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.

Once Again Back Is The Incredible

My 29th birthday having come and gone, I've decided to come back to blogging, again, for the however-manyth time. The graveyard of half-finished posts promises a short buffer zone before I start having to produce legitimate original content, and the goal is to try to put something up (even a short, simple outline of an idea) five times a week. Also, I discovered a way to stick my beloved smartassed asides directly into the text. So, yeah, here goes nothin'.

Shut Up & Sit Down

Shut Up & Sit Down is a rather good series of boardgame video reviews by a couple of video game developers in England. That they agree with me that Arkham Horror is a "cardboard pachinko machine" and that Cosmic Encounter is "the best example of the board game in existence today" only slightly influences my opinion.

MPSI - Genesis

"There is a great threat posed by nuclear weapons, true, and we have built far too many of those monsters. But horrible though they are, they are rational monsters. They explode when they should, and no more. They do not dream, hope, love, or mourn. They do not go mad with drink or lust or grief. If they did, we would all fear for our lives; and so we should."
- Sergei Primakov, 1987

In 1987, Sergei Primakov, an undistinguished Deputy Chairman of the KGB presumed until that point to be another bland cog in that agency's bureaucracy, gave a short speech to the United Nations, directed pointedly at the intelligence communities of the United States and its allies, which caused an international uproar. The crux of Primakov's speech, alluded to above, was that whatever the threat posed to the world by nuclear weapons (a sore point following the US's withdrawal from SALT the previous year), the threat of rogue, crazed or even merely agitated parahumans was far more dire. He followed up this dictum - common sense, of course, but near-blasphemy to the thinkers of the day who saw each side's parahuman resources as an extension of Cold War brinksmanship - with a plea to the collected community to form a bipartisan intelligence agency dedicated to monitoring and countering parahuman threats on a global scale. It is a tribute to the effectiveness of Primakov's speech that the notion was entertained at all - that it was, even guardedly, accepted seems so miraculous that it is often cited as proof that Primakov was himself a latent para.

In addressing the UN, Primakov had made an end-run around the Kremlin, and the halls of power rang with calls for his head. However, Primakov had developed surprisingly strong connections and, more importantly, blackmail dossiers for such a nonentity; combined with his recent international exposure, he could not be easily removed. Fortunately for the lynch mob, it seemed that Primakov's punishment was inherent in his crime: He was made the first director of the USSR side of the Mutual Parahuman Security Initiative, which rapidly became a dumping ground for the unflushable dregs of Communist intelligence. The CIA treated it much the same, and the position of the US director was filled by a constantly revolving series of careerists whose primary interests were getting the hell out of MPSI and back into "real" parahuman intelligence, giving Primakov free reign over his kingdom of dead-enders. The MPSI seemed hopelessly stillborn; distrust cleanly divided the two sides, the primary intelligence agencies refused to share any but the most clearly useless information (though the quantity was as great as the quality was poor; "full participation" in the MPSI was a means of getting international-cooperation brownie points without giving anything away), and the initiative was constantly overshadowed by well-funded mononational organizations from both Dum and Dee. Nevertheless, MPSI managed to rack up a number of small victories, though Primakov was quick to shunt the credit for these onto others, often the revolving US directors or other functionaries seeking to get out. Interested observers, of which there were very few, noted the change from dumping to testing ground; the MPSI almost imperceptibly shifted from a punishment detail to a stop on the careerists' upward trail. However, Primakov's greatest accomplishment was still to come, with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yeah, more spy games, this time biting with ferocity on a certain agency from a certain out-of-print superhero game. I've been reading a lot of historical supers books for Wild Talents, and the desire to slap together a universe is upon me.

Tuesday Character: Perfect Elliot Refuel

Times have been tough for the Cathartic Church. Granted, not as tough as they've been in other timelines, in which the church was wiped out back when it was still the Albigensian Heresy, but there's a reason the phrase "better than being massacred by a Papal army and tortured by the Inquisition" never really caught on. The actions of a cadre of nobles who had converted, found the new faith a fascinating curio, or just wanted to tweak the Pope's nose convinced the King of France to intervene on behalf of Catharism, but the sect remains a tiny oddity one step up from a cult. While the church's doctrine of a world created by a spiteful divinity (Rex Mundi) that wants humanity to suffer rings true for many, and the Cathars' much more liberal stance on sexuality has kept them at the vanguard of religious reform, their doctrinal opposition to bringing children into this vale of tears has come perilously close to wiping them out. Only an extremely active recruitment program (bolstered by how evidence of Rex Mundi's dominance is always close to hand) keeps them from disappearing completely.

Perfect Elliot Refuel. the head of Cathars in the Edge (where the Demiurge's malevolence is most clearly visible) has kept the faith since he became a Credente at the age of 28 almost forty years ago. In that time, Refuel has found that the Cathartic goal of complete separation from the material is simply untenable. The endless fundraising needed to maintain the proselytization campaigns has ensnared him in the political machinations of the island, and he often finds himself at some monstrously tacky gala, haplessly nodding along as one or the other of the island's Kings of Wickedness explains how much respect they have for the Cathartic vision. The Cathars even occasionally participate in the Temple of the Divine Experience's broadly Christian Sunday service, rubbing elbows with other churches that would have  wiped their ancestors out (and, multichronically speaking, did).

The lines between divine and vulgar have grown blurry for Refuel, and his prayers to the True Godhead seem to be cast into a gulf even wider than the seven emanated universes of doctrine. He worries constantly about the state of his own soul and that of the church, and ruminates that perhaps it would have been better to let the church be annihilated than to let it become the bloated thing it was today. He mechanically accepts filthy lucre from the material world, justifying it as the only legitimate use for money but still terrified of the implications. Refuel worries so much about his interactions with the material that his shunning of material temptation has caused him to pass out from malnutrition at three separate social functions. He knows he will soon be replaced by one of his underling Perfects*, and it's fair enough - the promotion of Catharism is a young man's game, one for enthusiasm and ideology rather than acclimatization and exhaustion. But before he goes on to whatever awaits him (he fears it is simply another rebirth, despite (or because of) his rank and service), he wants to do something to awaken the faith of a new generation of Cathars and to save his own.

* Although the Cathar name "Perfect" is used to refer to all clerical members of the church as a nod to the church's egalitarian origins, it disguises a highly complex and stratified organization. Refuel worries about that as well.

Why I Like Cosmic Encounter

Illuminati minus all the bullshit

I enjoy Illuminati. The mechanics are solid, if a bit simplistic, the player interaction is swell, and it's definitely in the running for best theme ever (YMMV, depending on your love of conspiracy theory and controversial knowledge). But I rarely play it, for the simple reason that it takes a fucking eon. Part of this is bookkeeping: collecting money, spending money, shuffling it around, making change; part of it is table talk - the whining and cajoling and promises of support to one side or the other; and the lion's share is how anyone within spitting distance of a win condition gets dogpiled by all the other players, exhausting their resources and letting the second place runner walk to the win, or possibly third place if fate is exceptionally fickle. Overall, a soup-to-nuts game of Illuminati can take four or five hours, and that's assuming that everyone involved knows what they're doing.

Also, the game's art is a) fantastic and b) features jokes like this.

Cosmic Encounter features all the things I like about Illuminati - politicking, sudden reversals, a simple system leading to complex results and a metric assload of possibilities - filed down to the razor point. Originally released in 1977, the game has gone through five different publishers and has a thriving community of grognards* to attest to how time and revision have done nothing to dampen its elegance. A game of Cosmic takes about an hour and contains the same amount of plotting, backstabbing and "No, fuck you"s as an Illuminati game four times as long.

The basics of Cosmic are clever enough, the kind of game you hope you could come up with if stuck in a mountain cabin with a deck of cards, a bunch of counters, and a group of friends who don't care for poker. Each player has five planets and 20 ships (the ships are cute little 50s saucers that stack equally cutely). Each turn, the offensive player draws a card from the Destiny deck to determine which player he will encounter, and sends one to four ships to meet'n'greet on one of the defensive player's planets. They then both ask for assistance from the other players - Anyone who's invited to can tag along on the invasion or try to defend the planet, depending who called on them. The offense and defense then each pick a card from their hand, play them facedown, and then reveal them.

The hand mechanic encourages strategy- each player gets eight cards, but they have to use all their encounter cards before they can get a new hand, so more isn't necessarily better. There are two types of encounter cards, attacks and negotiates. An attack has a value which is added to the number of ships on that player's side, and the higher total wins, destroying all of the other side's committed ships. A negotiate (essentially, "I come in peace") loses to any attack, but the losing player gets to take cards from the winner's hand equal to the number of ships they lost as compensation; so if you're going to lose anyway, you might as well get something for it. If both players play negotiates, they have one minute to make a deal or both lose three ships. There are many devious ploys to be had with this simple setup, such as trying to convince your opponent you want to negotiate and then shanking him with a low attack card, blasting a foe you know is going to play a negotiate with a high attack card to prevent them from getting it as compensation (or conversely using a negotiate to make an opponent waste a good attack), and a personal favourite, convincing one or more opponents to ally with you and then dropping a negotiate - You all lose your committed ships, but only you get anything for them. Not the kind of trick that works twice in one game, or earns you a lot of friends. But as Pope Boniface said, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

Winning as the offense gets you a colony on the attacked planet - both for the main player and all of his allies. Gain five colonies outside your home system and you win the game, easy as that. Winning as a defensive ally gains you extra cards, or gets back ships you lost before (the defensive main player himself gets no reward aside from keeping his planet) . Of course, either way you risk losing your ships and getting bupkis for them, so players won't want to get involved with every encounter.

And this.

That's the steak (and not a bad steak, either) but the sizzle is that every player gets a power that breaks these basic rules in some fundamental way. The Oracle can make their opponent reveal an encounter card before choosing their own, the Loser can make whoever loses win and vice-versa (but has to decide to do so before playing cards), and the Zombie doesn't die (a power that seems ludicrously broken until you note that it means he can't receive compensation for negotiating, the only sure way to get new cards if people won't let you ally). If a player loses three home colonies, they lose their power, making a full-offense strategy dangerous. Adding to these powers are a class of cards called Flares, each keyed to a particular alien, which either give another player a "wild" knockoff version of that alien's power or, if held by the player of that alien, supercharge it, and which can be reused. The core of the gameplay is in these powers (regular, wild and super), their use and interaction, and how this affects player interactions, threat perception and plotting.

As mentioned, despite the dizzying number of interactions (with the 90 aliens released thus far, there are over 5 trillion possible 7-player games), the base game is incredibly fast and simple to play; the straightforward scoring of offworld colonies (and the low number needed to win) makes it easy to grasp who's in the lead, but the Destiny deck's randomization of encounters makes it difficult to directly attack the leader, encouraging negotiations (or the negotiation-related shenanigans I mentioned earlier) between other players. The allies getting colonies and the potential of one-minute negotiations means that multiplayer wins are more than possible, they're likely**. The end result is a game that, while fast, has remarkable depth. Since I bought it, I've played it almost every day, I've won exactly half a game, and I'm still utterly obsessed with it.

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* The Cosmic fan community, like game fans generally, is a mixed blessing. While hugely prolific and methodical (CE fansite The Warp has some 1700 alien powers in its catalogue, the bulk of them homebrews), it also teems with the nostalgic elitism and senseless causes one inevitably gets among gatherings of elder beardos. The most notable of these latter are the campaign to reintroduce the "Lucre" money mechanic (an entirely unnecessary addition to the game's economy of ships, cards and colonies, IMHO), the eagerness to bring back certain powers which they admit aren't very fun simply because they were in the first edition, and the seething hatred of a particular alien for being a Calvin and Hobbes reference.

** I can't help thinking that Cosmic would make an excellent game to play for money, if only to provide something more than gamer pride to discourage these kinds of group victories. Then again, handicapping the various alien and their powers would be a herculean task. Better make it nickel-ante.

Cthulhu 2210

I won a copy of Cthulhu Dice at a con, and it's become an obsession to try and find an actual use for this goofy die covered in Cthulhoid iconography, given that CD, as a game, ain't that hot. So I figured hey, what game appreciates a good bit of randomness and occasional hilarious unfairness better than 2210? So here's a new threat to add to your amoebas and zombies and alien conquerors, the mythos cults, with the twist that it's quite possible (and occasionally beneficial) to coexist with them. Right up until ol' tentacle-face eats you.

Setup: Draw a number of land territories equal to the number of players, or a minimum of 3, after all players have claimed their territories but before the 3-unit fortification begins. Place a cult marker on each territory thus drawn. Cult markers coexist with any units in a territory, and have no effect on that army until the end of the year. No territory can ever have more than one cult marker.

Roll: At the end of each year, roll the Cthulhu die.
Yellow Sign: Spread. Cults attempt to spread to adjacent territories.
Tentacle: Seduce. Cults attempt to seduce units both in their own territories and in adjacent occupied territories.
Elder Sign: Dark Power. All players gain energy equal to 1/2 the number of territories they share with the cults, rounded up.
Eye of Horus: Dark Reinforcement. All players gain MODs equal to 1/2 the number of territories they share with the cults, rounded up.
Cthulhu: Rising. Destroy 1 unit in every territory with a cult marker. Roll again.

Spreading: When a Yellow Sign is rolled, draw a number and type of territory cards equal to the number and type of territories with cult markers. If any of these territories are adjacent to a territory that already has a cult marker, but does not have one of its own, the cult attempts to spread. Roll 1d3: If the result is higher than the number of units in the territory, the cult spreads. Place a cult marker on that territory. Unlike invasions, the player who controls the territory may choose to voluntarily fail this roll, inviting the cult in. If a territory drawn has no adjacent territory with a cult marker, or already has a cult marker, it has no effect.

Assisting the cults: On their own, the cults may not spread to water or space territories. Players may opt to assist the cults, either to infiltrate rivals, because they hope to take advantage of the cults' very occasional generosity, or because they just want to make it somebody else's problem. A player with a naval commander and a territory with a cult marker may replace one land territory card the cult would otherwise draw with a water territory. A player with a space commander in play and a space station in a territory with a cult marker may replace one land territory the cults would otherwise draw with a space territory. Only one such substitution (either water or space) may be made per player. The cults, being reckless and in league with dark powers of both ocean and space, do not need to limit themselves to the prescribed landing zones and coastlines that limit traditional armies, and cards drawn from such assistance do not need adjacent territories to support the attack (in later turns, such assistance cards should be separated from water and space territories drawn normally). However, water and space are difficult for cultists to survive in, and their rolls to spread to such territories are made at -1 (thus a 1 always fails). If successful, the cult establishes itself in the new territory, and on future spreading and seduction results, draws a card from the appropriate deck. The cults may spread into water territories adjacent to coastal land territories with a cult marker, or any of the normal space landing areas if there is any land territory with both a cult marker and a space station.

Seduction: Seduction works similarly to spreading: When a tentacle is rolled, draw a number and type of territory cards equal to the number and type of territories with cult markers. However, there are several differences. If a territory drawn during seduction is entirely unoccupied, or only has a cult marker, or has no adjacent territory with a cult marker, it has no effect. If a territory drawn is occupied, has no cult marker of its own, but is adjacent to a territory that has a cult marker, the cult attempts to seduce the army there: Roll 1d3, and if the result is higher than the number of units on the territory, destroy one unit and place a cult marker (this can entirely depopulate a territory except for the cult marker). Again, the player who owns the territory may voluntarily fail the roll to invite the cult in, but they still lose one unit. If a territory drawn is occupied and already has a cult marker, roll 1d3+1: If the result is higher than the number of units in the territory, destroy one (again, this can entirely depopulate a territory except for the cult marker.

As with spreading, players may choose to assist the cults' seduction by replacing land territory cards drawn with water or space territories, with the same restrictions and the same exception to the need for an adjacent territory (an empty territory, or one with a cult marker alone, still has no effect). However, seduction does not have the same -1 penalty to expand to such territories as spreading, since they are co-opting the existent survival structures (and the cults roll 1d3+1 as above if the territory drawn already has a cult marker).

Dark Power: Rolling an Elder Sign provides a pure energy benny for those willing to put up with an occasional ritual sacrifice and the possibility of monstrous rising. All players gain energy equal to half the number of territories they occupy that have cult markers, rounded up.

Dark Reinforcement: Likewise straightforward, rolling the Eye of Horus means the cults lend their military power to those good enough to turn a blind eye to their doings. All players gain MODs equal to half the number of territories they occupy that have cult markers, rounded up. These MODs may only be placed on territories with cult markers, but may otherwise be placed freely

Rising: But it's not all gravy trains and bloody sacrifice. One unit is destroyed in every territory with a cult marker, and the die is rolled again. And yes, it is possible to roll Rising repeatedly.

Fighting the cults: Considering the nastiness of seduction and the always-present possibility of the big guy's rising, players may be justified in wanting to exterminate the cults. This is done during a player's turn as an invasion, including any bonuses for commanders, territory type or Command cards. Cults defend using a single d8, and win ties as normal. Cults cannot be purged from a territory with only one unit. A territory's surviving units may still invade as normal after purging a cult, and an attacker may purge a cult in an invaded territory as a continuation of the original attack (the defending player cannot use the cult to defend, and the attacker is not obligated to destroy the cult before occupying the territory).

The only way to be sure?: Nuclear cards only destroy a cult if they have already destroyed all other units in the territory and there is still at least one unit worth of overkill. Thus, the continental weapon cards cannot kill a cult unless the territory was already otherwise unoccupied; ditto scatter bombs. Other Command cards have no effect - Cults cannot be removed by MOD Reduction and are immune to Death Traps.

Potential variants being considered:
Weaker cults: Change the cults' defense roll to a d6. Makes them less of a hassle to wipe out, and thus less of a strategic concern.
Monstrous rising: When a Rising is rolled, 1d3 units are destroyed in each territory with a cult marker. Multiple risings are catastrophic, and cleansing cults becomes a major concern.
That is not dead: At the end of a year in which all cults have been destroyed or when there are fewer than three cult markers in play, draw three land territory cards and place a cult marker in each, then roll as normal.
Multiple rolls: At the end of the year, roll once for every (5/7/# of players in the game) cult markers in play, resolving each roll completely before the next is made. Risings (or multiple Risings!) and the following roll count as one roll.
Wiped themselves out: If a Rising is rolled and there are no other units in a territory with a cult marker, remove the cult marker.
These were the most loyal: In conjunction with the above, every time a cult marker is destroyed by a Rising, place it aside (on a doom track, if you will). It now counts as permanently in play for purposes of the number of rolls made if using Multiple rolls, above, or raises the minimum number of cult markers that must actually be in play for That is not dead, above, or adds an additional territory card to those drawn for That is not dead, or adds to any rolls made by the cults still in play, or if you're exceptionally masochistic, all of the above. For slightly less masochism, restrict this to one marker per Rising rolled, or one per year.
The End is Here: If at any time a cult marker would be placed and there are no more cult markers available, Cthulhu rises and nobody wins. The viciousness of this is dependent on how many markers are available (I have 21).

Oh, and for those of you who don't have the overpriced novelty die this is based on, you can replicate it with a regular d12:
1-5: Spread
6-9: Seduce
10: Dark Power
11: Dark Reinforcement
12: Rising

The Young Nerdhood of Studs Lonnigan: Dragon Magazine

Of course, I started with Dungeons & Dragons, just like everyone else. I found a set of old red-covered D&D books in my aunt's basement, abandoned there by my much-older cousin, and that was pretty much the end of it for a life of quiet dignity.

I don't know why I started buying Dragon mags specifically. They were reasonably priced and well within the range of a young nerd's allowance, and offered a wide variety of supplementary material - Almost all of it for D&D, but of course at that point I was only barely aware that there were other options. The then-current issues often focused on the arcana of Second Edition which was strange and baffling to my first-ed mind, and so I skipped over them and went straight to the back catalogue. Of these back issues, I favoured the Halloween and April Fool's editions, which offered opportunities for horror and comedy gaming, strange, alien ideas at the time.

One particular Halloween issue (1994, to be precise) was the tipping point. There was an article on resurrection magic and its impact on the imaginary world - In particular, how it fucks around with the quasi-medieval milieu that, as mentioned, is D&D's default arrangement (The King is dead! Long live the King! The King is back!), and how, given the hefty but by no means impossible cost of magic, for wealthy merchants and the like being assassinated was closer to a fine you had to pay than an actual corporal punishment. Pretty standard stuff by the standards of modern gaming, but it blew my young mind because it presumed a few things: An internally consistent world, and actually working out every possible impact and effect of the changes of that world.

Another article, which it turns out came from six months earlier (1994 was a good year, I guess), enhanced this idea with an article breakdown of a short series of books and pamphlets of what I would later refer to, with much gleeful elbowing and knowing looks, as "controversial knowledge". Specifically, these materials conveyed Thomas E. Bearden's spectacularly loopy theories about how the Soviets were totally developing Tesla technology, guys. In addition to the usual Tesla fun, Bearden's version of the tech kicks physics in the balls in a whole new way, as any energy transmitted through hyperspace is massively magnified through pure magic*. Thus, by transmitting nuclear blasts through harmless-looking transmitters, the dastardly Reds had access to planet-cracking bombs with no need for satellites or missiles! And shining a flashlight through hyperspace creates lasers! And the devil is in my water supply! This was my first encounter with CK, but even to a 13-year-old, the author, Gregory Detweiler, was a bit too credulous (although come to think of it, he was probably just adhering to TSR's general "please, please don't sue us" attitude, which they held for pretty much the entire 90s**). Anyway, this set off a lifelong fascination with crazy guys and their vanity-press frothings, a fascination all the more enabled by my later discovery of Kenneth Hite and his whole rich galaxy of WTF. As for Detweiler, he went on to write Blood Brothers, the greatest idea for a Call of Cthulhu supplement ever***.

The Reviews section was another favourite, as it was often written by Rick Swan, whose breezy manner made them more interesting than a lot of the (usually ponderous) regular articles. Swan had done a lot of freelance work on Paranoia and it showed in his writing style. The reviews tended to make everything sound great (although nothing was ever quite as good as good old TSR**** products), and it was through that column that I learned about this crazy game called Over the Edge where "PCs can be anything from Green Berets to talking cats". Of course, it was also in the review column that I found my first mention of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, so in a sense it's Rick Swan's fault that I spent a lot of 1999-2001 statting up fomori and not realizing what an absolute knob I was being.

And finally, in the pages of Dragon I had my first real glimpse of how awful gamers could be. My gaming groups had had our fights, our games had been cancelled on account of rules disputes and nerd drama, but I had assumed that was us and our youthful inexperience - Surely real gamers didn't have these emotional freakouts. In Dragon, in the Forum and Judges' Guild columns, I learned that it never really gets better, it only gets sadder. Judges' Guild was people writing in for Official TSR Rulings on rules questions, and you could tell that behind every one there was a seething argument about how my halfling totally would have survived that green ooze pit if my dick DM hadn't rounded up for encumbrance, and now TSR themselves are going to show him he's wrong so nyah. But even that was relatively mild compared to the Forum section, in which the overpowered/underpowered nature of the cleric was endlessly debated in multi-column screeds, as were other weighty issues like gaming outside your gender. Yeah. Exactly like an internet forum. Nothing ever changes, it seems.

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* Actually, there was a technobabble explanation for why the Laws of Thermodynamics not only don't apply but appear to be actively reversed in hyperspace, but it's about as convincing as everything else Bearden wrote.
** If the words "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri"  mean nothing to you, you dodged a bullet.
*** A series of short, light-hearted adventures based on classic horror movies, from teen slashers to silent films. I know, right?
**** Hey remember when the internet loved spelling it T$R? Man, that never got old!

NGE CCG: OMG WTF ASL

Giant Monsters and Emotional Abuse, Now in Card Game Form!

There was a full-on, playable collectible card game based on Neon Genesis Evangelion. I'll let those of you familiar with that series pick up the shattered remnants of your exploded heads, before we catch up the unenlightened.

NGE is an anime show that often gets fulsome praise these days for inverting the expectations of the viewing audience. It started as a fairly straightforward teenage-boy-pilots-giant-robot show with a lot of (literally) arbitrary Judeo-Christian-Freudian mythology as set dressing, and then took a headlong dive into psychological fuckery, high weirdness, and ultimately the creator more or less directly telling anime fandom as a whole to put on a non-dragon shirt and leave the basement for God's sake. Of course, as certain observers have pointed out, this message was somewhat diluted by the creators' willingness to pimp out the series for a wide variety of collectibles. tie-ins and relaunches, many of which involved heavily sexualized incarnations of the two pubescent female pilots, colour-coded for your convenience as red (dominant) and blue/white (submissive). The demands of crass commercialism and creepy anime fandom aside, NGE managed to squeeze out a pretty decent boy-becomes-man story viewed through the funhouse mirror of animoo.

The NGE CCG, one of the tie-ins relatively light on both crass and creep, is actually startlingly faithful to its source material. Relationships between characters are key to gameplay, and six of the main characters from the series are arranged in a pentagon plus the three Evas (aforementioned giant robots) below, creating something like a Tarot layout¹.  Every card title is a line from the show, spoken by a character in the relationship matrix - Ordinarily, each character can only speak one line per turn, though as in all CCGs, rules are flexible things. Cards can be played both for their normal effect, or flipped over for another line that can be used to either attract or harm a character. In the former case, the targeted character is "grouped" with the character who spoke the card - in the latter, they're either broken out of whatever group they're in, or if alone, are "downed" (injured, sunk into a deep pit of despair) until someone says something nice to them and gives them the strength to carry on and keep fighting (this is anime, after all)². Characters who are downed can't speak cards, and pilots who are downed can't pilot Evas and fight Angels (the giant monsters drenched in aforementioned Judeo-Christian mythology).

Another interesting rule is the "Draw points" in the upper right corner. Rather than drawing one card per turn automatically as in Magic, you draw a number of cards at the end of the turn equal to the total draw points of the cards you played. Most cards are worth +1, including all cards played as attract/harm lines³. Particularly powerful cards are worth 0, and devastating ones are worth negative draw points, requiring a player to discard cards. Since having no cards in hand at the end of a turn eliminates a player, this serves as a rather severe limiting factor⁴. It's an oddly roundabout way of doing things, and keeping track of total draw points looks like a pain in the ass, but the suspense of instant elimination unless cards are shepherded very carefully could save the system.

The CCG is also faithful to its roots in that the victory conditions vary - Each player chooses a particular consummation card to start, and although consummations are tied to particular characters, a given character has several consummations (reflecting various goals they had over the course of the series). Victory is achieved by first reaching a particular gamestate (two characters are grouped together, a certain character is downed, you defeat an Angel) and then flipping the victory card over and achieving a different condition. The sheer variety of win conditions means that, particularly for the first "level" of victory, it's not a zero-sum game - One action can easily fulfill multiple win conditions. Although Angels have to be defeated (an undefeated Angel forces the active player to discard cards, hastening their end as mentioned), their defeat is often only incidental to the ultimate goal of the game, which again works well for a show where the giant monsters often took a backseat to the main character's torturous and mindfucky relationship with his father, his fellow pilots, and pretty much everyone he met.

Is it any good as a game? No idea - despite an entire cardset and rulebook being translated and made available online, I haven't yet gone mad enough to try printing the whole damn thing out and negotiating the fan-translation on the cards (See the card above - it's powerfully evocative of the feel of the show, but what the hell does it mean? Does Shinji's group break up? Are cards attached to him discarded? The rulebook offers no assistance). It remains a mysterious enigma of odd rules and Mysterious Japanese Game Design, waiting for the day I lose my sense entirely and attempt to print and play. For the time being, I'm quite content just to know that it exists.

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1. And heap another layer of symbolism on there, whynot.
2. Rei Ayanami is the only character who automatically recovers from being downed every turn. It's a big old spoiler to explain why this rule exists, but it amused me to no end.
3. Again, except for Rei, whose attract/harm lines are worth 0. And again, hee hee hee.
4. Although logical, since a player with no cards has no means of getting new ones.

Agents of FATE: Sideline

So we're back to Agents of FATE, which now stands for something other than Fancy Acronym; Totally Empty. The Agents will be working for the Fictive Attachment for Tactical Espionage, with credit going to IRL friend Greg and the mysterious internetty Chris¹ in 3-to-1 measure.

Shuter and Laskey

I'm also wild about Chris' idea to have FATE be presumed fictional within the context of the setting². A series of books seems too low-key, though, and besides, nobody reads any more. I'm running with the notion of a syndication-length TV series, made with obviously low production values and sold on the cheap to cable channels with a lot of dead air to fill. This series, "Agents of F.A.T.E." ³, follows the adventures of F.A.T.E. superoperatives Clarinda "Blackbird" Shuter and Hank "Depthcharge" Laskey, and mixes vaguely accurate, fragmentary descriptions of the real FATE agency and its modus operandi with plentiful disinformation, ridiculousness, terrible acting, yawning plot holes, and baffling breaks with the tone, setting and style of the series in general⁴. FATE ensures that the show is aired in slots which maximize peripheral awareness; most people have had an episode of "Agents of F.A.T.E." playing in the background at some point in their lives, but couldn't tell you the plot to save their lives. Of course, there are also the fans, collecting minutiae and merchandise and maintaining wikis, fansites and the annual AoFCon in Atlantic City. As far as the mundane world is concerned, claiming to work for F.A.T.E. is the equivalent of saying you're with the X-Files - or, considering the chintziness of the show, the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research. That F.A.T.E. uses the same fictionalizing tactics within the show's continuity just makes evidence about the real FATE all the more unbelievable⁵.

There's some fun to be had here. While real FATE missions are deadly serious, carry the potential for betrayal at any moment, and often involve weighty decisions that can change the course of world events, the show is a goofy bit of CG-heavy pap in which the chemistry-free will-they-or-won't-they between Shuter and Laskey is given precedence over any possible consequences of a mission⁶. PCs who try to invoke the agency's name will be presumed cosplayers or worse. After a particularly harrowing or betrayal-ridden mission, I could switch it up and run a game in the morally duochrome metafiction of F.A.T.E. - Perhaps as the heavily fictionalized but sole remaining record of an early FATE operation with relevance to the FATE group's next assignment.

... Then again, this kind of over-the-top doesn't really mesh with the life-or-death, trust-no-one mood I originally set out for with FATE (Well, to the extent that I set out anything - Greg Stolze, eat your heart out⁷). It's a neat idea, but it'll take a lot to make it work right. I think I'll try and clever up some actual mechanics first, and maybe take another stab at it afterwards.

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1. I've known a lot of Chrises in my time, so you'll forgive me if you know me IRL but I can't identify you from ten sentences. If you're a total stranger, well, thanks for reading my blog and contributing to this thing of ours. You're a rad dude.
2. I have a total boner for secret agencies maintaining their secrecy by loudly declaring themselves fake, as obliquely hinted by the MALARKEY¹ designation in the Changeling Cold War setting I posted back in the hoary mists of around this time last year.
1. Which is, natch, more or less a lock stock and barrel steal from Charles Stross' A Colder War, in which ultimate top secret materials are marked BOOJUM. Oh Charles Stross, you were pretty okay before you started running your mouth about the singularity.
3. Note the ellipses - their presence distinguishes between the fictional F.A.T.E. and the real FATE. 
4. The latter two are exemplified by "Operation Daggerblade"¹, the episode where Laskey "retrogresses" into a literal goblin and vanishes into the New Jersey Pine Barrens as Shuter weepily bemoans his "incurable" condition. He is back to normal in the next episode and no explanation is ever provided.
1. And yes, all the series episodes have titles like this.
5. Annnnnd I do believe my secrecy-through-fictionalization boner just went fractal.
6. The continuity is intentionally and irrevocably mangled: For example, other events of "Operation Daggerblade" are often referenced in later episodes, but never the 'goblinization', leaving its status in canon a source of constant flamewar. FATE did this intentionally, as the canon arguments keep the fanbase occupied and off the trail of the real organization.
7. Stolze bemoaned how other writers for Unknown Armies had written material that contradicted certain rules he thought the setting required, while acknowledging that he never actually made those rules explicit. Here, I've managed to do the same thing to myself.

Public Domain Super Heroes

This was the last thing I needed to find when in essay crunch mode, but when I get around to running another supers game (that's definitely when, not if), I'll be all about using it as a resource, or at least inspiration. Which reminds me, I really need to finalize my currently-unposted screed on the problems and advantages of Mutants & Masterminds.

Oh, and this guy⇨? He's the Sparkler. He can turn invisible, and when he becomes visible again, "sparks caused by the broken light rays coming together leap about his body". And, of course, all the pink. So yeah, pretty much gayer than that time I had sex with a dude.