Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 71

Down, as if with the Sickness.

It would be awesome if I felt well enough to sleep.

Because I Needed it

I am stricken with a more mundane sort of illness, some miserable spring cold which has me achey, sore and up at 7 ayem with the can't-breathes.  OTOH, I am much further along in the day.

And while I am here, tell me about your favorite fantasy wasteland!  I have the usual suspects - Mordor, The Deadly Desert of Ev, the Poisoned Wasteland of Grenh, the Waste Land along the Beam, King Haggard's Kingdom.  The Skeksis castle (the land was green and good, before the crystal cracked), The Scar...  I keep going to the same old places, though.  I need new places to read about.  Wastelands!  April is the cruelest month and all.

Bicycle Blogging

Dear Running,

I love you, and that will never change, but I know we haven't been spending as much time together as either of us have liked, and all our attempts to renew our commitments have seemed to fizzle, so I've decided, what with all the time you've been spending with others, to take up with a love from my past.

A little less than 3 and a half miles on the bicycle today, and wow, it's more work than I remember, but, forgive me, more fun than running.

Apocalypse World - Pathfinder Moves

An Animal Thing - When you encounter an animal roll + Hard.  On a 10+ the animal will do one thing you ask of it to the best of its understanding and ability.  On a 7-9, choose 1.The animal leaves.The animal freezes.The animal shows submission.The animal is quiet and behaves as though you are not present.On a miss, the animal gets mad at you and makes whatever noise it is able and, if it is at all aggressive, may attack.
Camouflage - Get 1 armor in any natural or uninhabited area, 2 armor if the area has any vegetation.  This armor replaces and does not stack with any armor you are wearing.

Corner of your Eye - When you make a move against someone who is unaware of your presence, either take 1 forward on the move or, if you do Harm, your harm is AP.

Everywhere and Nowhere - When you want to disappear from the sight of men roll + Sharp.  On a 10+ you are gone and no one can find you.  You can reappear in any scene of your choosing thereafter (you were there all along).  On a 7 - 9, choose 1 of the following.You left a sign or a trail or someone saw you slink away.  You are only hidden until the next sunrise or sunset.Someone needed you while you were gone, knows that you wandered off again and it mad.  Take -1 forward with that person until you make amends.You have no idea what you're walking into.  When you reappear you are Acting Under Fire.On a miss, you're route out and location are pretty obvious to anyone who has a mind to follow, and the MC can make a hard move against you.

Tracking - When you want to find someone, follow a trail or search an area for signs of passage roll + Sharp.  On a 10+ you can ask 3 questions, on a 7-9 you can ask 1.Who came through here last?Where is the last person or group who came through here going?What is the condition of the last person or group to come through here?How dangerous is the last person or group to pass through here?Who has been through here prior to the last person or group?

Run Blogging

Sorry, seyeh  , I haven't not been running, just been away from the internets too much to mention.  Also, my running has not been much.  Today it was incidental on a 2.5 mile walk, but then, yesterday, I had a massive anxiety attack.  For those just joining in, my anxiety attacks basically have all the symptoms of a heart attack only 1) my heart has never been, to the best of my cardiologist's knowledge, in distress, and 2) they do not kill me.  They do, however, rob me of a great deal of my vim and vigor, particularly one like yesterday's where ER visits were contemplated and pulses were checked often.  So maybe a mile total out of the walk, and I think that's all I have for today.  When I am not running, though, I continue to walk and really notice how much easier walking has become since I took up running, so that's something. 

The Monstrous Difficult

So, a couple of days ago, I played at coming up with a budget for Badness.  I realize I'm a couple weeks late for being interstitial, so I guess I will just be early for next year; this kind of lives between TRPGs (Tabletop Role Playing Games - aka nerdy D&D shit) and fiction. 

And that's something I need to address, because the interstices between the two are deeper and wider than I think anyone who's ever given two shits about both has ever imagined.  Part of it is the actual writing involved.  Fiction writing is fiction writing.  Game writing, be it crunch (the mechanics) or fluff (setting, situation, tree monsters) is pretty straight-forward tech writing.  And they are different skills.  Or, at least for me they are.  I am much more confident in my ability to pull off fiction - unless my brain is set on tech, at which point I fail up the joint.  Anyway, that's the easiest difference. 

In fiction, you tell a story.  In TRPGs you give a group of people you will never meet and do not know some instructions you hope they will use to tell a story, and if it has any relation to the story you had in mind, trust me, that was only coincidence. 

The second really fecking important difference is that games are interactive.  This sounds about as subtle and occult as the sun rising in the morning, but this is something that almost EVERYONE EVER ALWAYS GETS WRONG. Something that I had to ask darkpaisley  to beat into my head recently.  When you are telling a story, people want to know what you have to say.  They will take what you offer, and I won't say it's passive, because the brain is always making decisions and judgments and processing what you take in, even when it's television.  Even when it's True Blood.  But they are not making it happen, so everything they process is something you made.  In an interactive medium, people want to, you know, interact, and any time they are not personally making things happen, they are going to be bored and disengaged.

To bring this down to a more specific level, the epic fantasy fan and gamer who will gladly wade through all eleventy-bazillion pages of the Wheel of Time will NEVER read your 5 pages of setting notes, and furthermore, it's not fair to expect this epic fantasy fan to do so.  This is why the internets is clogged with games that are setting based that no one will ever want to play; this is why the term "Fantasy Heartbreaker" exists.  This is also, to bring it back around to fiction, why slush piles are full of the dreaded "D&D Fantasy" sub-genre.  This is why my two most successful games to date were summed up in their entirety by one sentence a piece: 1) This is Not!Brittain, you are Knights of the Table of Indeterminate Shape, questing for a few of the scary crystal balls from The Dark Tower and 2) It's D&D just like in your very expensive rulebooks and you live in a city where pocket dimensions that are the dungeons randomly show up and you have to deal with them.  This is why all the shit I've done for the Provinces needs to be an epic multi-volume fantasy ...epic, and not a game setting. 

On the good side, this means the moment I get a protagonist, let the multi volume fantasy epic begin.  I just need a fecking protagonist...
Anyway, while I'm here, and realizing we are not getting to the part of the story where I tell you how to spend your badness budget (fiction writers - spend it on shit that moves the story or reveals the characters.  If you feel you have points left over, who cares?  I don't, you shouldn't and neither should all but your nerdiest fans who play Who Will Win on the internet when they should be touching their genitals*), I probably should tell you about those two weird terms I brought up in the last but one paragraph:

D&D Fantasy - as from a post on a forum told to me by skaorn  and horribly misquoted: dudes with renaissance weapons and armor, worshiping Iron Age Greco-Roman polytheistic pantheons represented by Dark Ages Germanic priests with modern ethics and priorities fighting brain sucking aliens and occasionally finding lasers and giant robots - and badly misunderstood versions of each aspect, I might add.  On the literary side, its represented by an understanding of Tolkien gotten by half reading a photocopy of a ditto sheet of a Terry Brooks novel + some Sword and Sorcery filtered through the two Conan movies and occasional mentions of shit Fritz Lieber and H. P. Lovecraft wrote, plus a generational x-factor.  In uncle Gary's time, it was new-wave and Moorcock.  When I started it was Mercedes Lackey and her contemporaries.  Now, I think it's grrm  as filtered through repeat viewings of 300 while on a sugar high, but those damned kids just don't respect my telepathic horse...  I don't know how prevalent it really is in slush piles, though to look at the submissions guidelines in many magazines it must be or have been very common.  I rarely encountered it at Fantasy Magazine, but sample size = 1 slusher and maybe 700 stories over 10 months, so take this with a grain of salt.  It is fantasy that uses a particular, established tropes that don't really hang together with no understanding of whence the tropes came.  But despite this and its many other sins, it is a real literary genre with real product on real shelves (e.g. the video game I am playing [Dragon Age: Origins], which is D&D Fantasy to a level that I never thought I'd see, even playing D&D).  The funny thing about literary expressions of the genre is that it was never meant to be a literary genre, it was just a mashup of all the things the people who originally put together TRPGs in the mid 70s thought was cool at the time.

Fantasy Heartbreaker - This is the gaming flipside of D&D Fantasy.  This is a fantasy game that breaks from the tropes established in the D&D Fantasy canon.  Or, more doomed, use the tropes with distinctive and idiosyncratic spins on it.  Instead of elves and dwarves, it's selkies and night-fighters, who are really humans but they get altered with spirits.  And bards aren't minstrels or Danny Kay style court jesters, they're keepers of law and educators and... Guys, stay with me.  I haven't even gotten to explaining the cosmology**!  They are doomed for two reasons, the first being that no one runs a TRPG unless they drew the short straw and have to (at which point, you will be playing in Westeros or Ferelden, I guaranfuckingtee) or they have their own setting ideas, at which point they will be throwing out yours.  Some really well established game settings do have their adherents (we play L5R, which is fantasy Not!Japan plus a little fantasy Not!Mongolia and Not!Korea and maybe even a little Not!ThePhilippines mixed up like the world's worst Asian Fusion chef's hubris), but you don't have one, and, no, even trying straight Sword and Sorcery against D&D is like trying an MMO against World of Warcraft.  It does not matter, it is doomed to failure.  You cannot remake D&D.  You can with your gaming group, but that's as far as it ever gets.  Why this is, I am not certain, but I suppose it stems from D&D being the seminal, if not first TRPG and it's genre being fantasy.  You have more wiggle room with Urban Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, but there you are always up against the World of Darkness, Call of Cthulhu and whatever fucking incarnation of Star Wars they have these days (which is a horribly ungamable setting, but that's a different rant for a different time). 

Yeah, we are so not spending that badness budget today.  Sorry folks.

Another really important distinction between fiction and TRPGs is something I already hinted at.  Up above, when I rashly promised to start a fantasy epic in the Provinces, I mentioned that it would require me finding a protagonist.  That's a pretty big hurdle to clear right there, but there's some swamp and bear traps around that hurdle - when you are creating material for a game, the qualities you are looking for are different than when you're gathering material together to make fiction.  For fiction, you want to include stuff that matters to your story, things that advance the story and reveal the characters.  If you like exposition, then you can go for things that add depth or verisimilitude, but I am of the school that says if the characters seem real to the reader and the story seems honest, then you're good. 

In TRPGs, your target for material is something that is gamable.  Gamable is a quality that I have difficulty defining, but I can try - gamable means that the material your creating is not in motion, but has the potential to move in many different ways.  In a story, each thing you include has to move and in order to move it has to have a direction - otherwise it sits there until, hopefully, your editor scoops it out.  Those are the darlings you're supposed to be killing - the ones that, however awesome they are, don't move the story.  In gaming, you want those.  You want potential or implied conflicts, not actual conflicts.  Player Characters make those.  You want open-ended questions and no intention of answering them (these can be good in fiction, too, but in gaming, you want as many of these as your players' attention spans can handle [so about 1-3 at any given time] which is way beyond my chops to pull off in fiction.  Yet.).  And, actually, even that is a little too much, because what you really want is something that inspires the person who is running the game to make those.  You just want to catalyze someone else's creative process.  Or provide monsters for their PCs to kill. 

Making stuff that is gamable for you is not easy.  It's a skill.  Making stuff that is gamable for others is much harder.  Especially given that whole not reading your 5 pages of setting notes (not reading your more than one sentence of setting notes to be honest.  Even "Like Star Wars meets Pirates of Dark Water" has failed, thus far, to win me much traction and I've been floating that one since 1997). 

Taking stuff that is gamable and trying to write fiction out of it is like trying to choose a breakfast cereal if the cereal aisle was the size of the Costco in Idiocracy.  It is a ticket for an indecisive writer to analysis paralysis and if you're being indecisive that is not the best sign for your story, at least not at the point where you're indecisive - or, at least, it never is for me.  To a certain extent, making a TRPG is like writing a cookbook for hungry people who do not know nor want to learn how to use kitchen appliances.  Getting them to use the toaster is a coup.
*Then again, you can play Who Will Win on the Internet while you're at work and not risk becoming a registered sex offender.***
**Yup, that is the Provinces I am mocking.
*** Usually.

Arrival and Departure

Yesterday, my comp copies (I always opt for a second one in lieu of payment so I can hand them around) of Not One of us #45 showed up.  I am in there, and so is asakiyume  and sovay  and a bunch of other cool people I didn't get a chance to read, but I remember that, looking at the TOC, it seemed like all my friends were there.  I was not up to reading, yesterday, or any entertainment less numbing and consuming than video games, because of the departure of the finest pigloo tank commander the 3rd Armored Guinea Pig Cavalry has ever seen: Mouse.


Okay, it was a bad idea to go get that video.  It's kind of tacky to do.  And also it's got me wibbling.  Anyway.  We had to have her euthanized.  I have never seen a small critter hang on like that.  They show the first symptoms and they are gone in an hour or two.  She was 5, which is pretty old for a piglet.  She was very sweet.  Prey animals are good at forgetting, though (it's pro-survival) and so her compatriots (also around 5) were at the bars for carrots this morning like nothing happened.  I don't expect grief from critters with brains you can fit in a thimble.  I don't expect grief over them, either, but one of these two things is pretty constantly present.

Stupid creatures.
The other departure is the possible departure of LiveJournal.  Not that I think it's immanent, and not that it upsets me too terribly.  My capacity for being upset is somewhat stunted at the moment, and there are only a handful of people with whom I have contact solely via LJ.  To that end, if you are one of those people, you can find me on the book of faces using the name you see associated with my account here.  Dreamwidth is not allowed here at work (and yet LJ is, go figure), so I probably won't use the account I have there (fear_and_failure - I was in a Very Bad Mood when I made the account) with any regularity.  To that end, I am going to look into getting a somewhat more legitimate blog on blogger or something and just put links to what I write on aforementioned book of faces.

Building Badness

This is one of those crossover things that was meant for gaming but might find some interest from other people who aren't gamers.  The notion here is that when you make a threat or villain or monster, you're usually going to want to have a sort of economy of badness going, so that for each power and advantage the badness has, the protagonist or the players have something commensurate to explain why they aren't just steamrollered by the badness.  Clearly, this isn't going to work in some modes of storytelling, but they should work in some and just about all forms of gaming.

So here are the things you use to pay for badness.  This isn't a complete list, an exhaustive list or anything but a first draft, this-is-what-I-can-figure list:
Visible Signs of the Presence of Badness.Stories of the Badness (Accuracy doesn't matter).A Reason or Need for the Badness to Activate.A Theater of Operation.A Historical Link to the Theater in which the Badness Operates (That is, the badness has been around for a bit).A Lair (Maybe many lairs; bonus points if destroying the lairs weakens the badness).Habitual Victims (Ones the Badness keeps coming back to for Bad Reasons.  Pay attention to scale.  Bonus points if depriving the Badness of victims  weakens it).Special Vulnerabilities (You can probably make some points up on that one, too, by having several).Dormant Stage (This isn't relevant if it's Jeepers Creepers or Pitch Black style dormancy e.g. only active when in pursuit of protagonist pie, this is more like vampires sleep during the day).Visible Signs of the Presence of Badness. - Blue flames and hairy palms, mostly.  Van Helsing puts a lot of stock in it at one point, but it's marginal.Stories of the Badness. - Hungarian peasants tell Harker to stay the fuck away.  I guess that counts.A Reason or Need for the Badness to Activate. - The blood is the life.  Also, hot British girls.  A Theater of Operation. - Transylvania, then England.A Historical Link to the Theater in which the Badness Operates. - This is interesting, since the count actually loses this one when he comes to England, though, you could argue that he brought crates of his native soil to counteract this one.
A Lair. - Castle Dracula, Carfax Abbey.Habitual Victims - Mostly Lucy and Mina; Drac likes to work one over before moving on to the next.Special Vulnerabilities - Lots.  Exclusively nocturnal, sunlight destroys him, aversion to holy symbols, needs native soil to travel (if this isn't covered under historical link).  Actually, not as many as I thought.  The fact that silver bullets and stakes through the heart and beheading are potentially lethal is actually an advantage, since all that stuff will kill a regular guy, but stuff not mentioned won't kill Dracula.Dormant Stage - Sleeps during the day, again, though arguable whether this is covered under vulnerabilities.For fun, let's go on to Lestat D'Lioncourt and see how things have changed.
Visible Signs of the Presence of Badness. - I don't know... Poet shirts?  The need to open all his novels Vampire Lestat here.Stories of the Badness. - No.  Considering the body count Rice's vampires rack up, that's something.  Then again there is his rock career...A Reason or Need for the Badness to Activate. - The blood is still the life.  A Theater of Operation. - I can see this one being a given in almost every circumstance; I got the ways an means to New Orleans.A Historical Link to the Theater in which the Badness Operates. - In France, he was a landed noble, in NOLA, not so much. A Lair. - He likes where he lives, but he does go traveling.  Any sunlight proof place would work.Habitual Victims - Not so much.  Just suck them dry seems to be his mode.Special Vulnerabilities - Mostly sunlight.  I think there might have been another vulnerability or two, but definitely stripped down.Dormant Stage - Sleeps during the day, again, though arguable whether this is covered under vulnerabilities.William "Vampire Bill" Compton?
Visible Signs of the Presence of Badness. - The need to make me drink every time he says "Sookie?"  Actually, you might put the fact that their blood is an addictive drug with teleological properties under this.Stories of the Badness. - Interestingly, yes.  Vampires are known by the world at large and their capabilities and vulnerabilities are pretty well known to everyone.A Reason or Need for the Badness to Activate. - The blood is still the life.  A Theater of Operation. - Bon Temps and Northwest Louisiana in general.A Historical Link to the Theater in which the Badness Operates. - Kind of.  He did live in Bon Temps way back in the day. A Lair. - Hell, there's an airline that caters to vampires, though, home security from the sun is important.Habitual Victims - Indeed.Special Vulnerabilities - The need to be invited into a place returns and silver becomes a big one.  Sunlight, as always.Dormant Stage - Can stay awake during the day, but it's not pretty.And while we're at it, Edward Cullen
Visible Signs of the Presence of Badness. - Sparkling?  The fact that vampire venom is apparently highly infectious should have... well, really, resulted in a vampire apocalypse about 10 years post the first vampire, this is kind of interesting that there aren't a lot more of the things running around.Stories of the Badness. - Other than what the werewolves have for stories, but I'm not sure that, strictly speaking, counts.A Reason or Need for the Badness to Activate. - The blood is still the life.  Also whiny high school girls.  A Theater of Operation. - One of the legitimately more clever ideas that Meyer had - Forks, WA.A Historical Link to the Theater in which the Badness Operates. - Not really. A Lair. - Not really this, either.  Habitual Victims - Not so much, unless you count animals that do not show up outside of one mention.  Just suck them dry seems to be his mode.  His love interest is, interestingly, not his victim since vampiric feeding leads to vampirism or death 100% of the time.Special Vulnerabilities - None.  Zero.Dormant Stage - Again, none.  Go to school all day, stalk your girlfriend all night.Essentially, I'm thinking that these things go in to pay for what you give them in terms of power over the plot and the things that they can do.  Under that regime, I figure I'd have the most (to use gamer terminology) points to spend tarting up Dracula, about equal numbers to spend on Vampire Bill and Lestat, and the fewest to put toward Edward.  That said, I kind of wonder which vampire would end up being the hardest, in game terms for the same hunter or group of hunters to take on. 

Right now, Dracula has the most earned Badness to spend on getting cool stuff, but he can't move very easily and there are a whole host of things that can stymie and mess with him.  Cullen, on the other hand is almost completely unencumbered by vampiric weaknesses, but clearly wouldn't be earning the big badness.  Vampire Bill is considerably more constrained than Lestat, but not so much as Dracula.  And frankly, the thought of a Who Would Win just makes me ill (though, if we're talking post Queen of the Damned, Lestat was pretty much a god who couldn't tan, and would have the three of them at a walk if they ganged up on him, so there you go.  Say what you want about Rice, but she knows how to turn a Mary Sue up to 11).

Okay, I'm not sure this is going to be any more useful than thought-experiment dork-wank, but hey.  There might be something useful in this mess.

Woodkid - Iron

Hello. Turn your Radio on.

It seems like an awfully long time to be out of contact.  I feel very out of contact, what with the weekend, and Monday and Wednesday being adrift, working from home (and actually working) with the new VPN hogging all my home bandwidth and denying use of the internet, and yesterday and today being mad dashes to PUT OUT ALL OF THE FI4RS, which are largely now smoldering spots of damp blackness.  No running, barely a chance to walk.  No writing, barely a chance to do anything at all.  A little mental collapse leading to a managed video game indulgence (I rarely play them during the week anymore.  I'm not even sure WHAT I do, but it is not sleep, maintenance, writing, exercise, or even fucking around with video games... I must spend it all on the internet, which is why 5 days of sane use feels so disconnected.  I'm not sure that's right, either).  Anyway, without anything to run in, I'm going to take a walk and start thinking about a Birch Province playset and continue thinking about this week's Extra Credits, because I think that may be where I want to make a career, and this extra-depressing article about companies getting people to work for free, because I think that's what my future will be if I don't make something else of it RIGHT FUCKING NOW.  Which is not a good line of thought, but maybe I can wiggle out of it on my walk.  Maybe when I get back, I will read this article and find a better way.