Pay to Play, the Gamer’s Edition

I have to admit, I’m actually kinda ticked about this new edition of the Star Wars RPG – and a bit disappointed in Fantasy Flight. We’re supposed to be excited to pay $30 for a Beta version of the game, just so we can then turn around and pay for the full version when it’s finished? No. I am not paying you for the privilege of playtesting your rules for you. Not even for Star Wars.

At least with Only War, they knocked the cost of the Beta off of your order if you also ordered the full rulebook at the same time – basically you paid $20 for the Beta rules, then got a $20 discount on the full version when it came out (though that was DTRPG and not FFG). That’s kosher, as far as it goes.

But this, this just feels exploitative. Especially when I’ve been part of Paizo’s open Pathfinder playtesting community for years and never had to drop a dime on it. I know some people would say that FFG needs to recover the cost of making the books, but in response I’d say, why print them in the first place? Put out the Beta as a pdf, charge a couple bucks for it (and maybe take that off the top of a full edition order as above), and the rules will still get just as tested, I guarantee. This just feels like an attempt to get hardcore Star Wars collectors to grab a “limited edition” before the game is even ready, and I dislike it intensely.

People who know me know that I hate the “OMG gaming companies just want to make monie$” gamer argument, because I know better. Gaming’s a business like any other; they have to make money if they want to keep making games, and don’t need to apologize for it. But that said, there’s still a legit way to do it, and a sketchy way to do it, and this feels sketchy to me. Fantasy Flight has built a reputation on putting on some extremely high quality tabletop rpgs, in addition to their already fantastic board games and other diversions – maybe that’s why I feel such a letdown to see this sort of business practice. 

September 14, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Cry Havoc!

So I’ve been teaching a little course for the college’s civic arm called “Cry Havoc! Science Fiction Goes to War” about – appropriately enough – military science fiction. I’ve always loved the genre, but until I started prepping for the class I never really considered it as a whole, and now I wish I had always looked at it as a continuum instead of as individual books. I’ve known for a long time how much of an excellent mirror science fiction is when it comes to examining society, but when it comes to our outlook on war it’s perhaps especially potent. 

We started with Starship Troopers, which is one of those books that I simply re-read over and over again, at leas two or three times a year. As a writer, I am amazed every time at the construction of the narrative – it is perhaps the best example I know of how to do a S. Morganstern-ish “the good parts” narrative that moves freely among the best elements of the story while not wasting even a single word on unnecessary exposition. Author geekery aside, it also serves as a great meditation on the changing perspective on military conflict from the end of WWII through the Korean War, as we were confronted with a new and different kind of enemy we struggled to understand. A lot of my students had only been exposed to the movie before, so teaching them the book was a particular delight. Rico is a disarming narrator – a gee-whiz kid in power armor – and that made it easy to get them in the mindset for the rest of the fiction.

After that we tackled Forever War, and the mood in the room changed noticeably. Many of my students are older, and this remains The War for them, one which must be addressed carefully. A few of them served in it, and the others knew people who did. There was a quote I found when I was preparing the lesson on the book: “Vietnam remains the only American war about which one must apologize before speaking.” I couldn’t reliably attribute it, but the sentiment seemed right – while we had some fantastic discussions of Haldeman’s pro-pacifist attitude and the way he tackled scientific implications of concepts like relativity in his fiction, there was always a little tension, especially when the young folks like myself spoke up.

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, was next, another of those books I find myself re-reading on a regular basis, and while we looked at it as a product of the Cold War, it was also interesting to note that it marked a shift away from writers who had military experience to those that didn’t. It’s not a question of quality – you don’t need to have been a soldier to write strong military fiction, any more than you need to have been a homicide detective to write good murder mysteries – but there is a shift in what gets focused on. Card’s book is philosophical, with the technology largely serving as a backdrop to the action of the story, while Heinlein and Haldeman are much more interested in the nuts and bolts of soldiering, the details like kit and drills and chain of command that are a grunt’s whole universe. My students also struggled with the ages of the characters involved, but that’s normal – you have to keep reminding yourself how young they are to really feel the impact of what’s going on, and the parallels to the so-called “Cold War kids” generation are really powerful.

In a couple of hours, we’re finishing up with Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, and I’m really excited, mostly because it’s the first time I’ve taught it and I’m eager to share it with the class as it was shared with me. While I normally dislike heavy comparisons, as they imply a book can’t stand on its own, I really believe it combines the best military elements of Starship Troopers with the hard sci-fi edge of Forever War, all without missing the human component of the conflict (as Ender’s Game covers so well). Not only that, but it also manages some genuine humor and even an element of mystery, which all told makes for a very satisfying package. I’ve already heard some good things about the book from my students who’ve been reading in advance of this class, so I think we’re really going to have a great discussion.

July 23, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Schrödinger’s Ending

[Author’s Note: This is a spoiler-light review of the Mass Effect 3 finale, the ensuing controversy and the nature of endings in general. What that means is that it contains very broad hints at the different endings, but no specifics; I made a solid effort not to give away anything concrete or even too terribly suggestive. If even that threatens to kill your buzz a little, though, please don’t read on. I’d hate to accidentally ruin your enjoyment the way a careless spoiler ruined some of mine before I saw the endings myself. Otherwise, enjoy!]

If you’ve had your ears open anywhere that picks up geek news lately, you’ve probably heard something about the controversy surrounding the end of Mass Effect 3. A number of fans have castigated BioWare for endings they felt were unsatisfying, even going so far as to start online petitions urging BioWare to change the current endings/create new ones. (This measure was apparently successful, by the way – BioWare announced that some form of change is coming, though whether it will be a patched ending, DLC or whatnot is unclear.) Others have bitten back against what they see as a a fan culture of entitlement, where players fail to accept the idea that not all stories have a super happy ending, not to mention that giving in to fan tantrums is not the best precedent to establish as far as business models go. If you want to hear what some video game experts have to say, PC Gamer has an interesting line-up of folks giving their opinion on this very topic as well.

About the only common thread that can be pulled out of this is that people really, really care about Commander Shepard’s story – there just wouldn’t be this kind of controversy otherwise. And it’s not hard to see why: Mass Effect 1 took a fairly standard concept about a small band of heroes battling a great evil and executed it in fun, innovative and most importantly emotionally engaging ways. While its formula has become a source of some teasing, BioWare’s patented branching stories, conversation wheels and crews of supporting characters to interact with are a stable model because they use them so well. It’s hard not to become attached to crew members, to try out different Shepards to see how different decisions affect the story. Mass Effect 2 then took that ball and ran with it so far it started playing a different sport, carrying over decisions from the previous game in meaningful ways, expanding on the universe, ramping up the stakes, digging deep into characters from the first game and bringing new characters and decisions in that added real weight to the story. (Well, except Samara. Jack may have been annoying sometimes, but at least she wasn’t dull, not to mention anatomically wince-inducing.) As the Empire Strikes Back installment of the series – building on a previous story and secure in the knowledge that there would be another following it – Mass Effect 2 took the opportunity to play a bit dark and dangerous, and rocked it. In prep for Mass Effect 3, I recently replayed the final mission from ME2, and I still get chills during the final rallying speech. It was, to properly employ an often overused word, epic.

Having finally finished the game and gone back to play through each of the endings available to me, let me give the short, spoiler-light version: there are three possible endings, at least that I’ve seen. Two of them are “normal” and one was available as a bonus because I’m a completionist who bumped galactic readiness to 100% and gathered all the war resources I could before the final battle, including arming several battalions of Girl Scouts, weaponizing Christmas music and equipping every bullet with its own miniature gun to fire while in flight. True to BioWare form, one choice seems to be offered as the “Paragon” option, one the “Renegade” option, and the bonus choice as a little bit of both. And to be honest, in their initial unfolding scenes, each of those felt right. Shepard’s choice is fine, I think – it’s the rest that’s a bit wobbly.

The problem is that after the immediate consequences of your initial choice, the endings all collapse into essentially the same cinematic, with the only difference between them being whether two characters appear or not. (Plus, after watching it several times, the writer in me has started yelling “Why are they even there? How did that happen?” louder each time.) Not only that, but you get very little in the sense of aftermath, especially for a story operating on such an epic scale. Leaving some questions unanswered is one thing, but leaving so many is quite another. At the end of Mass Effect 2, players agonized over knowing the fate of a single squad member, often restarting the final mission several times to try to get everyone out alive (or at least their favorites). At the very end, you got a chance to mourn anyone you’d lost, and see the survivors, count the people you’d helped. It’s part of what made Mass Effect 2 so effective – not only did it set the stage for Mass Effect 3 so well, it also made you feel like all the decisions you made mattered, from entire colonies down to the life of a single crew member.

That is what I think falls a bit flat at the end of ME3 – you don’t get that final look back over what you’ve saved, and what you’ve lost. Which means that all those tough decisions you’ve made along the way, particularly the really tough ones in the last game, don’t mean as much, because we don’t get to see what they accomplished in the end. To make matters worse, some of what we do see appears to be “take backs” – plot twists that neatly undo something the player has worked hard to accomplish or agonized over losing throughout the game. (Imagine if after all the blood and sacrifice and inspirational Tom Hanks speeches, Private Ryan was simply shot and killed in the closing moments of the bridge battle, and you get an idea of what I mean about how a “take back” makes the audience feel.) In a game that goes out of its way to resolve a minor storyline involving Conrad Verner, a comic relief character from the first two games and Shepard’s #1 super fan, the decision to leave huge stories and major characters undetailed is a bit puzzling to say the least. It feels a bit like the writers got lost at the end and just didn’t know how to wrap up all of the stories they’d been telling, so they took the path of leaving most of it unrevealed. Which might work, except all this emotional investment you’ve built up needs somewhere to resolve itself, and when it doesn’t have enough of an outlet, it turns to frustration instead.

It’s as though you’d gotten to the conclusion of the Lord of the Rings, with armies clashing and a ring poised to fall into a volcano, only to suddenly cut away to a single human soldier walking back to his farm and hugging his wife and children. On the one level, what a neat, close-up way to end the series. It’s implied that the forces of good won the day, after all, and rather than sweeping images of armies of thousands, a single person’s story can be that much more emotionally effective, putting epic events back on a scale we can relate to more easily. It could be part of a great ending, no question. On the other hand, if that’s all we get, we’re left with a trilogy’s worth of characters and storylines that are now stuck in a sort of emotional limbo, with no resolution to wrap them up. What happened to the hobbits? To Aragorn? To Gimli and Legolas? To Gollum? To freakin’ Gandalf? We may not need an accounting of every man of Rohan, but accounting for none of them? We’re left with Schrödinger characters, nether alive nor dead.

And, emotionally, it just doesn’t work.

Don’t get me wrong, I am normally a staunch advocate of letting writers tell the story they want, including ending it how they feel is best. A lot of people whined about the end of Battlestar Galactica, for example, but I was always quick to defend its creators – it’s their story, they get to tell it their way. Fans are free to bitch, and they do, and the fact is that no matter what ending a game or a series has, some nerds will always rage about it. You really can’t make everyone happy. I suspect that a lot of the fans complaining about “we didn’t get the ending we wanted” are frustrated that they don’t a flawless Hollywood action hero American ending. They can, to put it mildly, put on their big kid pants and shut the hell up. If they weren’t expecting sacrifice and loss, they really weren’t paying attention – the Mass Effect series has always been about making hard choices, from your decision on Virmire to the suicide mission to the very last battle.

At the same time, no matter who you’re trying to please, your ending needs to be true to its own story. I was prepared for the idea that Shepard might very well not survive Mass Effect 3 – when the annihilation of all civilized life in the galaxy is the threat, a heroic sacrifice is always on the table. (That’s not a spoiler, by the way. I’m speaking in theory, about heroic stories sometimes requiring heroic sacrifice. Breathe easy.)  The problem is that, regardless of whether Shepard lives or dies or turns into ice cream or puts on the Metroid armor or goes on to win “Dancing with the Stars”, right now the endings don’t do justice to everything that’s come before them. We can’t have closure about every single possible character, and I accept that, but we need more than what we’ve got right now. When I shed some tears about the loss of a crew member – and I did, especially for one of them, and I get choked up thinking about it even now – you’ve done the impossible, as far as writers are concerned. You’ve made me truly care about your characters. Bravo.

Just let me say good-bye to them, too.

Please.

March 24, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Coming to Life

One of the best parts of writing – and not incidentally gaming – is when your character surprises you. You have an idea of where you think they’re going, they seem pretty predictable, but suddenly BOOM! They come to life, even if just for a moment, and tell you “Actually, I’d rather do X.” It’s a bit of a rush, though truth to be told it can be a little creepy too, because suddenly you realize that this person you created, who is entirely under your control, has just elected to go a different way than you intended. 

I know, I know, to some folks out there that sounds more like schizophrenia than creativity, but I bet the artists and the role-players are nodding. As my Creative Writing students will tell you, I am very much not a unicorns and rainbows kind of person when it comes to how creativity operates – it’s a lot more work than wishes – but this is one of the rare exceptions. Because honestly, when it happens, it really does feel a little bit like magic. The feeling that the character has gone from a fun creation to a real personality is pretty spectacular, especially because it tends to creep up on you. 

I think one of my favorite stories about one of my characters surprising me occurred about eight years back, when I was playing at Mystic Realms, my very first boffer LARP. It was a weekend centered around battling a giant monster, one that was rarely seen at the game and the subject of much legend and conjecture by those who hadn’t been among the few that battled it the first time. We had been warned of its impending attack, and the staff had done a great job ramping up tension as the town tried to prepare all manner of siege weapons, magical barriers and battle plans to have a hope of defeating it. It was also one of the rare few monsters that had a chance to possibly remove your character from play for a very long time, if not permanently, so the fear factor was unusually high. I was playing a character perhaps best described as a swaggering rogue, but beneath the wisecracks, I was rattled. I had no idea what to expect and I was really excited about what was going to happen.

On Saturday night, the word came down that the creature had been spotted, and the town rallied to battle. We marched into the woods with weapons ready, murmuring tactics in whispered voices and wondering what lay in store. Then we found it. Basically? Chaos. The monster was superbly created, a giant beast operated like a Chinese dragon, and along with its minions it truly gave us hell. (But not unfairly, something that made the whole experience worthwhile – it was never easy but never impossible.) Plans fell apart, desperate fighting erupted in a dozen spots and the woods were alive with fear and danger. I’ve been LARPing for a decade and a half now and this is definitely one of the scariest moments in memory. When we finally took the beast down after hours of hard fighting, the town erupted into genuine cheers – it had really been a thrilling experience. My cocky little arcanist made jokes right along with everyone else, and as we started back to town, it seemed like business as usual, bantering with friends.

Then we were crossing the bridge over the lake, lit up like noon with a full moon in the sky, and without quite knowing why I sat down at the edge, dangling my feet over the side. And I started to cry – not sad tears, but tears of joy. I’d survived, and quite suddenly I realized that my character hadn’t planned on making it back that night. He’d figured he was dog meat, a feeling reinforced several times throughout the fight as I was nearly killed several times over. But there it was – my swaggering, wisecracking, never-show-fear character was glad to simply be alive. A friend of mine sat down and put her head on my shoulder, her normally talkative character also quiet, and we just sort of sat in happy silence for a while.

I suppose in the telling it doesn’t sound so dramatic, but in the moment, I was amazed at the fact that this character – who was usually fun but a bit two-dimensional in his wisecracking nature – actually had an inner life of sorts. He valued his life, and he was simply overjoyed to have made it out of such danger alongside his friends. I didn’t underestimate him quite so much after that, and it actually turned into the core of a superb roleplaying experience later on, a motivation that made him a lot more fun to play. 

So what are your favorite moments of characters coming to life in unexpected ways, whether in gaming or in art?

March 6, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

One If by Jeep

So this past weekend I attended Dreamation, one of Jersey’s longest running cons, and despite having arrived late on a Saturday I was able to crash some great games. The first was a tabletop session of Apocalypse World, D. Vincent Baker’s badass post-apocalyptic game, where a great table made for a fun afternoon of misfit adventures. I submit to you that if the idea of a chainsaw-wielding fat man in a business suit, dinosaur bone armor and a wooden Zulu mask he calls The Duke doesn’t make you giggle even a little bit, well, it might be time to blow the dust off those D6s.

As much fun as that game was, the real highlight of the con was Under My Skin, a fantastic LARP about relationships, boundaries and the power of new love. The game is inspired by the Jeepform school of LARP design – usually just called Jeep for short, which I’ll do here – which stresses freeform storytelling, emotional development, and personal drama over traditional rules and action-adventure style physical conflicts. I was fortunate enough to have the game’s creator, Emily Care Boss, running the session – despite our tight time constraints she kept us focused and centered throughout. Eight players rounded out the group, with LARP expert and blogger extraordinaire Lizzie Stark in attendance along with two of my fellow Apocalypse World players from that afternoon, a good friend’s super cool boyfriend and a few total strangers. All in all, a nice mix of familiarity to work with for a con LARP.

[Author’s Note: The rest of this post is part session review, part game design discussion, and it got very lengthy. If you enjoy that sort of thing, read on – if you don’t, you can skip to the last paragraph for a capsule review. Enjoy!] 

Character Creation Basics

As we sat down to create characters, we first talked a bit about ourselves, our boundaries, anything we thought might be helpful for the group to know. Players were encouraged to share freely but not required to do so – there’s no checklist for what an Under My Skin group needs to know, which meant some people shared stories, others preferences, and a few not much beyond the basic details. We had a diverse crowd, too, which was interesting to factor into the process – going around the table we found a couple of married folks, a polyamorous triad, a single person, a couple of open relationships, and a couple of monogamous ones. Physical boundaries were set too – the game defaults to casual social touching outside the bathing suit area, but players could potentially set other limits if they liked, provided they respected the limits of other players first.  So if you don’t have a problem with light kissing but I do, then we’re not kissing, or perhaps we’ll compromise with a theatrical “thumb kiss” or the like. Throughout the night, different pairs of players did little micro-negotiations of the “is it OK if I put my arm around you in this scene?” variety, but that’s about the extent of the contact that went on, or really was expected.

Right there one of the persistent myths I’ve heard about Jeep relationship games got busted, which is that it’s basically a front for gamers who just want an excuse to make out with strangers. We had a pretty progressive table in terms of relationships, I’d say, but no one even broached the subject of going past the usual touch limits; the most contact in game was some hand-holding, a couple of thumb kisses and some 7th grade “arm around the shoulder on the couch” action. I suppose you could say that we were just a restrained group, and that another game might have been wall-to-wall naked gamer party parts, but really, that could be true of any LARP if that’s where the players want to take it. I think it has a lot more to do with the desires of the players than it does with the game itself – I’ve been to Changeling LARPs with a lot more sexy touching than this session of Under My Skin had. If anything, the fact that we were taking on relationships and emotional issues made people a little more cautious, not less.

Couples & Friends

For a game with no “rules” as such, simply a structure to the session events, character creation took a surprisingly long amount of time – we began by selecting a “core issue” our characters that would help focus our roleplaying, such as guilt, honesty, loneliness, insecurity, etc.; the group then offered suggestions about areas where this issue might arise in our lives, such as work, relationships, religious beliefs, intimacy, you name it. Once we had those, we tried to get a sense of who our person might be, how those factors might have shaped them. I looked over my character’s core issue – honesty – and the areas I’d been given – taxes, the workplace, relationships, intimacy – and came up with a salesman one step ahead of a scheme falling apart around him, a smart young guy who’d left his old job under the cloud of a fraud allegation and was now hawking a second rate product as hard as he could before his customers caught on. I decided that this guy, Nathan (“hey, just call me Nate”), had a problem with honesty because he was so good at working around it, telling people just enough truth to be believed and get his way while leaving out the stuff they wouldn’t like so much. He wasn’t a really bad guy, in the sense of being truly abusive, just morally lazy as hell and seldom there when the fallout of his lies hit – he always tried to move on before the consequences caught up. I didn’t want him to be a caricature, but I definitely saw him on a downward swing as the game began.

After we’d had some time to think on our characters, we paired off – three couples and a pair of best friends. As it happened, I was paired with Lizzie Stark’s character, Rita, a disappointed actress and sometime teacher. We got together and talking about our characters, decided that our couple saw themselves as the model of a very modern, enlightened relationship – no marriage for us, no sir (and how’s that religious guilt working out for you there, Rita), we’re allowed to see other people, we talk all the time about our relationship, etc. So we rated our Intimacy high, since we communicate often on relationship issues, but gave ourselves a low Passion score – for all our talk, the two of us aren’t really doing well due to our mutual disappointment in our careers, and so the physical side of the relationship had suffered, priming us both for the arrival of a New Flame, the game’s destabilizing element. We picked a few things we do together – pottery class and oh-so-hip restaurants – and our Lines, the limits we do not want our partner to cross with someone else. Going over a Line is considered a serious betrayal, even if it might seem minor (like “don’t go to that restaurant with anyone else”) and so are the fuel for a lot of the drama of the rest of the night. The default Line is “have sex”, but it can be changed, and you may have up to three total. After talking about for a bit and refining our Lines for maximum dramatic value, we finally agreed that my limits for her were heterosexual sex (isn’t Nate so enlightened!), long romantic phone calls, and telling intimate stories, while hers for Nate were “sex with someone I know”, long romantic phone calls, and dishonesty about what he was up to. When those were settled, we also got a pair of Friends, two other player characters we were casually connected with. We sat down with them and worked out some details about our mutual past; I got Steve, an old-coworker I still played online games with, and she got Naveen, a travel writer she met while shooting on location a while ago. We had a few minutes to work out some friendship details and we were good to go.

One of the things that knocked me out about Under My Skin was how much I knew about my character after this process, how well I thought I could inhabit him even after just an hour or so. Another myth about Jeep took a hit there, which is that Jeep games are full of tortured characters and focus solely on Deep Angsty Melodrama. While your core issue will be the focus of your dramatic path over the course of the game, it is not required to be a horrible flaw – I could’ve taken “honesty” and been painfully honest instead, a nice guy who maybe tells the truth when a simple white lie would be better at times. Likewise, your areas give you some latitude to interpret your issue – you can choose to be free of your issue in some of them and suffer in others, to give it some contrast. And the Lines, well, damn. Having rules that your partner is never supposed to break, in a game where it’s guaranteed that they’re going to fall for someone else? That is the stuff drama is made of, ladies and gentlemen. You could practically hear the hearts cracking already.

New Flames

Once couples and friends had been sketched out, it was time for the tipping point. The New Flame is the person your character is about to fall for (and who will likewise fall for you), as well as the one random element in the game – in this case, we rolled on it. This represents how you really can’t predict who you’re going to fall in love with, or when. It also prevents things from being too neat right off the bat – unlike your partner and your friend, you don’t talk to your New Flame before play begins. (You know who it is, but that’s it.) You’re required to fall for each other – one of the only truly required things in the game – but you’ll have to figure out how that happens in the moment with each other. This is less difficult or nerve-wracking than it might seem, as remember it’s a mutual attraction, so you’re both working to build chemistry, and most of us found it a lot of fun because when both people are working to make it happen, it’s a lot less difficult than if one person is unaware or resistant.

Note: You might think, as I did, that it’s not much of a game about relationships if you know in advance that your starter relationship is doomed. However, this is a misconception – all that’s guaranteed is that your character will notice someone new and face some hard decisions about where they want to take these new feelings. Some of our couples managed to hold it together and stay as they were in the beginning, others endured but changed their relationship to accommodate these new feelings, and some outright imploded. So it’s not a certainty that your original couple will collapse, just that they’re going to have questions to confront.

Game Play

After all that, Emily went over the schedule with us. Under My Skin keeps dramatic tension building by having a set schedule of “stages”, which feature scenes that shape the relationships we’re going to be exploring. Most scenes are just two players, with the other players acting as an audience; each pair of players has a turn onstage acting out the same kind of scene. When everyone has had a turn, the next major stage on the schedule begins. For example, the first stage is each of the starting couples somewhere on their own, and helps establish the baseline for each relationship (including perhaps some hints of hope or problems). So for our game, first Steve & Jo did a scene, then Naveen & David, then Rita & Nate, and finally Andi & Amanda. After everyone had had a turn, we moved on to the next major stage in the schedule. We were under time constraints due to the con, but in general players are encouraged to take a comfortable amount of time to reach a dramatic moment with their scene – you are politely encourage not to monopolize (and Emily watched the clock for us all), but there’s no set time limit as such.

Anyway, it starts with the baseline scene, and then a big group scene where everyone is onstage at once – in this case, the group decided to make it a house party at David & Naveen’s place. This is also where the New Flames meet, so while couples tended to enter together, people quickly moved to making conversation with their new interests. I was concerned about how this would work – I wondered if it would be a little rom-com cliche to try to play out sudden attraction – but as my previous comments indicate, it was surprisingly believable. After all, you’re trying to impart a sense of attraction, not necessarily go crazy right off, and so it was a very charged scene full of leading questions, invitations for later contact and the like. Nate met Andi, his new crush, and they immediately geeked out, agreeing to a Warcraft meet-up later in the week. Innocent, right?

From there, the composition of the stages alternated – we saw the couples together again, now struggling with their new feelings for other people (some discussing it openly, some not), then the New Flames meeting up for that first big scene alone together, back to the couples for more reaction and processing. Due our time constraints, unfortunately we could not really use Flashbacks, one of the techniques that is normally employed to flesh out the different stages. As the name implies, Flashbacks are very short scenes involving two of the characters in a scene, used to give some context, focus in on a particular sticking point and the like. Flashbacks can be called for by the moderator, as Emily did at one point to see what a couple was like on their honeymoon, by the players in the scene themselves or even by the rest of the players in the audience. We got a taste of it, but sadly not much more, though it did show a lot of promise, and I’d love to see how it could be employed in games with more time to make use of it.

Some of you are probably thinking that you spend an awful lot of time passively observing Under My Skin as part of the audience – after all, at each stage we had four couples that each needed a scene, and barring a Flashback or the like you’re not going to be in more than one of them. However, this is where the character creation really shined – outside of your own character, you have a Partner/Best Friend, a Friend and a New Flame, all folks you’re invested in due to the time spent working out relationships and building romances. Which means that even when you’re in the audience you generally have at least one person you’re invested in who’s taking part in a given scene, and so trust me, you pay closer attention than you might think. It was like watching the best episodes of a Joss Whedon show – the slightest bit of contact between lovers made people inhale with tension, a cutting comment might elicit groans or gasps from the crowd, a faint smile cause people to almost clap with excitement, that sort of thing. It’s a brilliant way to handle having players be in the audience so much of the time, and worked very well – we were a con game of mostly strangers running late on a Saturday night, with parties and other games waiting in most instances, and yet nobody was texting, yawning or reading their new rulebook.

The one thing you don’t do is stop for analysis – in Under My Skin, you talk a lot before play and do a good long debrief after, but as much as possible you try to keep the action rolling once the game begins. This is another point in its favor, I believe. A lot of the fun of the game is in the uncertainty of where things are heading while it plays – you might have a brief whispered conference before a scene, but that’s it. Too much thought lets people start constructing much neater, more predictable narratives, and I think that would spoil a lot of the fun.

Angels & Devils

The climatic stage of the game is known as Angels & Devils, and features the New Flames meeting in private for the last time in the game. This is where they will decide whether or not they’re going to cross the Lines their partners have set for them, and what that will mean. The twist is that each character has two players hovering nearby, one portraying the Angel (telling them not to cross the Line) and the other the Devil (telling them to run over the Line with a monster truck).  As a final twist of the knife, the player of the character’s Partner is automatically one of the two (their choice), so they will have a voice in their Partner’s decision process. (I should note that by default, the Angel/Devil roles are assumed to be more voices of conscience than actual voices in a character’s head or supernatural entities.) These players are encouraged to be as vicious or inspiring as they like, so long as they don’t upstage the principal characters in the scene, and they were a lot of fun to watch. I personally couldn’t quite get the hang of how to approach this role, but I was definitely in the minority – many of the comments made were absolutely heart-wrenching, and nobody had an easy decision to make. For instance, Nate seemed pretty definitely doomed going into the scene, but had an Angel who made a number of compelling comments, to the point where he was wavering and almost took the high road … until his New Flame openly made a play to seduce him, and he crumbled. Still, I walked in thinking it was just a matter of time, but my Angel’s player really spoke to his good side, making it a lot tougher than I thought it had been.

After that, there’s a final group scene, where the chips fall and we get to see public consequences for private behavior – Nate almost talked his way out of his infidelity with Rita (his half-truths coming in handy again), until Rita’s own New Flame heard about what happened from her best friend (Nate’s hookup) and it all came tumbling down. He ended up being tossed out after having a drink thrown in his face, but most of others were a lot quieter in their denouement, with some couples drifting apart, others setting new rules and so on. We sat down to a final debrief and talked about where our characters likely wound up, asked questions that hadn’t been answered, talked about our out-of-character reactions to events and passed around compliments for the scenes that we’d been most captivated by. It lasted far longer than any after-action I’d done at a con game, and even after 40 minutes or so the players had to be dragged out the door, we were having so much fun analyzing it. I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but the characters and relationships had enough complexity to sustain it for that long, and I was one of the ones dragging his heels most deeply.

Final Analysis

I came into Under My Skin with an open-mind, not inclined to believe the lurid tales of Jeep weirdness I’d heard from some quarters but also not convinced that Jeep would be the amazingly cathartic, therapeutic experience some of its devotees raved about. In the end, I walked out more a convert than anything else. It is a wonderful example of a game designed to explore a specific topic – relationships – and constructed to allow players to do exactly that on a level not often encouraged in other systems. Considering the amount of time we had to build our characters and their stories, the game was extremely effective prompting that most elusive of gaming conditions, namely getting everyone to really care about their characters – I sympathized with poor idiotic Nate more quickly than I thought possible, and both creation and gameplay really contributed to that experience.

So, could Under My Skin push some people’s buttons in a bad way emotionally? Certainly. But just as boffer LARPs write rules and guidelines to prevent physical injury when played properly, Under My Skin is designed with enough safeguards to make emotional trauma equally unlikely. There’s no one standing over your shoulder commanding you to confront your deep-seated real life issues – you only have to work with what you choose to bring. And just like boffer LARPs give you a visceral action-adventure thrill you really can’t find in other LARP forms, by making relationship dynamics its sole focus Under My Skin gives you an emotional journey more focused, intense and rewarding than most LARPs.

February 27, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Entitlement

One of the trickiest concepts I try to get across in my English 102 sections is that the truth is not democratic – that is, just because something is popular doesn’t make it so. (Of course, lack of popularity doesn’t indicate truth either, though those Flat Earth theorists keep chugging along anyway.) A great number of people can be wrong just as easily as a small number. It’s counter-intuitive at times but absolutely vital to developing critical thinking skills, which are sorely lacking in public discourse at the moment.

A companion and even trickier concept is that opinions and judgments are not the same. (Short version: Opinions relate only to you and your experience, judgments are when you make statements based on certain criteria that draw broader conclusions.) Opinions really are all equally valid, because they’re only relevant to the person in question. Judgments must be based on criteria, which means it is in fact possible to prove them wrong, or at least challenge their validity. People mix them up all the time, and it’s a bit of a disaster, because while everyone may be entitled to their opinion, they are not in fact always entitled to make a judgment.

The trick is the phrasing – a lot of opinions are expressed as judgments. For example, if I say “That’s the best movie ever!” it’s likely it would be more accurate to phrase it as “That’s my favorite movie ever!” The best movie is a judgment – it would need to be based on some sort of criteria such as writing, cinematography, acting, you name it. Even if it’s not scientifically measurable – otherwise the Oscars would be determined in a lab – there are still concrete factors that can be weighed, and I can be called upon to either specify my criteria or give up and admit it’s really just an opinion.

I’m not saying that people need to vigorously police their language, just that if you find your judgment challenged and you can’t produce criteria to support it, or your criteria are found to be provably inferior, you should probably admit that it was really just an opinion and concede the point.

February 15, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Gaiman’s First Law

“Picking up your first copy of a book you wrote, if there’s one typo, it will be on the page that your new book falls open to the first time you pick it up.” – Neil Gaiman

I’ve heard several versions but I like that one the best, so there you have it. My copies of the Gimme Shelter anthology arrived today, and I have to say, they look awesome. Bright cover, tight binding, well laid out – quality stuff, no question. Of course, as I suspect many authors do, I flipped right to my story and read through it. It sounds narcissistic, I know, but I bet my fellow authors out there are nodding, and probably not for the reason you might think. It’s not an ego trip, exactly. It’s more because deep down, no matter how many times you’ve been published, part of you never quite believes that it’s really happened again. That someone else thought those silly ideas from your head were worth the effort and expense of putting down on paper and showing to the world. We skip to our stories to tell ourselves Yep, it actually happened. And if we’re being really honest, it’s always accompanied by a big, goofy grin.

Of course, in the midst of the joy of a new publication Gaiman’s First Law crept right up and socked me. I found a sentence structure mistake almost immediately, which made me wince, but even worse, I found a continuity error later on, and I actually groaned out loud. Let me make one thing very clear before I go on: Neither of these mistakes should be attributed to the anthology’s very capable editor, J.R. Blackwell. Truly. Both of them land squarely in my court, because in my infinite authorly wisdom I decided to send her an “updated” file about 2 hours before the absolute final publication deadline, and both mistakes derive directly from some harebrained last-minute changes I made. Not to mention that I assured her I had gone over the story thoroughly before sending said last-minute changes. So I don’t want anyone to think that the fault lies in her, or the stars – just myself. Blame her and I guarantee you will answer to Dr. Mercury for your slanderous falsehoods. Trust me, not the best possible outcome. So keep the blame on me where it belongs. Got it? Groovy.

That said, there are few things that make an author feel quite so low as realizing what you sent out isn’t quite so perfect. Of course the trick is that it’s never perfect, really. Even it’s grammatically perfect and devoid of continuity or character lapses, even if it’s polished to a technical and artistic shine and beloved by fans the world over, speaking as an author you will never see it that way yourself. There will always be tweaks, be turns of phrase you wish you’d handled better, descriptions you could’ve juiced a bit more, you name it. Like the painter who sees the single errant stroke or the composer who hears the lone errant note, that tiny imperfection – real or imagined – will never go away.

As I’ve gotten older and possibly more experienced at the writing business, I’ve come to see this as more of a positive than a negative. Having read and given feedback to hundreds of writers as an editor and a professor, authors who don’t feel this way at least a little bit tend to produce pleasant but fair material at best, and self-satisfied train wrecks at worst. A bit of agony over the possibility of imperfections is a vital part of the creative process, I think. It keeps an author honest, keeps them searching for ways to improve their work, even if it’s just a single descriptive word here or a single rephrased statement there. That’s what Gaiman’s Law is really about, I believe – it’s not just about finding actual errors (though it often is), it’ about seeing things you wish you could have done better, the things that might not seem to be errors to anyone else but feel that way to you.

Of course, the other part of this obsession with improvement is the maturity to know when to step away and call it done, and accept whatever imperfections might remain. I’ve mentioned this in earlier posts, but I think an artist who cannot let go of their work is one of the saddest things in creation. In my time as a professor I’ve seen a half-dozen notebook novels, spiral-bound wonders packed with plot and character and history and maps and sketches and every other element to bring a fabulous world to life, yet so-called because I doubt those words will ever leave them. The authors, uniformly and without exception, always tell me that the story “isn’t ready yet.” I hope that some of them will finally make the leap but I know that most of them never will, just like the garage band whose album is never ready, or painter that never shows their work. Part of being a professional or even a dedicated amateur is knowing when you’ve honestly done your absolute best, handing it away and moving on to the next project.

It makes those errors just a little easier to live with, in the end.

January 21, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Gimme Shelter released!

As I mentioned in my last post, I contributed a short story to Gimme Shelter, an anthology of zombie-related fiction inspired by the amazing Shelter In Place game. The story is called “Lions”, and it’s a look at the lengths a father will go to provide for his daughter after their world falls apart. It joins fiction by such amazing authors as Chuck Wendig, J.R. Blackwell, Jared Axelrod, Mur Lafferty, Filamena Young, PJ Schnyder, and many more talented folks. Some are funny, some are tragic, some are full of kickass action, and all of them are chock full of zombies. What’s not to like?

You can pick up Gimme Shelter at the Galileo Games website, in Kindle, pdf and print formats. I prefer the print format, but hey, whatever works for you is good for me so long as you give it a read. Seriously – there’s something for everyone in there. Check it out!    

January 18, 2012 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Gimme Shelter

[Author’s Note: In the interest of full disclosure, Shelter In Place co-author J.R. Blackwell is a friend of mine – she even took my wedding photos! – and I contributed a short story to Gimme Shelter, an anthology of short fiction that was released alongside the game. So I may be a bit biased, but as if often the case when I’m a bit biased in my blog, I don’t particularly care. That’s the beauty of a personal blog. Still, take it with as much salt as you need.]

It’s been a little while since I had a chance for a proper update, so I thought I’d kick things back off on a positive note, with a review of one of the best LARP books I’ve read in a long, long time.

I’ve often wondered what the proverbial “next big thing” in LARP will be. Deep down, I suspect the answer will come when ARG becomes more widespread and viable, but until then, I think regular pokey old non-AR games still have surprises for us. In boffer LARPs, games like the post-apocalyptic zombie madness of Dystopia Rising* have broken away from the “strictly fantasy” model that has dominated that subgenre for so many years, allowing players to see what boffer can do with other settings and expectations. In parlor LARP, Jeepform is pushing the boundaries of what games are about and what players should seek to explore, not to mention giving them new tools to explore these different kinds of stories. And then there’s something I’d call playground LARP, and which brings me to the original purpose of this review: the wonderful little game called Shelter In Place, and why you should shake up your next office party or family reunion by playing it there.

Here’s a link to Shelter In Place on Indie Press Revolution.

OK, first of all, click on the link if you haven’t already and check out the wonderful cover art by the inimitable Daniel Solis. If that cover doesn’t immediately scream “BUY ME I’M AWESOME” you might want to check your, uh, eye-hearing. But as you might expect, it’s the game inside that is worth the rest of your $20.

One of the commonly-held tenets of Jeepform is “Restrictions foster creativity”, and that’s pretty much the philosophy behind Shelter in a nutshell. (Not that Shelter is a Jeep game, before I get angry messages from LARP enthusiasts, I’m just saying the expression is apt here as well.) While there are some fun twists that veteran groups are encouraged to drop in to keep the game fresh, the basic game uses the same premise each and every time: There’s been a zombie outbreak, some humans have holed up in a (fairly) safe place, and in an hour – or less! – either the humans will be rescued or the shelter will be overrun and all the humans slaughtered. The clock runs the entire time, with no rules that pause the action or otherwise mess with it, and it’s a hard limit – if you’re not rescued when that final minute runs out, you’re zombie chow. No pleading, no exceptions.

The twist? Scattered outside the shelter are materials essential for rescue, in the form of parts for a broken radio transmitter that needs repairing, as well as a number of other helpful items such as weapons, medical kits, food and so on. So you’re gonna need to leave that shelter, and that means you’re going to need luck, and a bit of strategy, and definitely some speed if you want to survive. Each tool has a single, specific purpose, with game mechanics that are quick and easy to understand.

For the players, there are a set of pre-generated roles. (No fuss about character creation, and the game has already been balanced in advance!) Each survivor has a specific and unique skill, with a number of “essential” roles required to run the game and then “optional” roles to add some spice if you’ve got more players. The roles are broad enough to be easily be grasped and taken on by just about anyone, while unique capabilities make everyone feel that they have something to offer. Likewise, they’re given some basic motivations in the form of bonus Goals, but otherwise left entirely for the players to flesh out as they see fit in terms of personality, backstory and so on.

The game itself is divided into three acts, with the zombies gaining more power each act, making the use of tools and tactics increasingly important as time counts down. Act transitions are triggered either by time or the completion of certain goals, making the game’s timetable surprisingly flexible for a baseline one hour limit. It’s also designed to be played in two runs at a time, with the players switching sides after the first run so that humans become zombies and vice versa. So everyone gets to experience being hunted as well as doing the hunter. And any humans that fall to the zombie horde early on simply swell their ranks, becoming more recycling enemies for the survivors to face.

Which brings up the combat mechanic, which is an adapted version of the game pretty much every human being knows – tag. To start combat, you tag another player and count loudly to three. Everyone who wants in must tag a target before the three count is over. The parties involved compare a simple set of numbers, and that’s that. No time-outs, no retests, no funky mechanics, just a bit of quick small-number addition and you’re on your way again. Defeated zombies recycle after a minute, while of course injured humans become another terrifying complication for their friends. I’ve played a lot of games that try to be as “real time” as possible, but aside from boffer games with real weapon combat – and even some of those indulge too much in pauses and description – most of them fail horribly under pressure. By contrast, these rules are quick, fun and completely without room for interpretation or confusion, making them absolutely lightning fast with even just a little bit of practice.

That’s why I called this a “playground” LARP, by the way – it’s not an insult, and certainly not meant to suggest that there’s something twee or overly precious about the rules. It’s because this is about as close to a playground game you can get as an adult without someone calling Chris Hansen, the sort of games that had the simplest rules you can imagine, and yet you can play over and over for hours on end without getting tired of them. That’s a major part of the charm of Shelter, as reinforced in its pages by its adorable mascot Fred, a lovably brain eating zombie – it is a simple premise executed without pretense, a great little idea allowed to be exactly what it wants to be without anyone mucking about and making it overly complicated.

Of course, as I mentioned previously, the book includes plenty of twists to spice things up. You can introduce unusual characters such as werewolves and cyborgs, or special enemies like evolved zombies that can talk or move at full speed, the better to close the distance on unsuspecting survivors of course. The book also gives plenty of tips for first-timers and fine-tuning, so that an experience most gamers dread – the Unknown First Session – actually becomes as much fun as the fifth or fifteenth or fiftieth. For instance, it notes how to create a proper shelter, notes that close quarters such as tight hallways and office cubicles tend to favor zombies (easier to corner or ambush people), and gives important safety reminders such as discussing the difference between shambling, walking and running when it comes to making sure players and scenery don’t wind up in pieces. All presented in the same clear, amusing tone as the rest of the book.

In fact, such is the easy tone and simple clarity of the book that I almost feel like I’m doing it a bit of a disservice with a complicated review. It all boils down to the basics: Humans, zombies, props, Tag!, clock, go!

Just don’t forget to bring plenty of brains water, because chasing down your close friends and devouring them is definitely going to be thirsty work.

*Author’s Note, Part II: I’ve also done work for the fine people at Eschaton Media, the parent company of Dystopia Rising, not to mention brought entirely too many cupcakes to at least one of their houses. Throw more salt on the pile if you like.

December 27, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Unconventional

I love going to cons.

I’ve been to all kinds of conventions – comics, gaming, costume, professional, you name it – and even though the atmosphere changes, the vibe usually doesn’t. Gathered in one place are a whole bunch of people who, as a rule, are crazy about a particular subject. I mean, absolutely nuts about it, and they’d have to be, as unless you’re a local who can afford to day-trip it, a con usually involves a couple hundred bucks in registrations and reservations and the not-inconsiderable logistics of modern travel. And that’s before you even start to consider what you’ll drop in the dealer’s room. Right off the bat, you’ve generally weeded out the idly curious, which means you’ve got a pretty fired-up population. So what do you do with them? Turn them loose for a weekend and hope that the hotel chain can survive it.

And that’s pretty much what happens – you let them go all-out with their particular passion. Seminars, demos, lectures, Q&A, workshops, instructional sessions, you name it. Not to mention all the fun that attendees can come up with on their own on the side. It’s a pretty amazing feeling to be in a crowd of people and know that, on one level or another, you have something specific in common. It creates a sort of giddiness in the air, a reflexive smile that’s shared by almost everyone you see as they walk around. Pretty intoxicating, really, the feeling that you can walk up to almost anyone at random and start up a conversation about a subject of mutual interest. Though be careful about that part, because even at a con, manners still apply, as I’ve wished only too many gamers over-eager to talk about their characters had remembered.

Of course, there is a little bit of a down side too. Over the years, one of the saddest things I’ve noticed about cons are the wannabes. I’m not saying that like some hipster kid with a Cosby sweater, skinny jeans and an $8 PBR, either – I mean it quite simply in the sense of people who desperately want to be part of a scene but can’t quite figure out how to join.  You can spot them at any con, the people who are there but don’t quite fit in, who are hoping that somehow maybe the simple fact that they are in this place at this time will magically make them part of the scene. I always feel bad for those folks, mostly because they’re looking for an external solution when in most cases being part of a scene is an internal perspective first and a group consensus second. Until you get that first bit down, the second really won’t come together.

I’ve been to a couple of cons this past month, one huge and one local, and as I was leaving the local yesterday it struck me how similar they were in many respects. The same giddiness of shared interests, the same air of excitement, the same sight of strangers striking up conversations and forming almost instant friendships – it’s always fun to watch that in action. I spent a good deal of time just walking the halls, taking in the atmosphere. Because for all they mocking they receive – and certainly deserve, for all their quirks – cons are pretty amazing when you think about it.

I mean, it wasn’t that long ago when we didn’t have these sorts of gatherings, at least not for anything less than professionals and industry leaders. It was just too expensive and difficult to set it up for something like that in the hopes that a bunch of fans and amateurs would show up. We are the beneficiaries of some amazing advances in technology, travel and communication, make no mistake. And it’s awesome to watch what people do with it.

Even the old guy in the Sailor Moon outfit.

November 6, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Last Call

Never buy a dead guy a drink.

When your business is kicking over rocks and chasing what wriggles away, there aren’t too many rules, but still, that’s a good one. And yet there I was, sitting across from a smirking stiff in a rotting blue suit, smiling at him like he was my type at last call and sliding a beer across the table to those greedy greenish fingers. I’d even left my iron locked in my car. If I didn’t know me better, I’d say I’d set myself up for one nasty night of surprises. I mean, I always knew some monster might do me in, but I didn’t figure I’d be showing it where to stick the knife.

The things we do for nice chunk of change and the soft hands holding it. I swear.

Don’t get me wrong about the booze – it’s not that zombies can’t drink. Christ, it’s practically the only thing that gets them off. Without boring you with the finer points of necromancy, suffice it to say that taste is just about the only pleasant sense they’ve got left.  So most of them drink and stuff themselves every chance they get. Sure, there are still some old-fashioned cannibal zombies out there chowing on brains, but these days when the hunger hits most of them will just shuffle off to the Golden Arches. Your guess is as good as mine what that says about the rest of us.

My rule? I’d love to say it was inspired by something as noble as being repulsed by the horror of the dead walking among the living, but that’s not true. I’d even love to be an old-fashioned bigot about it and say I hated zombies just because, but that’d be a lie – I’ve met some stand-up dead folks in my time. Hell, I used to partner with one, but that’s going back a ways and doesn’t matter much now anyway. Hit me up for it a drink or ten later if you want to know. Right now I’m working.

No, the reason I don’t buy zombies booze ultimately boils down to something petty and personal: Even the nicest dead folks are horrible moochers. Do something for them once and you’ll never meet again without them expecting the same. They’re like stray cats you leave milk out for once, only these cats never sleep and they know all about credit cards. My buddy Jenny Ink says it’s because the curse of undeath leaves zombies feeling forever unfulfilled, and so they grab at anything and everything that makes them feel even the smallest bit loved and alive. I say it’s because being dead makes them assholes. There’s a c-note riding on the question, by the way, that I doubt either of us will ever collect.

I needed this sit-down bad, though. I try to get by without the gossip from the cemetery set, if only to avoid the inevitable bar bills, but so far the case was cold leads and slammed doors. Like it or not, the dead know stuff that the living don’t. It’s not a spooky magic thing, exactly – the dear departed just tend to have lots of free time and not too much in the way of morals. You don’t believe me, try writing a list of what you’d do if you were invisible, could walk through walls and crawl inside people to make ‘em do what you want. Not exactly a Sunday school to-do list, I’ll wager. And that’s just the ghosts. Zombies can’t do the walk through walls gag, true, but little known fact? Anytime they take a bite out of someone, they learn a little something.  They actually slap your brain on a plate and chow down? That’s your life story in one serving, with fries and coleslaw on the side and a slice of pie for after.

Anyway, sooner or later, all that spying, cannibalism and assorted perversion adds up to a pretty big pile of information. And I’d been around enough to know that if it was weird, and more importantly if it involved booze, Dave was the zombie to talk to. Fortunately for me, he had a habit of leaving the Boneyard at seven each night like clockwork, using his hoodoo to slip into the same neighborhood bar where he’s been a regular for the last fifty years, thirty-one of them postmortem.

“So tell me where I can find the Philosopher’s Shot,” I said. I made sure the glass was on his lips when I asked. I may buy the guy a drink, but it doesn’t mean I have to let him enjoy it. I thought about Honey’s eyes, blue as the sky through a summer school window, pleading with me as she pressed the check into my hands. Strictly for motivational, damsel-in-distress purposes, I told myself. Not because I’d seen them in my dreams every night since we met. No sir.

I watched some beer sputter back in the glass, propelled by a curse. “Christ, Frankie, you always this much fun on a date?”

“You should see me at the movies.”

“I like the outfit, too. Very classic.” It was a crack, not a compliment. For some reason it seems to bother monsters a lot more than regular people that I still wear a suit and hat to work. Don’t ask me why. The way most of ‘em bitch about the modern world, you’d think they’d appreciate a little nod to times past, but no such luck. Most folks just assume I’m doing it for the image, and I guess that’s part of it these days, but put all the cards on the table and it’s just what I like. Sue me.

“You like this, you’ll love the little silk number underneath.”

“Think I’ll pass.” Dave considered the bottom of his glass for a few moments, a glum look cracked into those crumbling white features. When he looked up and saw me still sitting there, I guess he decided I wasn’t going to go away. If he still breathed, he would’ve sighed as he put his glass back down. But he didn’t, and so it was just a silent film gesture. “Who wants to know anyway?”

“A client,” I said. I took an extra long swig to let him swing, waiting, then watched his look sour even worse as he realized I wasn’t going to drop the name after all. “One who’s paying well enough for me to skip the foreplay, so stop changing the subject.”

“Yeah? What’s a rich gig for you these days? A hundred bucks?” Dave’s eyes lit up and his face split in a nasty smile. No lie – I could hear the skin on his cheeks tearing a little. Goddamn zombies. “Fifty?”

I flirted with the witty retort of breaking his ankle under the table, but discarded it on the grounds that Dave was probably a screamer. You’d be surprised what sissies the undead can be. “It’s an honest living,” I said with a shrug, putting just a little more emphasis on that last word than was strictly necessary.

“Fuck you,” Dave hissed. Brother, let me tell you, the days of the classy Lugosi-talking creatures are long gone. I never thought I’d miss all that Old World bullshit, all fancy accents and fake Shakespeare phrases, but there you have it.

The glaring contest lasted about a minute. Dave even put some juice into it on his end – I could feel the energy at the tips of my fingers – but I’ve seen worse. Hell, I’ve taken worse to bed and never bothered to call it after. Some fancy writers have said the eyes of the dead are like fish eyes, all cold and inhuman. And Dave’s eyes might have been creepy that way, if I didn’t know he was cheap lush in a cheaper suit. The only difference between life and death was that the booze couldn’t kill him twice. So he could pour on all the magic juice he wanted, and it wouldn’t matter. As it was, it was like watching a goldfish try to scare off a great white by taping a fin to its back. It’d be pretty damn funny if it wasn’t so desperate.

“So are you finished yet or what? Jesus, Dave. Just tell me what you know about the Shot and where to find it and I’ll let you finish the rest of that in peace. Promise.”

“There’s no such thing as a Philosopher’s Shot, Frankie. You know that.” On paper, he was right. Of course, on paper a lot of things work out nice and neat, like wedding vows. And I saw his eyes dart at mine over the edge of the glass, nervous. I caught the look and it made me stop for a second. A lot of petty political stuff happens in Creep Town – bowing, long names, saving face, tea and crumpets, all that Old World jazz. But Dave was really nervous, and it wasn’t all because of me. This wasn’t just about the etiquette of the underworld. Something was spooking him. If I’d thought about that more I wouldn’t be in the mess I am now, but that’s work these days.

“Bullshit. You took me for a beer already, I’m not buying a line too.” I put down my drink and cracked my knuckles, completely casually and without any implied threat of violence at all. I’ve got hands with almost a hundred years of boxing in them, so it I know it sounds impressive. Sure enough, his eyes widened and I guess he could see just how friendly I was going to be about the matter. “Talk.”

“You don’t scare me,” he hissed. He slid back just slightly as he said it, though, cradling his glass to his body almost like a child. Priorities. I took a slow swig of my own glass. “I heard you’re in deep with the Lurks again anyway. A little bird told me they’re going to put you down for what you did to Zu Ket’s brother.” He giggled. “You’re going to be even deader than I am, when they catch you.”

Twice in one night; if word was getting around, that must mean the Lurks were getting ready to move. I guess putting a torch to a thousand year old creep with a thing for young boys qualifies as big news in some circles. I knew there’d be paybacks to deal with from that job eventually, but from the sound of it Ket’s crew was already talking hexes. Damn mummies always have a serious hard-on for revenge.

But I’d have to worry about toilet paper garrotes and getting a plague in a package some other night. I checked my watch. Maybe six hours left, which meant it was time to stop messing around and twist something of Dave’s until it snapped. And in a way, he’d just made my job easier. I leaned in close, so the brim of my hat almost touched his eyebrows. “If I’m in so deep, why not see who else I can drag down to keep me company?”

“You wouldn’t try anything,” Dave protested. “Not with the sun down.” But the only thing shaking more than his voice was the ice in his drink. He noticed and put the glass down quickly, steadying one hand with the other, but he had to know I’d caught it too. His shoulders sagged and whatever fight he’d had to start with was gone. He couldn’t have folded any more obviously if he’d been a country club napkin.

I didn’t answer right away, just gave him my business smile. I’m kinda proud of it, actually – I’ve been working on it for years. It’s a combination of I’m a big guy plus a touch of I have a weapon, with just enough I occasionally hurt people for money thrown in to really make ‘em sweat. Strictly speaking, that last bit is a little bit dated, but turns out breaking legs is like riding a bike. You never really forget, and it shows.

“Aw, fuck, the Hell do I care if you get killed anyway?” Dave laughed. It was an ugly sound, like a belt cracking across a kid’s back. He jabbed a finger at his glass, as though accusing it of betraying him, still not quite meeting my eyes. “Chinatown. The Shot’s in Chinatown. There. Congratulations. Happy hunting, Frankie.”

Chinatown. Damn. I should’ve known. I felt my heart slow down, and for a minute I thought it would just quit on me right there. Chinatown was about the last place I wanted to go tonight. Strike that – I didn’t want to go there, period. Not now, not ever. But especially not while I was working. I knew what would be coming next even before I spoke, but I said it anyway. It’s like asking the surgeon with the sad eyes if your wife is going to be all right. You know the answer already, but you have to hear it from someone else to make it real. “Yeah? Who’s got it?”

“Emperor Red.” Dave spat the name at me. Zombies aren’t known for their people skills, but they can sniff a hint of misery a mile off. Even a two-bit stiff like Dave could see that name hit me like a kick in the crotch, and just like that he’d forgotten all about pissing himself with fear. I’d ruined his social hour, but he’d ruined my night. What a miserable pair of bastards. “Are we done now?”

“Unh,” I managed by way of agreement. I fixed my eyes on my drink, barely noticing as he slimed out of the booth and into the crowd. He was out of sight and I was halfway to forgetting him already when I heard him call out to me over the rumble of conversation. I swear. Some assholes just have to have the last word. “Hey Frankie! Didn’t anyone tell you that Bogie’s dead?”

“So’s your mother.” Yeah, I know, the king of all weak comebacks. But when I looked up, I could see Dave’s eyes were burning and his free hand was clenched in a tight white fist. He actually held eye contact for about two seconds before he remembered that he was still scared to death of me and turned toward the bar with a frightened little jump. I shrugged. I guess even alcoholic zombies can miss their momma.

I sat there for a few more minutes, playing with my glass in my fingertips. It didn’t matter that my appetite was still out of town. I wouldn’t be drinking for the taste. At that moment I wanted to down that glass and twenty others like it and forget all about Honey, her dying husband and a bottle full of magic juice. What did some idiot have to go and make that damn potion anyway? You had to know people would get killed for stuff like that. Hell, killing would look good compared to what people would do for a drink that cures all that ails you and makes you immortal for a few hours. How can you be smart enough to cook it up and not smart enough to realize that? All this job could do was get me killed, maybe even Honey and her husband too. I lifted the glass to my lips, tasted a little on my tongue.

And put it back down. I got up, grabbed my coat, tossed a careless handful of bills on the table and headed for the door. Because I’m not a totally nice guy, I made sure I gave Dave a hard shoulder on my way through the crowd. I didn’t stop to see what his reaction was; his opinion of me couldn’t get much worse anyway. I had work to do, and I didn’t need to think of Honey’s eyes again to remind me. It just needed to be done.

I don’t care what they say in Sunday school – your conscience is not some prissy little white-robed dope that sits on your shoulder and whispers in your ear. If you’ve got one worth a damn, he’s a big, deaf, muscle-bound bastard who knows how to twist your arm behind your back until you stop fighting and do as he says, quick-like. I hamstrung mine a long time ago, so sometimes he’s a little late on the scene, but what can I say? I’m not proud of it, but at least I can sleep some nights when he’s around. And trust me, after a century or so, a good night’s sleep is worth a lot more than you might think.  Besides, I figure everyone works with at least one son of a bitch. I just happen to be self-employed.

All I had to do now was head to an illegal casino in Chinatown, arrange a meeting with a sword-wielding god of luck and convince him to part with a bottle of liquid immortality, so that someone he’s never heard of can beat a cancer he probably deserves. A casino where I still owed twenty-three thousand dollars, last time I checked. Run by that same Chinese little god, who still has a scar I gave him back in ’43. On his face.

Yeah. This should be no problem.

You might think I’d be upset by all of these things, but I’m a professional. I think I even whistled as I went out the door, something classy, Sinatra maybe. To my trained investigative mind, the situation was really quite simple: I was going to die. And if dumb luck actually held and I walked away from tonight intact, the advance I’d gotten meant my rent was already paid for the month.

Either way I was guaranteed a warm place to sleep.

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This piece was originally written for a grad school writing seminar, and became my thesis. It’s currently being expanded into a horror noir novel called One Hell of A Dame. Hope you enjoyed it! Happy Halloween hangover, everyone!

November 1, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Chivalry

Some people swore that the house was haunted.

We believed it. Set far back on the property, at the end of a drive long since broken up into weeds and gravel, the place had been abandoned about forever. Three stories proud when built, years of weather and neglect had brought sagging and collapse. Now it seemed hunched over, like a kicked dog, black windows bared like fangs, challenging anyone to approach. Because it was that kind of night, the door opened as we pulled up, slow as a death rattle and just far enough to make you wonder if it was the wind.

“You two walk the whole thing, flashlights on,” Mikey said, leaning against the Camaro and chewing on a toothpick. He thought it made him look like a gangster. I thought it made him look even more like a hick, but didn’t say so. He was that kinda guy.

“Yeah, and you have to stay inside for at least an hour,” Joe added. He turned his baseball cap around, pulled it down tight like a catcher. Nervous habit. He caught me looking and grinned to cover it. “Scared?”

“What do you think?” I replied, with practiced cool. I hated dragging Karen into it, but it was do this or listen to them bust on me for the rest of high school at least. You don’t get many choices for friends in a small town, and these were mine. “Up for it?”

“I don’t know,” Karen said, looking up at me hesitantly. I squeezed her hand as if to say, we have to do this.  “OK,” she relented, squeezing back. Mikey and Joe cheering us on, we lit our flashlights and walked slowly up the steps. We didn’t close the door behind us, but it swung shut anyway.

*          *          *

All I can say in my defense is that I wasn’t thinking straight.

Pulled together by fear and adrenaline, we got about three rooms in before Karen and I started kissing. I thought I was pretty slick, though looking back, I’m sure she’d known and decided to play along. High school. Anyway, things were going great until I looked past her and caught a glimpse of the two of us in a dusty, rusted mirror. Us, and something else.

Everyone asks me, but it’s the kind of thing you just can’t describe. I stared for a long time, long enough to tell I wasn’t hallucinating, long enough that Karen pulled back a bit and whispered “Baby, what’s wrong?”

Then it smiled at me.

I came out the front door flying so fast I don’t think my shoes touched the porch or the steps. I hit the walkway, stumbled, stayed on my feet somehow and bolted for the car. Dead grass crunched beneath my sneakers and dead leaves swirled in my wake.

“Start the car!” I yelled, hoarse with fear. I ran up to the backseat and yanked the door open. “Start the –” I froze, fear fighting confusion.

“What the hell, man?!” Mikey yelled, panicked and furious, pulling on his shirt. Next to him, Joe cursed and fumbled with his belt buckle, red-faced and sweaty.

“Yeah, what the hell?” I turned and saw Karen come running up, pale and glaring daggers at me, cobwebs trailing off her clothes like mist. Behind her the door to the house closed, almost casually. I looked to her, then to it, then back at Mikey and Joe, and realized I would never be able to explain what had just happened to any of them.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

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Tiny bit of contest: This story was originally written for one of NPR’s “Three Minute Fiction” flash fiction contests. It was required to be no more than 600 words long, and we had to use opening and closing lines that were provided for us. I had a blast, and hope you enjoyed it too. Happy Halloween, everyone! 

October 31, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Building Monsters All Day Long

When I was a kid, perhaps unsurprisingly I was addicted to books about the paranormal. Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series? Conquered by third grade. If it had a monster on the cover, I was so there. If the title had any variation of the word “ghost” in it, chances are I read it under the covers by flashlight. Even if it was one of those cheesy “DIY magic” books, I read it. My elementary school had one – one! – book in its library about the occult, and by the time I left the only names on its little checkout card were mine and my best friend’s, alternating in two week intervals (since that was the longest time you could keep a book). Let’s not focus on how dated it makes my story to have an elementary school library with an honest-to-goodness occult book that hadn’t been burned by fundamentalist parents; let’s talk creatures.

One of the things I learned back then was that I was fascinated by monsters. I mean, I think all kids are, but I think I was fascinated on a slightly different level. I mean, they scared me, sure, but I also wanted to understand why monsters worked the way they did. For example, lots of kids thought vampires were cool – and this in their pre-sparkle days – but I wanted to know why they drank blood. What did it do for them? How did they live on it? What did it have to do with sleeping in coffins or turning into bats? And if biting you made you a vampire, why wasn’t the world overrun with bloodsuckers? I got frustrated because I read so many books that I started to realize a lot of them said basically the same thing, sometimes almost word for word. Finding a new book that actually had some new information in it became a major win for me, something that would keep me happy for days or even weeks, sorting new facts into my mental file.

Eventually I started reading books that talked about the actual superstition and folklore that these creatures came from. I think one of my teachers sent me in that direction out of concern for my unusual reading habits, figuring that it might dispel some of the allure if I learned the “truth” behind the creature stories I was so addicted to reading. (Normally I don’t ascribe such motives to my teachers, but she was, shall we say, thoroughly committed to normalcy.) If that was her plan, though, I’m afraid it only made things worse. Reading about the historical legends surrounding vampires, for instance, just opened up a whole new toolkit of fun facts about them, a lot of stuff the fictional vampires either changed or ignored. Plus, every culture that had vampire stories had variations on the legend that were pretty fascinating on their own.

When I got a little older, I discovered White Wolf Games’ World of Darkness roleplaying series, and the game changed again (pardon the pun). Here was a vision of supernatural creatures hiding in the shadows of the modern world, a concept I’d seen explored once or twice in books that I’d liked as a kid (the term “urban fantasy” wouldn’t find me for a few more years), but done on a grand scale and in a super-cool modern style.Vampires weren’t staggering corpses – they were smooth predators. Werewolves weren’t solitary slavering monsters – they were noble champions of a dying world. Wizards weren’t guys in pointy hats with a thing for long white beards – they were ordinary people who realized one day that their beliefs could actually bend reality. And so on. It was another revelation, another way to look at how monsters might interact with the world, and I jumped in headfirst.

Years later still, I’m still soaking up everything I can find about monsters. I’m a hopeless sucker for any TV show about the paranormal – except psychic mediums, because I have Houdini’s contempt for predators of human misery – and my wife delights in dropping the occasional book about monsters in my lap if it looks like it might have some neat new tidbits in it. My friends bring back books of local legends when they travel, knowing the regional stuff is a treat. I design monsters too, from time to time – it’s what I consider one of the biggest perks of being a sci-fi/horror writer. There’s an art to a well-designed creature that absolutely fascinates me, and while I’m no master, I’m an enthusiastic practitioner. There are so many elements to balance: origins, motives, capabilities, ecology, weaknesses, etc.

Sometimes I stop and wonder what normal people do with their time.

I hope it’s as fun as making monsters.

October 22, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Artistic DNA

I mentioned my “Artistic DNA” assignment in my last post, and I realized it might be fun for folks to see what some of my answers happen to be. They change from time to time, but this is a pretty standard set. Enjoy!

Author: Stephen King

The first author I ever really followed as a fan, I devoured everything by King, and while I’m not as quick as I used to be about it, I still keep up with a lot of his work. As I got older, I came to recognize some of his weaknesses as a writer, but regarded them fondly, like an old friend’s foibles. (For the record, Different Seasons is still probably one of the most underrated books of the 20th century. Well, except for “The Breathing Method”, which was kinda lame.) And I respect the hell out of his no-nonsense, no bullshit approach to writing and the reactions of others to his work – his “treat it as a job and never apologize for your interests” ideas are a big model of my own work.

Book: Parliament of Whores, by P.J. O’Rourke.

I read this book probably about four years before I should have, but it totally blew my mind. Here was a guy writing smart, funny things about government, sending me to my parents to understand all the references to politics and history. His joke phrasing and pacing set standards I still try to follow. Most importantly, like the best satirists, he displayed a lot of heart underneath the cynicism and bite. It remains an incredibly funny and effective book almost twenty years later.

Movie: Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

I’ve loved Star Wars since I was a little kid – I actually saw Return of the Jedi in theatres – but the first time my parents rented Empire, it changed the game for me. It was faster and slicker than the first movie, but avoided some of the cuddlier, cheesier moments of Jedi. (Little did I know what was in store with the prequels.) And it was dark – I learned that you could have the heroes lose, or at best break even, and still tell a powerful, fun, compelling tale. Plus, it has probably my favorite romantic exchange in all of cinema: “I love you.” <beat> “I know.”  Killer. I’d love to see modern movies that take those kinds of chances on their middle installment.

Album: Destruction by Definition, The Suicide Machines

I’d listened to music a bit before I got to college, but not a whole lot – a few random movie soundtracks, the Weird Al collections I think a lot of geeks my age had, a couple Rush albums – and then my freshman roommate played this record for me. It was fast, it was fun, it mixed ska and punk, and I was hooked. I started going to any show I could find – punk, ska, swing, hardcore, you name it – and before I knew it I was head over heels in love with music. I entered college with 9 albums and left with almost 900, but this more than anything was the one that changed it. It’s still on my High Fidelity “All-Time Desert Island Top 5” albums.

Classic Literature: Henry the IV, Part I

I had an incredible senior year English teacher, who went beyond the high school staples like Hamlet, MacBeath, Julius Caesar and challenged us with some material off the beaten path. Her model of teaching us the history behind the play, the cultural context of Shakespeare’s time period, and the nuances of the language heavily influenced the way I teach today. Plus, I fell in love with Hotspur – being assigned to read his part aloud in class helped – who remains one of my favorite “minor” characters in Shakespeare. I love that basically the nicest guy in the play is the villain due to circumstance rather than malevolence.

Concert: The Aquabats, “Floating Eye of Death Tour”

I had been into music and going to shows for about a year when I went to see ska-Devo madmen The Aquabats at the Troc in Philadelphia. I’d enjoyed their stuff since I discovered them in the Princeton Record Exchange budget bin a few months earlier, so I figured what the heck, why not. I was totally unprepared for what I encountered. Giant eyes shooting laser beams! Story time with pirates! Guys in giant rubber costumes! Bottle feeding a horse puppet! Backflips! Fake commercials! It was madness, absolute madness, and I loved every second of it. I’ve seen them every time they roll through Philly since, and they never disappoint. They really understand the value of putting on a show, as opposed to simply getting up there and playing music in front of a backdrop.

Song: “In Your Eyes,” Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel was one of my favorite artists when I got into music, and this song never fails to impress me. Even though it’s been done, redone and overdone by countless movies and videos – most spoofing on the famous Say Anything scene – it still never goes stale for me. It’s the rarest kind of love song, in that it makes you feel better when you’re in love, and also makes you feel better when you’re not in love. It even helps with a broken heart, somehow. Most love songs are good at one, maybe two of those goals, but this is the only one that works for all three.

Game: Changeling: The Dreaming, by White Wolf Games

When people ask what my favorite (old school) White Wolf game is, I always say that Mage has my mind, Hunter hits me in the gut, but Changeling has my heart. And it still does. Partially because writing the Mind’s Eye Theatre book was my first major game industry publication, I’m sure, but that’s far from the only reason. I’ve always liked fairy tales and modern fantasy, so blending the two was a great start, but then I started realizing that Changeling is also about the journey of an artist, struggling to find Glamour and inspiration against the often-encroaching Banality of everyday life. It’s even a good allegory for the gamer’s life – seeing a world others don’t, fighting to find time to visit this secret word (which gets harder as you get older), and imagining something so completely that it feels just about real.

So…. what’s in your Artistic DNA?

October 14, 2011 | Categories: Uncategorized | Leave a comment