Fear Itself

Actually, given the context that this phrase is usually used ("nothing to fear but"), it's an interesting title for a horror game.

The Game: Fear Itself
The Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Degree of Familiarity: Some with GUMSHOE, none with this game in particular.
Books Required: Just the one.

So, this is a horror/slasher game. There's no given premise (indeed, the first step is that the GM gives us one), so I shall pick one from the list of example premises. Heh. "Regulars at a hipster coffee shop in a bohemian neighborhood." Sounds good. I like coffee.

I start with a concept. It needs to be easily distilled down to a two-word phrase, because these characters are meant to be archetypal. I'll say my concept is "overeducated barista." His name is Ross Landau.

I choose a risk factor. This is what motivates me to run into stupid encounters. What is Ross' stupid blind spot that's going to get him killed? "Curious" is tempting, but really, this being a horror movie, I think I'd rather play "Horny." Ross is smart, sure, but he's also using those smarts (and his badass coffee-making skillz) to impress the honeys.

Ooh, actually, I can take more than one. OK, I'll take Curious as well.

Right, now I choose the worst thing I ever did. Obvious for horror movies, I think; this is the thing that might get revealed and either embarrass or implicate Ross during the game. What's the worst thing Ross ever did? I think Ross robbed the coffee shop once. He's worked there on and off for a few years, and during one of the "off" times he broke in after hours, opened the office, and stole the day's take (they never took deposits to the bank until Monday morning). He feels bad about it - he's an ethical person, generally, and he did it more out of spite than need - but the worst part is that he carried a knife with him. He has no idea what he'd have done if anyone had caught him, and that scares him.

Now I buy Abilities. This works a lot like Trail of Cthulhu. I get 10 investigative points (I assume if I were playing there would be at least 4 people), and 60 points to spend on General Abilities.

For Investigative, I do this:

History 1
Humanities 1
Natural History 1
Occult Studies 1
Research 1
Trivia 2
Flattery 1
Flirting 2
Computer Science 1

Pretty spread out, mostly a college-educated dude. But really good at useless bullshit, and really good at making panties hit the floor.

Then General:

Athletics 5
Driving 5
Filch 4
Fleeing 5
Health 10
Infiltration 5
Sense Trouble 5
Preparedness 8
Scuffing 3
Stability 9

I get one freeing Health and Stability, and Fleeing costs half so my score is really 10.

Sources of Stability: I need three. I'll take the coffee shop as one (Grounds for Dismissal). Just being there, but especially slinging drinks, helps him find his zen. I'll take sex as another. Ross doesn't have a special lady at the moment, but he has lots of fuck-buddies and he's always looking out for more. It's be easy to see him as a player, but he's not - he doesn't lie to women about his intentions, and he's happy if sex results in a lasting relationship, he's just not broken up if it doesn't.

Last one: Guess I'd better give him a relationship. There's a professor at his alma mater who works in the history department named Sally Myer. Sally is a tenured prof, probably 20 years old than Ross, but they had an affair once. It lasted a few weeks during the summer, and they stopped sleeping together when school resumed, but they've remained in email and occasional lunch-date contact. Ross misses her, and sometimes toys with the notion of going back to school to pursue a PhD. If she wound up his adviser, so much the better.

Now, I consider What Do You Want. I need a personal goal for Ross. It's supposed to be mundane and it's good to tie it in to the premise, so I'll say Ross wants to be a manager at the coffee shop. The present manager, Tim Belanger, is boring and jock-ish, and seems to have some real contempt for the weirdos that come in after dark. Ross wants the place to go 24 hours, he wants open mics and movie nights, he wants Grounds for Dismissal to develop more of its own identity.

Last thing on the sheet is affinity and enmity, but those refer to other PCs, which of course I don't have. As such, that's me done!

This would be an odd horror game. A "last the night" in the coffee shop would be fun, but a longer story might also be fun if there's a creeping horror in the neighborhood that starts killing patrons. I'd like to play Ross either way.

OK Road Trip: Day 3-Home - Crickets, wine and cooking

 So! When last we left our...us...we'd lost our damn AC. Again. We dropped it off at the Firestone in Lawton, OK and piled into Michelle's parents' pickup truck to go home (tight fit, but her mom let me drive because she's an angel).

Firestone got working on it the next day (it would later turn out that the first fix involved a faulty part, and the compressor exploded again. The mechanic was very excited, he said they'd never seen anything like it before. Yaaaay. At least it was under warranty so it didn't cost me more). Meantime, we did Oklahoma things.

We saw The Amazing Spider-Man, which I really enjoyed. But no pictures of that. We went back to the house in Temple, OK (which is small and empty and OH GOD GET ME OUT), which was being swarmed by crickets. Like, really, you'd go outside and there was a blanket of them. Frogs loved it, though.

Next day (which I guess would have been...um...Monday? I'm totally lost) I mentioned I wanted to cook. We were going to go to Michelle's brother's house so the kiddos could swim, but they also have this awesome kitchen that they seldom use. Michelle's mom was kind of flabberghasted that I a) could cook b) wanted to cook and c) would cook in someone else's house, but see, I center myself by cooking, and I was pretty off-center.

So we went by Wal-Mart (ugh, if I never set foot in another Wal-Mart it'll be too soon, but there apparently aren't grocery stores in Oklahoma) and got stuff to make chicken Parmesan, which is simple and easy to make, but also not strange (Oklahoma is the land of starch and red meat and that's it) for the diners. So the kids jumped in the pool:

Will and Al, pooling.

Will and his superhero cousin, Libby.

...I made dinner. It was well-received, and April (who's...geez, my sister-in-law, I guess. Wow, I just realized that! Neat!) asked for the recipe. So that was gratifying. :)

Home, sleep, uneventful day, crickets, and then next day, voop! Off we go! We got the CR-V first, of course, and then headed to Oklahoma City and Half-Price Books, where we sold off enough books and records and whatnot from Michelle's parents' house to finance most of our trip home (so that was nice).

We drove to Springfield, MO, stopped for barbecue for dinner, and then I realized there was no way I was driving another 180 miles to Fenton (which is where our hotel was) without coffee. So we drove down "C-Street" in Springfield, which was a cool little area, and found some photo-worthy stuff:

A rose in the street.

A creature made of metal.

We also found a coffee shop called Big Momma's, which is exactly my kind of place:

They really like hedgehogs.

I totally agree.

We got coffee and dessert, and then back on the road! We found some radio broadcasts of The Shadow to listen to, and that got us to Fenton.

Next day (Thursday), we set off toward home. We had breakfast at this awesome little restaurant called Maggie's Lunch Box (if you're in Fenton, I highly recommend it - I had a beef and ale sandwich that was amazing). Behold!

Soooo maannnnyyy....

...lunchboooxxesss...

And then we found ourselves in Illinois, and near Greenup. We'd been here before, at a winery that we really enjoyed, so we stopped by again (amidst whiny protests from Will) to buy more wine. We also found a cool covered bridge nearby:

Ooh, covered bridges.

Lyons!

And from there, the long slog home. Stopped by Indianapolis and had dinner at an awesome little Chinese place with John Kennedy. And then home!

And here we are. Our next trip, I think, is GenCon.

Character Creation: Mermaid Adventures

I backed this Kickstarter a while back, and just got my copy in the mail, along with Kai's awesome t-shirt. So we're making characters! And by "we", I mean me, Gus, Kai, Will and Alisdair. Hoy.

The Game: Mermaid Adventures
The Publisher: Third Eye Games
Degree of Familiarity: None
Books Required: Just the one!

OK, let's do it! Will has already decided he's playing a shark-folk. Let's see what the others choose! Kai wants to be an Octofolk, Al chooses Fishfolk, Sarah chooses Jellyfolk. I'll be an Eelfolk, 'cause I like me some prankin'.

I note down my free Quality (Cheerful), and now I get 5 points to divvy up amongst my Attributes. I give myself the following scores:

Body 2
Mind 2
Charm 3
Luck 3

Now, I roll for Hair Color, Style, Eye Color, and Fin Color. I get pink hair (with bangs!), amber eyes, and green fines. I'm kind of the lead singer of Neon Trees, only an eel.

Extras! Roll twice on the Extra Table. I get Weapons and Clothing. I wind up with a Lab Coat and Sharp Teeth. Neat!

My goal is Bravery. I get a bonus for doing stupid brave things.

Qualities, including magic. I take Nosey (whatchadoing? whatchadoing?), Royalty (I am a bratty eelfolk prince!), Water Bending (magic, exactly as it sounds), and Human Expert ("This is...a dinglehopper!").

That's it, but for a name. My bratty prince with the pink hair (which annoys mom; really it's the bangs that do it) is Prince Neon.

Character Creation: Chronica Feudalis

 I'm out in the wilds of Oklahoma, with a cricket army invading the house and a car that seems to feel this is a good trip to die (the A/C is fixed again, for now. I fully expect it to explode again long about St. Louis). But that is no reason not to do chargen!

The Game: Chronica Feudalis
The Publisher: Jeremy Keller, I guess. You can buy the game at IPR.
Degree of Familiarity: None. I've read it.
Books Required: Just the one.

This was a game I got in the bundle, and I never got round to reading it because the character sheet made it look complex. Really, it's a FATE-based game, meaning it's a system I know, and there are some interesting tweaks to it. The book is written "in character," the basic conceit here being that a bunch of 12th-century monks made up an RPG and wrote it in English because they didn't want to get in trouble with the higher-ups (and English was a language they shared). So that's silly, but whatever, my game's about shadow-controlling ideologues.

As with many games, we're advised here to make sure that our characters are compatible. That is, if we're playing knights, we should all be knights, or at least have a reason to hang out with knights doing knighty things. The example in the book is of a bunch of people on a pilgrimage, so I'll go with that.

First step: Pick Mentors. You pick three people who have taught your character stuff, and that gives you skills and items and whatnot.

Since getting good produce is difficult out here in the fucking desert, I'm gonna take Peasant as a mentor. My character grew up farming, and learned from his father how to take care of such peasant-like things. And then there was a disaster of some kind - let's say a flood wiped out our farm and we rebuild farther into the woods. And then I learned there from a Hunter, a fellow who already lived there and made his living off the land. Finally, after my father died, my mother took up with the hunter, and the hunter's brother, an Outlaw, hid out with us for a while. My character left with him when he fled, and he eventually ditched me, leaving me with this group going on pilgrimage.

Anyway, for Skills, I get:

Aim d6
Hide d8
Climb d6
Brawl d6
Hunt d6
Fitness d8
Sense d6

Mostly a physical character. I'm good with that.

So now I do Tools, also determined by my mentors. I get a bow and a quiver of arrows, a snare trap, a tool of my choice (I choose a hammer), a pair of shoes and everyone gets a purse. All of this gets a die rating, which I note.

OK, so, three Aspects. These are the bit that come from FATE (the dice system doesn't), so I want to do Aspects that can be both negative and positive.

So my pilgrim is a peasant that ran away from home after being mentored by a kind of unconventional family. I think I'll take an Aspect of "Pines for his forest home." That should give me the chance to use that Aspect when dealing with foresty kinds of things. So why did he leave? I'll say "Reward for his head." Again, makes him kind of badass (even if it's mostly by association). Finally, I'll take an Aspect "Penitent." He wants to go home, but he wants to make this Pilgrimage first. Figures God brought him here for a reason.

Now Backgrounds. These are weird. They're things that my character is good at, but that I don't want to see happen in the session. Like, if I wanted to avoid violence in the game, my character could be a fighting expert (as a Background, not an Aspect) and then we just take violence as read, I suppose. Weird. OK.

See, I keep trying to wrap my brain around this and I don't get it. If my character is good at something, then that's what I want him to be doing. If he's bad at something and that's part of his character arc, then cool, that should be a Background. I guess I just don't get the value of putting what I don't want to see on the character sheet. But whatever.

Oh, wait, these are optional. So that's good, then. Um. I can't really think of anything. I'll leave those blank.

I need a name. I think my guy goes by "Forrest." It's not his name, but his real name is attached to a wanted man, and all Forrest wants to do is find forgiveness from God and then go home.

OK Trip: Days 2-5.

Woof. Eventful trip. Finally started to get good for a while there, and then the second car-splosion. Let me back up.

 So, when we last left our protagonists (that'd be Michelle and me), we were in Davenport, IA, getting my car fixed. That took all day, but it did get done ("Air compressor exploded. Needs new coolant fan. Dinglehoppers need re-bloofered."). Fortunately there was a mall nearby, where Michelle and I spent much of Friday.

That's a tattoo parlor on the left and a Build-a-Bear on the right. Odd mall.

But eventually we got the car done, and drove to Des Moines. Now, the whole point of taking this route to Oklahoma (going through Indiana, Illinois and Iowa rather than down through Missouri) was going to Zombie Burger.

Zombie Burger is, as you may have guessed, a zombie-themed burger joint. Their food is really awesome, and all their burgers are named after various zombie things (the one I ordered was called "They're Coming to Get You Barbara", and the bun was two grilled-cheese sandwiches because FUCK MY ARTERIES ANYWAY). Some pictures from the place:

Shamble to the restroom.

Wait times for tables can be murder.

Yes, you can order a Bloody Brain.

Michelle, about to be eaten by a wall.

The initial plan was to go to Kansas City and crash with Michelle's aunt, but it was late before we got to Des Moines so we just got a hotel. Next morning, then, we got up and started heading to Kansas City so we could at least have lunch with her.

En route, we stopped at another winery. This one (Two Saints) had a number of really lovely wines. And was very pretty. Check it.

Vineyards.

A moment later, the plant ate her.

 So we tasted some wines, and bought a bunch, and then back on the road! We made to Kansas City, and had a lovely lunch with Michelle's aunt Ann, and then got back on the road. Ann mentioned that there was a winery nearby that had, at one point, been a sanitarium or something like that. Odd Fellows? Hell yeah, gotta see that.

We bought some more wine, and on we went! We drove through Kansas, and OMG, Kansas is like Iowa except somehow more boring. We did find this kind of cool fence thing, though:

Not pictured: Michelle.

So we finally made it to Oklahoma City, got the boys (after some fuckery from United Airlines), checked into the hotel, and went the hell to bed.

Next day (Sunday) we all got up and had breakfast in the hotel, then had lunch at Dave & Buster's (the food was surprisingly good), and then went to the Oklahoma Science Museum. Oh, yeah, we got pictures.

Lyons.

The skeletal dinosaur surveying his domain.

I AM THE PILOT.

Yoshimi, they don't believe me.

Michelle and also boxes.

A little miniature village.

CSI Pompeii?

"Snakes for hair, you say?"

I have no idea why she took the picture while I was yawning.

Al is really tall.

Will is training to be a mall cop.

The boys as astronauts. We're not sure why the robot needs a helmet.

And then off to Ted's Escondido Cafe for dinner, then back to Temple in a complete uneventful evening...OH SHIT CARSPLOSION.

Yeah, the A/C is out. AGAIN. The good news is that we left it at Firestone (because they "fixed" it the first time, it's under warranty) and went back to Temple (aka, "nowhere") for the night.

Further adventures today.

Oklahoma Trip, Day 1 (and part of 2)

So, it was a sound enough plan. We (Michelle and I) leave on Thursday, hit Davenport, IA the first night, drive to Des Moines Friday (today), get lunch at Zombie Burger, head to Kansas City, crash with her aunt, drive to Oklahoma City on Friday, get her kiddos at the airport, stay with her folks a couple of days in Middle-of-Fucking-Nowhere, OK, drive to St. Louis, stay in a hotel, drive home. Whole thing takes a week. Lots of driving, but no real killer days of driving, and plenty of time for wineries and strange and beautiful things.

And then fuckery happened.

Let me back up. (Only a few photos this time, sorry.)

We left yesterday, stopping first at Heather's house to visit my kiddos (they just got back from their own trip):

Cale using a freeze ray on me.

Kai being adorable.

We drove forever, and we found a winery in Indiana that, apart from having two godawful red wines (smelled like tomato sauce, tasted like soy sauce) also had a Traminette and a blueberry wine that were just lovely. Other low point of the detour - the signs are for shit. We wound overshooting it, heading too far north, and we wound up in...Michigan?

Nice bench, innit?

So we bought some wine, and kept heading west. We initially thought about stopping through Chicago and hitting the Shedd Aquarium, but it's only open until 6 and we didn't figure we'd have time. Above all, we joked, we want avoid Gary. There are vampires there.

But somewhere in Indiana, our A/C quit. Now, you gotta know, it's a billion fucking degrees out. Staying in the car is fatal. We kept going, got as far as Gary (fuck) and stopped at a Jiffy Lube to get the A/C recharged. Hell, my car has a quarter-million miles on it. That'll need to happen, right?

Well, Jiffy Lube said, "nope, totally not a recharge issue. A leak in the line." OK, then. We drove down the road to a repair place, and the dude said, "Yep, can totally do that. Tomorrow."

Michelle and I talked it over, and figured fuck it, we'll get to Davenport tonight (we weren't too far away) and get the car repaired in the morning. We arrived in Davenport smelling like GenCon, but this morning I got up at crack o'clock and took the car to Firestone. And the very nice, tall man at Firestone said...

...my compressor exploded (note to those who, like, don't speak car - the word "exploded" shares a prefix with "expensive," and that's not a coincidence, baby). Yes, they can fix it. No, it's not cheap, but I sure as balls don't want to drive to Oklahoma and back to Cleveland with no A/C. There's not enough deodorant in the world.

So I am now at the Starbucks in the Barnes & Noble in the mall in Davenport in the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea, waiting on the car to be fixed.

My car, in surgery.

The rest of the plan continues as scripted. I am getting a Zombie Burger today.

Further details and photos as we go on.

Exploding Internets and "Censorship"

Man, it's been a month of weird, huh?

So, in case you don't know, there was this Kickstarter, in which Anita Sarkeesian was raising money to do a series of videos examining how women are portrayed in video games. This came on the heels of trailers for a new Hitman game and a new Lara Croft game, both of which are, let's say, problematic, misogynist, and violently sexualized (or sexually violent, take your pick).

Anita wound up getting rape threats, and a concerted effort from...well, assholes to get her project cancelled. It would up make her just shy of $160K, so the asshole brigade probably succeeded in doing nothing but getting her more money, but that's not the point.

Meanwhile, there's this guy name James Desborough. James writes, occasionally, for Mongoose and has written for Steve Jackson, and he does his own stuff through Post Mortem studios. I've never been a fan; PM does a lot of parodies of White Wolf properties, some of which are too British for me to get the joke and so which just aren't my taste. But he's also written for gems like the Slayers Guide to Female Gamers, which is meant as a joke, though I think the joke is, at best, tired and should be taken out and mercifully shot.

But then he published a blog post called "In Defence of Rape."

Now, what he was talking about in the post (spurred, partially, by the aforementioned Lara Croft trailer) is the use of sexual assault as a plot device. The point he thinks he's making is that sexual assault and rape, in and of themselves, shouldn't be off limits to writers. I agree with that, I suppose.

But the point is lost. It's lost amidst how fucking gleeful he is not just about using rape as a plot device, but over defending it. And that's what makes the whole thing creepy, not the larger point he's trying to make. The other thing is, he included the phrase "rape is fucking awesome as a plot device," though I swear the first time I look at the post the words "as a plot device" didn't appear in that sentence (I could be wrong about that).

So he posted linkbait. And then the shit started. A woman started a petition to ask Mongoose to refrain from hiring him again. The Internet exploded. The woman in question (who is a rape survivor herself) was getting rape threats faster than she could clear them from her inbox. Desborough said on Twitter that this was no big deal because those threats weren't "genuine." Then he and his wife started getting them.

Mongoose has apparently stated that they aren't going to hire him anymore, and weren't planning on it anyway (they didn't handle all of this well initially, but I don't have any real use for Mongoose anyway so I didn't pay much attention to that part).

Desborough posted on G+ complaining that all of this was triggering for his depression. I'm sure it is. I'm sure it sucks to get threats against you and yours. And I empathize. I wouldn't wish that one anyone. I do wish, though, that he would take the lesson - what you say matters. When you say hurtful things, that matters. You're not just taking the piss or whatever when you contribute to the overall level of misogyny in this industry. And it's not the same thing when it's directed at men, because as a man, all else equal, I do not have to fear sexual attention. At no point is a woman following me down a hallway or, indeed, sending me nasty email, going to truly make me feel threatened, and if a man was doing it, it wouldn't be the threat of rape rather than just straight-up violence that I would worry about.

(That's privilege, by the way. It's a real thing. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't.)

The whole thing makes me sad. But then the folks who do this shit make it easier on me, because they misuse the word "censorship" and that just pisses me off, and then I don't have to feel sad anymore.

Look, if the government comes down and says, "No, you can't publish this book or say this thing on your blog, it's illegal," that's censorship. And sometimes that's even justified, I think, but that's a separate issue. If the greater masses of the Internet say, "Hey, you can say these things, but doing so makes you an asshole and we don't want to buy your shit anymore," that isn't censorship. That's physics. That's cause and effect. And mind you, a lot of people got on board with Desborough. They were fine with everything he wrote and wanted to buy his shit on the strength of his writing. That's cause and effect, too.

I think it's generational, in a way. Younger folks, maybe those who have grown up with the Internet, might think that what you say online doesn't count because it's not said directly to a person. To that I say: Pretend it is. Pretend that who you want to talk to or who you imagine you're talking to is sitting there, in front of you, listening to you say what you're typing. And imagine your mom's there, too, why not.

You own what you say. What you say, online, can have consequences. Saying nasty or hurtful things online, as in "real life" (as though online isn't real life), doesn't make you cool or edgy or more honest or genuine. It means that you are impaired in communication, specifically pragmatic language, because you haven't figured out how to talk with people and really communicate.

And yes, if you come across as a complete asshole, people might feel compelled not only to avoid spending their money on what you did, but to ask other people to do likewise. That's how this works.

Not censorship. Just physics.

More on related matters here.