anyway, we just destroyed the center of Beijing — srsly, I’m talking flaming wreckage of the Tiananmen itself crashing down into the sea of gasoline-charred zombie body parts, bullet casings, shattered concrete, and dead PLA soldiers — and now I have to go write subtle, elegant politics.

My head hurts.

But wheeeeee, is over-the-top gaming fun.

Why don’t I ever do stuff like this in novels?

It’s all about:

1) Luring the bad guy and a few of his most powerful minions away from the warehouse

2) Curb-stomping a few of the remaining minions and blowing up the rest

3) Kidnapping a scientist out of the zombie-making bunker below the (now burning) warehouse

4) Stuffing a jet ski* into the freight elevator and snapping the cable so it falls a long long way and blows up the zombie-making bunker and what’s left of the warehouse

5) Recruiting the kidnapped scientist into working for me in my genetics lab/incipient cult.

I mean, srsly. Exploding jet skis. Which I think Johnnie used as an improvised melee weapon during the curb-stomping phase.

*We all know from Waterworld that jet skis are the most explosive object known to man.

low-key game

Tonight we:

  1. cured malaria
  2. played poker
  3. got magic tattoos

This is what happens when the GM just lets us make stuff up for a few hours.

It makes me faintly sad that I came up with a fantabulous idea that can only ever work in this incredibly specific context. I mean, unless I write a short story or novel about a brilliant geneticist daughter of a particular Mesoamerican god (and granddaughter of a Japanese god) who decides to get a semi-magical full-back tattoo, the design of said tattoo doesn’t have a high re-use value.

But I’m pleased with it all the same.

Twenty-First Century Gods

First session of ninja_turbo‘s Scion game last night. It’s well-timed; in the week we tackle the subject of race in my spec fic writing class, I find myself playing in the most multiracial, globally diverse set of characters I’ve yet joined in an RPG. Not “diverse” as in “we’ve got an elf and a dwarf and a halfling;” as in, white folks are a minority in this group.

Scion, for those who don’t know, is a game about playing the child of a mortal and a god in the modern world. Several of us decided not to assume that the gods would only stick to their own ethnicity and near neighbors. As a result, we’ve got the Greco-Swedish raised-in-Jersey Scion of Hades, the Greco-Macedonian (!) raised-everywhere Scion of Hermes, the mixed-Native American western drifter Scion of Thunderbird, the half-British half-Japanese Aussie Scion of Susano-o, and my character, whose father is the Aztec god Xipe Totec and whose mother is as mestiza as they come — on one side a Brazilian mix of European and African and Native, on the other side Japanese, because she’s an unrecognized Scion herself, of a Japanese god I have yet to determine.

We worked out backgrounds that had several of our characters running into each other all over the globe, and the whole group came together for the first time in Rio de Janeiro. I fully expect this pattern to continue, since the premise of the campaign is that we’re all ascending to godhood in our own right. And it’s fitting that twenty-first century gods should be global in such fashion.

Also: yay gaming. Haven’t had enough time for that lately.

for a few of you

Most of you can disregard this. Or rather, follow the link and marvel at the existence of a recipe for apple dumplings that involves Mountain Dew. (Apparently the result is fabulously tasty. We may try it at some point.)

But the real purpose of this post is for the old Changeling folk.

Check out the top of the left-hand column on this page.

If you need me, I’ll be having an aneurysm in the corner.

Man, I have missed LARPing. And if I can say that after the costume I wore last night, it really must be true.

(Short form, for those who I’m very glad didn’t see it: think truck stop diner waitress. I’ve done skin-tight and low-cut costumes before; now, with the crossing of the short skirt boundary, I’ve got about as far as I can in terms of revealing costumes without violating public decency laws. You know there’s a problem when you put off getting changed until game’s right about to start.)

Beforehand, gollumgollum and I were running a scene for a different (tabletop) game, and we ended up half-LARPing it, with me stretched out on a couch and her in a chair at my side, because it just wasn’t possible to get into the right headspace without doing the spatial positioning the scene required. And we both felt underdressed for playing those characters. Once you get used to physically performing things, it can seem weird to not do so; I know I’ve been frustrated in tabletop games when I’m having an important, personal conversation with someone and we’re on opposite sides of the room. It just isn’t the same. I like the physicality, the way that posture and stance and clothing and everything else can change the way you behave.

But there aren’t any LARPs in town I feel particularly inspired to join right now. (OTOH, maybe this means the boy and I will get off our butts and run “The Dance and the Dawn” like we’ve been saying we will.)

Man, the weirdest thoughts pop into your head while you’re scrubbing every bathroom in the house.

I’ve known for a while now that I don’t tend to write characters who are deeply broken inside. On the whole, while the people in my books have their problems, those problems are more side notes in a tune that is generally well-adjusted. To the point where I’ve thought for a while now that this is something I should maybe push myself on more.

Then it occurred to me: I don’t seem to write such characters very often, but I have been known to play them in games.

A few case studies . . . we won’t even start with Ree. Ree’s problems weren’t just psychological, they were metaphysical, in a way that isn’t just Changeling-based but dependent on certain individualized quirks of that game. Let’s just say that dealing with fear by deciding the world’s just fucked anyway (and then helping to tear it down) is a bad plan. Allegra was of necessity broken to begin with — that’s a prerequisite for characters in Mummy — but being reborn fixed her, as it does in that game. Michael’s death broke her very badly, though, in that “he died because you couldn’t defend him/you should have died defending him” cue self-loathing kind of way. Ash was physically marked as a freak, so took the “hey! you’re a Slayer! congrats!” thing very, very badly; she felt like the victim of curveballs in a game she never signed up for. Catherine managed the feat of possessing a superiority complex and an inferiority complex at the same time, coupled with a tendency to lose her human cognitive abilities when she felt too seriously threatened. Oh, yeah, and the loss of identity that went with being too good of a shapeshifter. Sess was scared of everything that came within a hundred feet of her, and very nearly incapable of non-spastic conversation. Odette/Fionnuala . . . I’m not even going to count her, since kitsunealyc is the one who decided crossbreeding “Swan Lake” with “Donkeyskin” was a good idea.

Lessa might be the most stable, functional, well-adjusted character I’ve played in a while.

I wonder why the difference. The major thought that occurs to me is, when I’m playing in a game, I’m only working on one character instead of a whole cast. I can focus on the quirks and dysfuctions of that single person more intensively. Also, maybe it’s that as a writer or GM I can generate plot out of situations and external threats, whereas from a player position I really only have that one character to work with.

I can’t even remember how this thought occurred to me. But it made me realize I do create characters with internal breakage — just not so much in fiction.

Which is encouraging. It means I know how; now I just need to apply it.

good thoughts on endings

The ending of a story is inextricably tied up with the rest of it. It flows from what precedes it, but it also shapes and reshapes everything that precedes it. The ending of a story can tell us what the story means — it can give meaning to all that precedes it.

If you’re already familiar with The Sixth Sense and Casablanca — or if you don’t mind having their endings spoiled for you — you might want to check out Slacktivist’s post on endings. Normally I read his journal for his ongoing dissection of the Left Behind books (as an evangelical Christian himself, he finds the books not just bad with respect to plot, character, pacing, and prose, but morally and theologically abhorrent). You can see a bit of that peeking through where he talks about the Book of Revelation as an ending, but mostly this post is about narrative, the job an ending is supposed to do, and what happens if you replace it with another ending.

Good thoughts, says I. And it reminds me of one of the challenges inherent in playing RPGs with an eye toward the aesthetics of plot and character. Unless you script everything that happens and leave nothing to chance — and sometimes even if you do — you will occasionally find yourself in a position where some event doesn’t fit, where the story takes a turn that you would not have put in, or would have revised back out again, if this were a story you’re writing. But RPGs don’t allow for revision; every gaming group I know tries to avoid redlining unless there is absolutely no other choice. So sometimes what you end up with is a fascinating exercise in interpretation: how can you view and/or explain those events in such a fashion as to arrive at a meaningful ending? How can you use an ending to resolve conflicts or disappointments lingering from before?

Endings matter a lot to me. I’ve said before, I don’t mind seeing/making characters suffer and fail and lose what matters to them — in fact, I often enjoy it; yes, writers are sadistic — so long as the suffering and failure and loss mean something. They have to contribute to a larger picture, whether that picture belongs to the character in question, or other people on whose behalf they have gone through hell. But random, meaningless suffering, or suffering whose purpose is to show you there is no meaning . . . no. I’ll do gymanstics of perspective to avoid that, to arrive at an ending that gives a different shape to what has gone before.

How about you all? What are your thoughts on endings? If you’re a writer, do you know them when you set out (which probably makes arriving at meaningfulness easier), or do you have to create them as you go along? If you’re a gamer, how do you feel about retiring/killing off characters, or ending games? How about the alternate endings Slacktivist talks about, where a different resolution gets tacked on?

novel soundtracking

I’m not sleepy yet, so you get another post about writing.

Or in this case, soundtracking.

I’ve had the habit of listening to specific pieces of music while writing since I got seriously going on what turned out to be my first complete novel. But it’s generally been a small number of songs associated with each book: usually about two. (And by “associated” I mean “I listened to them most of the time while writing the book,” which does, yes, lead to a terrifying number of repetitions.)

But since coming to grad school and getting involved in the local gaming community, I’ve picked up a local habit of making soundtracks for games: character soundtracks for the ones I’m playing in, game soundtracks for the one I ran. And I speculated, some time after I started doing so, that one day I might find myself making a proper novel soundtrack.

That day is today. Or rather, that novel is this novel; I knew months ago that Midnight Never Come would be the pioneer in this field.

The reason is obvious: as I’ve mentioned before, the novel grew out of one segment of that game I ran. I made quite a few soundtracks for Memento, and each segment basically ended up getting ten songs, which meant I had ten songs already associated with the seeds of this story. Not all of them are applicable, of course, since the novel is not identical to the game, but it gave me enough of a starting block that it felt quite natural to create a proper soundtrack for this book.

It’s an in-progress thing; I haven’t chosen songs for certain characters yet (like oh, say, Deven), and a lot of the “event” tracks are also undecided. But I thought I’d provide a sampler, so that anybody who recognizes these songs will have an idea of the mood of the book. (Mostly you need a good film score collection for this one; I’m not the sort of writer who can use a lot of modern pop music to inspire a sixteenth-century novel.)

The soundtrack to date . . . .

MNC Book Report: The English Court, ed. David Starkey

I think my brain is melting.

This is another one of those books that you don’t pick up unless you have specific need for the concrete facts it contains. If you aren’t already familiar with Tudor politics, you’ll be lost within a few pages; hell, even I gave up on the first article after the introduction, which concerns the politics of the fifteenth century royal household, and is therefore way out of my period. But, like with the Hampton Court book, I started out by reading the chapter on Elizabeth, then had to backtrack to earlier pieces in order to understand what the hell I’d just read.

Having gone through the sections on Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, though, I now understand a lot better just what the Privy Chamber was, and what the various titles in it meant. (I also have seven pages of notes on who was in what post when.) I can tell you the differences between the Ladies of the Bedchamber, the Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, the Chamberers, the Maids of Honour, and the Ladies Extraordinary of the Privy Chamber; I can tell you what happened to the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, the Grooms of the Privy Chamber, and the Gentlemen Ushers when a female monarch took over. It’s a palimpsest, again; one cannot understand these things without reference to previous reigns.

Also? I may never again be able to play in a LARP focusing on noble politics; now that I have a better sense of how they really work, the vague attempts we make in those games will probably frustrate me more than they already did. (I’m not sure it’s possible to play such a game without putting in seventeen times more effort than anybody wants to, because ultimately those things don’t hinge on the big decisions. It’s all about the accretion of little favors and offices and insults and rewards and rivalries and family relations and other things that, like Rome, cannot be built in a day. Also, anything really important in politics takes weeks, months, or years to play out.)

Anyway, taking notes on the Elizabethan chapter as I went through it for the second time melted my brain, so now I’m going to go do something that doesn’t require me to think.

keepsakes

One of the reasons I like making soundtracks for RPGs is that it gives me a permanent relic of what is otherwise a very ephemeral form of art.

And it’s a good sign that I go back and listen to them. I mean, it’s all music I have anyway, so I may put iTunes on shuffle and have it bring up something I used on a soundtrack, and if the association is strong enough, when I hear it I’ll think of the character or event it described. But I’ll also go listen to the re-ripped versions of the tracks, where I burned them to CD and then ripped them again under the new titles, and when I do that, I’m listening to those versions. Musically identical, but different in meaning. And I like the fact that I find myself wanting to do that, sometimes.

Yesterday, it was my Season 5 soundtrack for Ree. Tonight, it’s her soundtrack (all five CDs of it) on shuffle.

It’s good to have a keepsake.

MNC Book Report: Elizabeth I: Profiles in Power by Christopher Haigh

If you ever want to write a novel of noble politics, or run or play in a game of the same, you should read this book. For my own part, I’m tempted to pick up other titles from the Profiles in Power series, to see if they’re as good.

This book isn’t about Elizabeth’s policies during her reign; it’s about how she made those policies happen (or not happen, as was sometimes the case). It’s about the realities of governance in the late sixteenth century, tracking chapter by chapter how Elizabeth related to and dealt with her position as queen, the church, the peerage, the Privy Council, the court, Parliament, the military, and the common people.

It isn’t the most flattering look in the world, either, which makes it a good antidote to the idolatry that often surrounds her; in fact, by the end I was feeling a little bit down, since Haigh covered in detail how Elizabeth’s government was petrifying and falling apart by the time she died. I was glad for the conclusion, where he pointed out that when all’s said and done, she survived on the throne for nearly forty-five years under some of the most adverse conditions imaginable, and that right there is a remarkable feat of politics. It helped restore some of my admiration for her, but it’s tempered now with some knowledge of her failures as well as her successes.

Reading this book, I understand much better how political factions operate: where their power comes from, how one can (and cannot) maneuver around them, what the consequences are of ignoring them, and so on. It makes me realize, too, how much work would go into setting up a political LARP and doing it right. I don’t know that I would ever have the energy to run something like that, or even to play in it, any more than I would have the energy to play politics for real. (I frankly wonder how Cecil didn’t keel over dead of stress decades sooner.)

But this will be useful information, not just for Midnight Never Come, but for Future Novel TIR, whenever it is that I get around to writing that one.

good starts to a D&D game

My first roll of the entire campaign: natural 20.

My first roll in combat: confirmed crit.

Our first kill: a (young) green dragon.

Our first loot: omgawesome.

I love killing dragons. ^_^

the story behind the story

When I announced Midnight Never Come as my next novel, I made some allusions that, for some of you, need expansion.

Or, to put it a different way, I need to apologize for (on the surface of it) committing one of the cardinal sins of fantasy writing: I’m writing up a role-playing game.

Generally, of course, that phrase indicates something along the lines of “an elf, a dwarf, and a ranger walk into a dungeon . . .,” and in such cases it is rightly despised; god only knows how many bad queries agents and editors see that are thinly-disguised writeups of D&D campaigns, even when they aren’t working on the Forgotten Realms. But of course game systems have come a long way since D&D debuted, as have the uses to which people put them, and this particular instance is about as far away from the dungeon scenario as one can get.

Last year I ran my first RPG, a one-year (okay, ten-and-a-half-month) tabletop game based on White Wolf’s system Changeling: The Dreaming. In a very tiny nutshell, the idea of the system is that faerie souls have survived into modern times by taking refuge in mortal bodies, and that when the mortal host dies, they reincarnate. So I ran a game that went through 650 years of English history — backwards — going from 2006 to 1916 and so on back to about 1350, and then back to 2006 to finish up the plot. For structural reasons, I called it Memento, after the very intriguing Guy Pearce movie.

The 1589 segment of the game grew like kudzu. It didn’t run any longer than the others (three sessions), but by the time I was done, its background and consequences stretched the entire length of the game, from the time of the Black Death through to nearly the last of our 2006 sessions. And at the heart of that web of action and reaction, folly and consequence, was Invidiana, Queen of the Onyx Court, who ruled the fae of Albion for a period of time mostly overlapping Elizabeth’s reign.

Midnight Never Come is not really a Memento novel; the overarching plot that spanned all that time (which was basically a 650-year alchemical experiment) will be absent, and many of the outlying tendrils of Invidiana’s plot will be pulled in, to make a more compact story. But she wouldn’t leave my head, and neither would a lot of the characters surrounding her, and I gradually came to realize that it wouldn’t be all that hard to file off the Changeling-specific serial numbers and make it an independent story about curses and dark pacts, lost memories and betrayed loves, Machiavellian intrigues and faerie/mortal politics. And while the proprietary ideas that belonged to White Wolf will be gone, those were never the central part of it anyway; the most important bits will still be there, and that’s why I can make it a novel. It was very nearly standing on its own two feet to begin with. (Hell, I’d thrown in so many things that violated White Wolf canon, half of it was hardly recognizable as Changeling anyway.)

So there you have it: I am committing RPG novelization. I pray you all forgive me.

the awesomeness of friends

I have several things I’ve been meaning to post about, and lucky me, they share a theme: how awesome my friends are.

Let’s take them in chronological order, shall we?

First up: khet_tcheba. Some time ago, she created the mask you can see in my LARPing icon, plus a mask for kniedzw, because I wanted something very particular for the White Court game and suspected she would have the costuming-fu to create it for me (and then my boy jumped on the bandwagon, too). The results were spectacular. So, like a bad person, I e-mail her a month or so ago and ask whether she can make me a fore-and-aft bicorn for the Regency LARP, ’cause the only ones I can find for sale online cost several hundred dollars (I can only assume they’re vintage pieces, not replicas). The photo of me from the game doesn’t show it all that well, but keep an eye out for an upcoming post with links to other people’s pics and you’ll get a better idea. (The thing is freaking ridiculous, but the fault for that lies with history, not Khet.) So the Swan Tower Millinery Award goes to her, for adventures in felting.

Second: tooth_and_claw. Back when I was running Memento, she made a number of awesome sketches for the game, and I commissioned from her a portrait of Invidiana. I ended up getting two: a headshot and a full-length portrait. So if you want to have an idea of what the fae queen in Midnight Never Come looks like, there you go. (I’m hoping she’ll end up on the cover, but I have next to no control over that; all I can do is suggest it to my editor.) The Swan Tower Illustration Award goes to her — as if she hadn’t already earned it with the Memento cast painting.

Third: unforth. I have a hardcover copy of Doppelganger! Y’see, she’s a librarian, and she knows how to bind books. A while back she mentioned that she was looking for suggested rebinding projects. Until she delivered it into my hands, I had no idea she’d decided to make her first project a hardcover rebinding of my very own novel, complete with a wrap-around paper cover replicating the front, spine, and back of the original. Unless there’s somebody else out there with her skills and deranged enthusiasm, this will probably be the only hardcover edition there ever is — certainly the only hardcover of the first edition. For her, the Swan Tower Bookbinding Award.

So there you have it: I have awesome friends. Seriously, you all (not just those three) have a stunning array of knowledges and skills, and if I occasionally get depressed that there are a million and one things I’ll never learn to do, I cheer up when I remember that I might know people who do. Keep up the random hobbies, folks; they make me proud to know you.

Regency LARP

I got shot. It was one of the best things that happened all game.

I love it when I can say something like that, and mean it as a sincere statement of fun. ^_^

It’s easier to post about one-off games in a way that’s comprehensible (and, dare I hope, interesting?) to outside audiences, since they’re designed to be self-contained, so if you’re curious about how I got shot and why this was such a fabulous thing, look no further than beneath the cut.

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