Half-Watching: The Grandmaster (2013)

Chinese folk hero/martial artist/Communist avant la lettre Ip Man (Tony Leung Chiu Wai looking uncannily like Barack Obama) kicks the crap out of various luminaries of historical  Wuxia, as he does in a number of other movies. Ip, being an upstanding citizen and Kung Fu hero, has the Superman problem that he can never really fail, so the filmmakers smartly focus on the fallible and thus far more interesting Gong Er (Zhang Zyi) a woman heir to the other great school and thus torn between familial honour and traditional sexism. The fight scene between the two manages to make wirework legitimately sexy. 

Half-Watching: Children of the Corn (1984)

Playing on the natural antipathy for small children in suits and fishy-lipped redheads, it's clunkily acted and unsure if it wants the good kids to be precocious or endangered. The South Park parody had me expecting better, but this is Maximum Overdrive with, well, children and corn.

Half-Watching: Lair of the White Worm (1988)

A new use for the blog: Keeping track of all the movies I watch in 2014, particularly those that exist at the periphery of my consciousness as I'm watching them, or that I have to leave part way through, or otherwise are half-watched.

I spent most of Lair of the White Worm trying to figure out if the Scottish archaeologist was Peter Capaldi before the ravages of time kicked in, or just a similar-looking guy. Turns out that he was, which I believe makes this movie official Doctor Who canon. It certainly fits in with the modern show: It's relentlessly goofy, grim underneath and has a weird, icky relationship with women. Capaldi digs up a mysterious fossil which is theorized to be the dragon slain by the ancestor of local nob Hugh Grant. The fossil gets stolen by Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe as a scenery-gnawing one-woman cult) who plots to use it to resurrect her dark god Dionin. Since Grant and Capaldi beating up a lone woman isn't much of a movie, she has a handy venomous bite that turns people into her servants after they suffer through some of the most Freudian-ass hallucinations Ken Russell can imagine. There's a lot of to-do about snake-charming music and a subplot about filling tunnels with poison gas that leads to very pretty shots of the English mountains and nothing else, but at it's heart it's a pretty standard Call of Cthulhu-style monster-hunting movie, enlivened by the crazy-ass hallucination sequences. Bram Stoker wrote the original story, one presumes after deciding that Dracula was just too subtle about the dangers of female sexuality; Russell takes that theme and runs with it by way of Cannibal Holocaust  and Video Toaster. Recent experiences have given me a renewed appreciation for the interestingly goofy, and Lair meets that criterion in spades.

The Finger

The child psychologist was missing the tip of his ring finger. The finger simply ended at the breach of the second knuckle, the abbreviated digit capped with smooth shiny scar-skin. The psychologist had a tic of tapping this cap against his thumb, in a regular drumming motion that might have been an automatic reaction he was helpless to control, or it might have felt good and transgressive like a Q-tip in the ear, or perhaps it hurt and thus concentrated his mind on the task of helping Allan to be well. Allan never asked, nor did he ask how the child psychologist had lost the fingertip, though he was dying to know. He hadn't noticed the shortened finger the first few times he'd come, being more entranced by the child psychologist's trimmed beard and wire-rim glasses and bright solid primary-colour shirts that made him look like a clown or a magician, and at eleven Allan was sufficiently mature to be embarrassed to ask about something like this on their fifth or sixth meeting.

There was a ring on the partial finger, which must have meant the child psychologist was married. Allan imagined their wedding, the bride whom Allan for convenience's sake imagined as looking exactly like the child psychologist's stocky secretary, but platinum blonde instead of raven-haired with a rebellious purple streak, and the moment when she had taken that ring and pushed into onto that finger that was not all there. The child psychologist's secretary-wife must love him very much, Allan decided.

BIKINI DUNGEON CRAWL characters

So we were discussing future gaming tonight, and latched on to the idea of a D&D tropetastic version of a high school hijinks movie, complete with Valley Elves, the mysterious hooded janitor, and Vice Principal Acererak. Here, then, are some characters for the notion, statted out in Over the Edge because, really.

Barney Fiddleroot
Sneaky Practical Joker 4 (An endless supply of rubber spiders and joy buzzers)
Halfling Tallfellow 3 (A halfling, about 6" taller than usual)
Drama Club Understudy 3 (Soulful eyes)
Scrawny -1 (Not much there, even by halfling standards)
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Reason for Being An Outcast: Too tall for the halflings, too short for the humans, and too overdramatic about it for the dwarves.
Quote: "You don't know what it's like, being different! It's enough to make you puke! *flops fake vomit on floor*"

Sybill Tyrasorinis
Thunder Mage 4 (Hair permanently poofed out)
Track and Field Runner 3 (Wears spikes all the time)
Secret Bombshell 3 (Take off the glasses and she even makes the hair work)
Bad Carouser -1 (Can't resist a drink, can't handle it either)
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Reason for Being an Outcast: Shortsighted and short-tempered, doubly so after she's had a few.
Quote: "I'm so sorry! He really looked like a bad guy!"

Mark "Entropinius" Glimmerlily
Big Man on Campus 4 (Confident swagger)
Former Paladin and Student Council President 3 (Perfect teeth and hair)
"Dark Lord Entropinius" 3 (Wears a black cape with spiked epaulets)
Emotionally Fragile -1 (Flinches when insulted)
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Reason for Being An Outcast: Trying really hard. Mark decided he was an anti-paladin after Costneth Leitengiad turned him down for a date, and has finally managed to get most of his old friends to stop hanging out with him (though they still greet him with a bellowed "LILYPAD!", which he hates).
Quote: "For soon all shall kneel before my awesome dark powe- Ow! Frigging cape!"

Andrew Soltarian-Rosenberg
Cleric of Primus 4 (Polypolygonal holy symbol)
Alchemistry Whiz 3 (Clothes splattered with fluids)
Half-elf 3 (Ears kind of pointy, manner somewhat arrogant)
Socially inept -1 (Stares at his shoes)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral
Reason for Being an Outcast: Worshipping the perfect order of the modrons is just weird.
Quote: "Uh, I don't think that's the, uh, optimal solution."

Jesse Brugtarg
Orcish Berzerker 4 (Slashed-up clothing)
Sensitive Bad Boy 3 (Lovingly crafted pompadour)
Speed Demon 3 (Sweet wagon)
Don't Know Much -1 (Snaps his fingers when stumped)
Alignment: Neutral Good
Reason for Being an Outcast: Orcs, ew!
Quote: "People is people, and sometimes that's just too bad."

Sherman Firsil
My Parents Own The Magic Shop 4 (Spiffy duds and nifty gadgets)
Performance Bard 3 (Hums intentionally tuneless songs)
Streetsmart 3 (Constantly smells of really good pipeweed)
Perpetually High -1 (Constantly smells of really good pipeweed)
Alignment: True Neutral
Reason for Being an Outcast: Grade-A wasteoid.
Quote: "You know, most people don't really get my work, but I can tell you're different."

Senduma: Alchemy

There are two kinds of magic in the setting I'm working on: Alchemy and Sorcery. These are their stories.

What Alchemy Can Do

• Transform something (or someone) physically into something else. That's it. Under that rubric, of course. falls everything from fireballs to monsterization (the Recreated) to healing to "magic" swords (physical material isn't necessarily mundane material). Although the modern science of alchemy is newborn, the result of synthesizing several underground traditions from the East, the nobility of Europe are daily finding new applications for it..

What Alchemy Can't Do

• Be cheap. Nobility are the ones discovering the frontiers of the science because only they can regularly afford the components of alchemical reagents. Your average large town might be able to afford a few shots of fertility potion (for the crops, although...), and those are known quantities - creating new effects involves wasting of very expensive materials that take time and contacts to procure. Alchemy is a rich man's pursuit: Even if it could create gold, the reagents would likely cost more than the end product earned..
• Be instant, changeable or safe. A new alchemical reaction can take years to develop, and there's no necessary connection between effects. On a more personal scale, alchemical reagents need to be carried in bottles, with precious seconds spent uncorking and using them. Further, while carrying a healing potion around only risks breaking it, a philter that turns the nearest twenty cubic metres of air into fire on contact is another story
• Summon beings or matter from other realms. You work with what you have. A physical object changed by alchemy occupies the same material "footprint" as before. Science can do a runner: Matter occupies a given space but can have a changeable mass.
• Charm, delude or otherwise create specific mental effects. Alchemical drugs can create spectacular hallucinations indeed, but if the dosage is wrong they can also, say, turn all the user's bones to lead, so the smarter aesthetes and interrogators just stick to alcohol.
• Gold, as mentioned above, is immune to alchemy. It cannot be turned to something else, nor can anything be turned to gold. Further, gold affects changed matter as if it had never been changed: A gold coin dropped on a wooden bridge turned to stone would hit it and rest without affecting it, but you could use that gold coin to carve your name in the "stone" bridge as if it were wood. Gold-plated knives are the standard backup weapons of the Brotherhood's anti-Recreated task force, and can go through chitinous armour like human skin.

I'll be rich, rich I tell you

BLOOD, DEATH AND RHETORIC: The All-Social-Combat RPG

With pages upon pages of rhetorical styles, schools of thought, verbal maneuvers and equipment to make your character more persuasive, and all physical combat is resolved with a quick roll-off of one character's dumpstatted Vigor against another's.

"Sure, he kills me, whatever. But I get a free barb against him, and because he resorted to violence, and won, I get both the moral high ground and pity bonuses. Oh man, this line is going to haunt him for years!"

The First

Forteana is all well and good and gameable, but there's plenty to be mined from the other side. The truth isn't necessarily stranger than fiction, but it can provide more details. A case in point is Ancient Aliens Debunked, an enjoyable and thorough refutation of The History Channel Presents Giorgio Tsoukalos' Carnival of Hair. Responding to the claim that the ancient Incans often rediscovered their own far-flung abandoned colonies, implying (sayeth the Hair) that they possessed, and lost, some whiz-bang travel technology in the far-distant past, AAD points out that it was an element of the Incan state religion that they were the first civilization, created by the gods, and thus predated by nothing. So every time they found ruins of some other civilization that came before, whoops, that was us, totally forgot about that one, ha ha. Aside from the delightful irony of countering Ancient Space Brothers malarkey with a vast government conspiracy (an Ancient one, no less), the notion has an odd resonance, a mix of religious infallibility, willful ignorance and untenability that appeals to my heretical heart.

In a modern-day game, this could be a fairly straightforward Secret Of The Saurians arrangement, or your usual Atlantis gobbledegook. Fun times, but well-tread ground. Transposed into fantasy, it suddenly provides a rationale for dungeon-crawling and tomb-raiding beyond the usual Vast Troves of Improbably Abandoned Lucre. Heroic scholar-adventurers explore the goblin-choked remains of "abandoned" cities, defying both church and state (assuming there's a difference) to ferret out details of a world-spanning empire that They refuse to admit existed. In accordance with the genre, these details will inevitably give a shape to whatever force wiped out the lost civilization in the first place - and provide the only hope of preventing its return.

But, to me, an idea this bizarre seems to demand an alien mentality. And so:

2045. The Earth is overcrowded, polluted, exhausted. Humanity teeters on the brink of any of a dozen disasters. First contact happens (perhaps the hyper-pressurized aliens from the last post float up from the Marianas Trench) and we're able to communicate with them easily (cheating a bit, but what follows requires understanding, if not comprehension). They're friendly and offer to share their technology, in return for nothing more than the parts of our overcrowded world where human life is completely impossible. Their motive for this generosity is implicit in the name they give themselves: They are the First. They claim to be the oldest species in the universe, the original movers, created and blessed by God or the Universe or themselves to fill the worlds with life. They're classic generic sci-fi universe Precursors, and claim to have seeded Earth: Thus their helpfulness is less "friendly" than "paternal". Faced with such a claim, the world's governments simply accept the proffered evidence without much dispute; too much is at stake in the here and now to argue history. Aside from a few pockets of, to steal Johnny Nexus' line, "people who take 'made in the image of God' very seriously indeed", humanity more or less accepts the notion. After all, it's not like there's any way to prove it one way or the other.

And then, of course, there is. Some datum or other (DNA, an offworld ruin, a rogue individual of the First themselves) proves the First's claim to ultimate precedence, the bedrock of their worldview, is a sham. Now the players who have this MacGuffin need to decide whether alienating or even antagonizing a hyperadvanced starfaring species is worth the truth coming out.

I've spun a few frames off from that broad outline. Probably the silliest is be playing the tense negotiations with the First as English-style farce a la Blackadder or Fawlty Towers (Don't mention the fossils!), most likely ending with the First avuncularly chuckling from their many mouths and congratulating us on passing their test. "You had us real worried there, sport."

More seriously, the conceit lends itself to a vicious satire of the temporal power possessed by certain Close Personal Friends of God in the here and now, and the warping of society, law and ethics to accomodate them. At the low end, earthly governments could try to maintain a simple media blackout of the evidence, or lump the PCs in with the kooks that gather in every corner of the dying world. Racheted up, a government hit-squad could be dispatched to take out a group of scientists who in their blind commitment to the truth are willing to endanger the entire species, with the PCs taking either role. If it looks like too easy a choice, there's always the option of using the Majestic-12 style personal enrichment of the negotiating parties in place of a broader For All Mankind deal (though, they'll argue, some remnant of humanity surviving is surely better than total annihilation), or the aliens could start making demands, seeing as they have us over a barrel ("I'm pretty sure 'all' the children is a highball bid, we can talk them down."), or their help could enlist us in a broader galactic conflict against our will or without our knowledge. Any or all of which might still prove preferable to being abandoned to die out on a lonely world. Another point is whether the First are complicit in the cover-up: The players could follow a wild tangent from an Imago Dei militia about the First's mind control powers, only to find that the aliens are innocent and their real enemies have been human all along. Or maybe the reverse, since "man is the real monster" has whiskers on it by this point. Or it could be that there are no aliens, just some human group with a lot of resources, a flair for forgery, and a very long gameplan indeed...

Pushing further into the future (and lifting off as we do from the grime of conspiracy into a more idealistic truth and justice mode), the game could become a cosmic-scale Law and Order plot. Investigators from the Union of the First's Rediscovered Colony of Earth work secretly to reopen a case that's been cold for millions of years, building an ironclad indictment one piece at a time from proofs light-centuries apart. The climax comes in a courthouse scene broadcast to the whole populated universe, as the unimaginably ancient Grand Heirophant of the First breaks down under relentless cross-examination: "Yes! Yes! We did it! We found your precious Precursors, a handful of degenerates on a backwater world, and we killed them and took their technology. You don't understand, it had to be true, we had to be the most chosen, or everything we've worked for would collapse. We are a force for stability in a chaotic universe, but our calm comes from certainty. We needed certainty, and those...things were going to take it from us. We - I. I read the reports. I gave the command. I destroyed everything, everything but the tiny scraps those meddling humans found. I did it. I did it for the First, for the Union, for the whole universe, and I'm glad I did it!". Okay, maybe not quite to that melodramatic extent.

Finally, if you have the kind of players who prefer exchanging viewpoints to exchanging bullets, there's the option of playing trained xenotherapists, walking on eggshells as they try to ease the First into their new, less-central role in the universe without triggering civilizational collapse.  Drag out some Asimov's Foundation or the even weirder post-scarcity stuff, and ask the extraterrestrials to lie down on the couch. The fate of two species rests on the most hidebound beings in known space accepting a truth that breaks them to the core. Let's talk about it.

Aliens Under Pressure

So I was reading Charles Fort, you know, as one does, and I came across an interesting notion. Dealing with mysterious objects seen glowing deep underwater, or diving into the ocean, Fort postulates that, like deep-sea fish, these ultraterrestrials are creatures of tremendous pressure, needing the weight of water in the dark ocean to keep them together. Fort on science is usually both impenetrable and outdated, but I'm having a lot of fun with this. For example, one could conclude that the UFOs sighted in our atmosphere and near-space are missed shots, unsuccessful attempts to navigate an unhelpful hyperspace from the depths of some distant world's ocean to the depths of ours. The process may be reversed as soon as instruments are materialized enough to sense the local atmosphere, hence the vanishing UFOs: If the safeties fail, the ship could emerge into our thin atmosphere and immediately tear itself apart, releasing its contents (and passengers) in the form of sky jellies or angel hair, or even explode completely. Space travel that bypasses interplanetary space entirely doesn't get enough play for my liking, and this way our aliens can exhibit all the features of super-deep-sea animals that make surface-dwellers' skin crawl: Translucent bodies with the eyes on the inside, giant eyes and many of them, tendrils and tentacles and pseudopods oh my. Plus, it means that actually dealing with the aliens directly will require serious The Abyss-style hardware, with the accompanying constant threat of messy pressurized death.

Why I Like In Nomine: Not Human.

I've ripped on In Nomine in this blog before, and not without good reason. However, I have to admit that for everything about it that bugs me, there's a counterexample of some bit of cleverness oddly ahead of its time. The D666 system, for example, is almost comically simple (the only system I can think of with a more bizarrely simplistic pass-fail mechanic is baseline Conspiracy X), but it's almost as simple to explain to people as Over the Edge and, I'll admit, enjoyably thematic. The power disparity between humans and angels has bothered me in the past, and the system is rather easily broken, even with the fan patches that fix the most egregious abuses, but if there's one lesson I would teach myself in junior high, it would be "For Christ's sake, make some actual female friends". But if I had two lessons to teach, the other would be "And stop wearing sweatpants". But if/when we get around to the gaming-related wisdom of experience, bullet point one on slide one is "Don't bother gaming with people who put their character's power level and breaking the system ahead of telling a good story". And for all its flaws, IN told some damn fine stories.

One element of In Nomine that really stands out in my mind is how the game harnesses the artificiality of the medium, in the form of both character classes and the distance between player and character, in the service of its theme.

Class/race combos are a part of our gaming heritage, of course, and more than that they're a shorthand for characters - a shorthand that says more about the character than you might expect. If your character is a dwarf fighter, I have a pretty good idea of how he's going to be played and what you wants out of the game - and if he's a dwarf wizard, then I know he'll be going against type for one or both, and furthermore, that you're willing to forego the advantages of traditional "optimized builds". In Nomine's equivalent to the class/race combo is choir/superior: A celestial character belongs to one of seven choirs of angels (or seven bands of demons), and serves a superior (An Archangel or Demon Prince bound to a Word). Each of these choirs and superiors has certain stereotypes, and certain choir/superior combos come up regularly: A Malakite (warrior-angel) of the Sword, for example, isn't going to need much explaining; ditto a Mercurian (friendly social angel) of Flowers. But switch those two around and we've got the dwarf wizard playing-against-type thing all over again.

The problem with such class/race systems, and the reason why most good games with human or humanesque protagonists dismiss it, is that they are artificially restrictive, and for characters who are meant to grow and develop organically, that's a big no-no. But IN's celestials aren't organic - much of the game's thematic tension comes from their being entities purpose-built by God, tools of the Divine Will, which are nevertheless possessed of a will of their own. The clunky artificiality of the choir/superior combos and their respective stereotypes actually reinforces this. A human wizard in D&D will never quite behave like a real human would and just pick up a damn sword once in a while. An IN angel likewise won't behave like a real human, won't lie to spare someone's  feelings, or express a very reasonable fear, or moon over some girl in a bar - but he's not supposed to.

An old gag about RPG characters (and media characters more generally) is that they never eat or crap unless its vital to the plot. IN celestials are the same - thus, the lacunas in normal behaviour are built into the gameworld. In a sense, the oddities of being a "typical" Player Character - fanatical devotion to completing a set mission by any means necessary, a total disregard for the niceties of conversation, an immunity to the aesthetic charms of the world, and a tendency to do horrible things to bystanders on a whim - are well-modeled by celestials. And for those gamers who are more involved in the fictional world, there are humans, or celestials playing against their roles - even to the point of falling from grace, or redeeming. But the default of celestial behaviour is perfectly in line with the default of RPG player behaviour.

It's interesting to note that most games presume that the PCs are natives of their fantasy world - Whether that world is Grayhawk or Tekumel or the Sixth World. Another tack is to have the players be familiar human beings discovering a new world, either in the John Carter of Mars/various Cheapo Fantasy Novels sense of literally going to another world or in discovering that the world as they know it is not what it seems - the latter being the core of conspiracy and horror games since Call of Cthulhu. In Nomine thrusts the players into their familiar human world as total outsiders (or Outsiders), and uses the dissonance between what humans would want in their situation and what the players actually do to illustrate how strange these strangers are.