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.

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!

Obliviax and Wonder Overload

Less is more. Consider our creaky old friend¹ Dungeons & Dragons. High fantasy is a genre where anything can happen, and then everything does and it turns out it's all pretty dull. I've been saying for years that Yahtzee Croshaw nailed it when he bitched about the very concept of a generic fantasy setting, and D&D is the purest essence of that trope - A whole galaxy of interchangeable settings with the same kitchen-sink cast of races, magics, items, and Eternal Ren Faire politics and technology². Hell, some of them even share gods. There are some exceptions, and these are often considered the best of the breed, but even the most wackity-ass worlds still carry over a lot of the generic baggage of fantasy. There are so many of the old marvels to be accounted for before we can even get to the new stuff.

Of course, my smugness on this matter isn't completely justified - I love Over the Edge, and it has this exact kind of kitchen-sink "everything is true" arrangement, but even more so because it includes the modern world and all its postmodern mythologies; ditto Conspiracy X, which covers X-Files knockoff ground from Greys to wizards to Atlanteans to werewolves to psi, albeit with a pretty good rationale tying it all together (which I'll spoil in a later W.I.L. post). But for all that I enjoy those games, I admit that their overstuffed worlds miss out on the subtleties of simpler premises: If everything's possible, nothing is interesting, and other such cliches. As an example of what I'm on about, I'll to steal a random³ monster from D&D and extrapolate the changes its could ring on an otherwise mundane world.

Very upset about something.

Obliviax is an "evil⁴ black moss" that absorbs memories, and, if eaten, can potentially give those memories to the eater (or just make them sick as dogs). In D&D, it's a minor annoyance, yet another wad of hit points with a boogah-boogah face and an unusual power which amounts to stealing spells from wizards and confusing everyone else for a few hours. If attacked, it sprouts a little "mossling" man to cast stolen spells. Just another day in the dungeon. Meanwhile, in a world less demon-haunted, where miracles and magics aren't a dime a dozen, this shit is crazy.

Let's say we dump the bit about forming the spellcasting mossling, which is legitimately stupid and really just D&D fulfilling its obligation to provide a Big Dumb Fight Scene at any opportunity. What we have here is a single organism which changes the world in a number of major ways:

• Psionic powers are real. This is big, but done. The capacity to alter the world with nothing but your will and rubber face is the cornerstone of a lot of existent settings. A thought here is that perhaps prolonged exposure to obliviax's telepathy can trigger psi abilities in humans: Cue hideous government experiments, or eager beavers forgetting weeks at a time trying to unlock their inner potential. Certainly memory moss is going to be at front and centre of psi research.
• ...and plants can have them. And suddenly we've taken a hard left into Batshit County. To quote Hermes Conrad, "That just raises further questions!". Our normal understanding of telepathy is kind of dependent on the critter in question having an actual brain and intelligence, usually quite a lot (human level or better⁵). A psychic plant leads to a questioning of our whole concept of will and intelligence, to say the least. And where there's one psychic plant, there are most likely more. Can they communicate with one another? Do they form a hive mind⁶? Greenpeace is going to go apeshit.
• Memories can be stolen. And then there's this. Why would a plant evolve the capacity to steal memories at all (robbed as we are of the "crazed wizard" all-purpose explanation)? That's a hell of a long way to go for self-defense that could be had just as easily by becoming poisonous. Maybe the brainwave patterns of animals are a part of the moss's diet or reproduction cycle - It's a fundamental assumption of any world with psi that psionic energies are just that, energies, so it's probable that obliviax draws nourishment from them, perhaps even emitting a low-level psychic lure to draw in prey.
• Ahem. Memories can be stolen. "Basic" obliviax as described above just drains your memories of the last 24 hours, which is not going to be a major concern for your typical D&D party, aside from throwing off the goblins-slaughtered count. Surely, there are plenty of other strains of obliviax - ones which take weeks, or hours, or maybe even years before being satisfied. Perhaps there are strains that feed on your most important memories, or your least important, or your name - If there aren't, our scientists are doubtless working day and night to create the most flexible arsenal of memory-erasing mosses possible, for their dire and inscrutable purposes. Or maybe to help treat victims of horrible trauma. Mad science doesn't have to equal evil science, you know.
• Memories can be stolen. And of course, like any means of memory-editing, this just reeks of potential Prisoner-style mindfuckery: Stealing memories and force-feeding new ones, the whole brainhacking thing. People could even sell their memories, like a biopunk Strange Days. It'd be fun if the PCs investigate their couldn't-think-of-a-back-story missing time and, instead of finding Greys or government conspiracy, just find a gigantic naturally-occurring obliviax patch out in the woods. And then get zapped, forget it, and wander off confused.

And all this from one filler entry in Monster Manual II, with a name like a hastily-conceived fake drug⁷. I might still be on a continuity kick from yesterday, but this was fun. I think I'll start another series of posts along these lines, settings based on single, obscure D&D monsters as the sole source of Weird in the world. Even if it means having to eventually write up Flumphworld.

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1. "Friend" here in the sense of a guy you knew back in elementary school who has since turned into a total knob.
2. A big part of this is that it means characters from one world or campaign can be easily ported to another, which is a double-edged sword in a hobby where everyone has at least read stories of campaigns completely destroyed by such transfer PCs. Despite this, with the ascendancy of the "running encounters at the game store" model of 4E (and WotC's new, staggeringly evil plan of actually selling  fucking booster packs of power cards to play in said encounters) the need to balance out everyone will make sure that this interchangeability isn't going anywhere.
3. Heyyyy Stewart!
4. Yeah, evil moss. Neutral evil, to be precise. Because a moss with an understanding of order and chaos would just be silly 
5. This is as good a chance as any to mention the Dogpocalypse setting I conceived in the old /tg/ days, in which testing on animal psi led to a Collie name Sandra getting scared and telekinetically nuking Salt Lake City. 
6. Like an even-more-bizarre version of Kult's Pazuzu, which is the collective consciousness of all insect life on Earth: A truly alien, ahuman consciousness which is constantly consuming itself. Pazuzu is one of those ideas (of which there are many in Kult) that you could build an entire campaign world around (with a tip of the hat to Philip K. Dick's "Expendable"), but in that game's incredibly overcrowded cosmology, it's strictly a third-string threat at best.
7. Actually, some gomer apparently decided to name his band that as well. Since it's an 80s fantasy metal band, I doubt that the D&D connection is a coincidence. 

Don't Lose Your Edge

I'm starting with the basic Over the Edge system: It's simple, it's elegant, it's pure roll-and-yell fun. So of course I'm going to have to go and fuck with it.

Quick rundown of OtE for those who haven't seen the light: Characters have traits like "Elf", "FBI Agent", "Vegetarian Chef" "Obsessed with Trains", with maybe a couple sentences explaining their limits. 3 is pretty skilled, 4 is professional level, 6 is ridiculous and 10 is HOLY JESUS WHAT. PCs have one main trait rated at 4 dice, two side traits at 3, and a flaw which gives them one less die on anything the flaw would cover. Any action not covered by a trait the player has gives them 2 dice, so an unskilled, flawed action only rolls one die. Characters roll against other characters or GM-set difficulties, derp de doo, you know how it goes.

Base Over the Edge uses six-sided dice, because you're likely to have a shitload of them. I'm changing that to ten-siders, because I'm such a dork I actually own more of those. There's another reason for this, which I'll get to in a minute.

In a roaring great break with tradition, I'm going to say the 0 on the die counts as an actual zero. This means that any die pool has the same bottom, which, along with the greater number of sides-per-die, means that larger die pools aren't quite as guaranteed to destroy smaller ones - there's always a chance they'll roll a lot of zeros. Of course, they may also completely ruin you, but that's to be expected. Rolling ALL 0's is, of course, wicked bad times.

To further complicate matters (and help out low rollers), I'll add in the OtE optional rule that if all your dice coming up the maximum (in this case, 9), you can roll another die. If that comes up 9 as well, you get another die, and so on into infinity.

Okay, so far so what, it's just OtE with different dice and a few new rules only serious math-huffers care about. The big change is a bit I shamelessly stole from Don't Rest Your Head* - the highest single roll. See, when you roll your dice pool, in addition to the total of your roll, you also note the highest die. So if you've got a 6,4,2,7, you have a total of 19 and a high of 7. Whichever side in a conflict gets the highest single die gets the Edge (if they both or all have the same high, nobody gets it). What this means is that you get a little something cool above and beyond what your mere total tells you - Even if you lost the conflict. The winner often has the Edge, so they get little flourishes like knocking enemies down as they hit them, finding out a clue in addition to what they were researching, and looking demure and innocent even as they ruin someone's reputation. But if the losing side has the Edge, then the victory is not total, and you can define some way that what they wanted didn't quite go off - Or what they didn't want, did. Basically, the total determines who succeeds - the Edge, who looks good doing it.

Mechanically, this means that that you can define some little extra bit of coolness that gives you the upper hand or penalizes them. Maybe the guy is bludgeoning you into submission, but you're able to manoeuvrer him into the path of an oncoming bike. One concept I'm gnawing on like a terrier is that of letting the Edge add a penalty die to the opponent's next roll. That is, when he rolls, he rolls one extra die, and then drops the highest die of all of them. It sucks for him. But, if we let the highest die be counted towards the Edge even as it's dropped (requires a touch of mental gymnastics, but I reckon we can manage), then the penalized character has a better chance of getting the Edge for himself next turn, creating (it's hoped) a nice little bit of back-and forth. In the same way, if a character uses the Edge to boost his next roll, he gets one extra die - But his second highest die is used to determine Edge. Easy to get, hard to keep.

Here's an example using the always mechanically awkward situation of several attackers fighting the same character. Zsolt the Bear has burst into the lab that created him, and is teaching the three scientists therein that you don't put a man's brain in a bear's body unless you have his permission. Zsolt's "Goddamn Bear" trait is 4, and the science boys have no relevant trait (they could have relevant flaws, but I'd say they're in enough trouble as is). Zsolt rolls 1, 5, 5, 7 for a total of 18 and a high of 7. The scientists would have to roll their maximum to have any chance of damaging him this round, so Zsolt's almost certainly going to cause some serious carnage. However, if one of the scientists manages to roll an 8 or 9, he can put Zsolt into a position where he (the scientist) has the upper hand, such as it is, giving the bear a penalty die. He'd better take advantage while he can, though, because Zsolt's probably going to have the Edge on the round after that.

* Yeah, I know DRYH uses six-sided dice. There's a detour here involving Ron Edwards' Sorcerer and some design babble, but the upshot is that using ten-siders makes ties for the Edge slightly less likely. At the moment, I like that, because it means the Edge rule gets used more - If its disruptive to keep handing off Edge, after playtest I might go back to d6s. I could also consider using DRYH's (and Sorcerer's, for that matter) mechanic of comparing the next-highest if the highest is tied, but in the mayhem of four players all doing different crazy shit, two numbers a pop is about my limit.

The Fiend

The Fiend is a funhouse caricature of the menacing druggie. His appearance is constantly shifting to represent what those around him picture "druggies" looking like - His skin tone can go from deep black to clammy white, pits and scars open and close on his flesh, his hair grows out into dreadlocks and falls away in bleached clumps. Shades perpetually cover his eyes, but their make and design shifts as much as anything else about him. In a crowd, the Fiend's look can vary wildly as dozens of different subjective viewpoints scan him at any given moment - This appears to cause him discomfort, and he prefers to appear to individuals or small groups, allowing him to maintain a relatively stable appearance

The Fiend can step out of shadows and fade back into them more or less at will. A dark alley, an unlit corner of a club, or the inside of a shipping crate allow him to appear or vanish. Where he goes when he disappears is uncertain, apparently even to the spirit himself - If asked, he simply says he's "been around". The Fiend never materializes in the presence of any law enforcement official, and if any approach him he will immediately break for the nearest patch of darkness to vanish.

The Fiend never actually does drugs himself. Rather, he draws essence from other people getting high around him. Thus, he lurks around nightclubs and crack houses, feeding on the brief bursts of pleasure and enhanced consciousness of humanity. In the process of feeding, he leeches the enjoyment of the experience away, leaving his victims in the depths of a bad trip, or looking for the asshole who sold them baking powder. Among those who have seen him before and can recognize him, the Fiend is entirely unwelcome, and places where users gather have lately made a policy of making their patrons take off their sunglasses before they can enter (which the Fiend, of course, can't do). Despite being able to elude any mundane bouncer or lock, the Fiend never returns after being told to leave. Whether this is part of his nature or simply a desire not to antagonize humans is unknown.

Lately, the word has spread so far that the Fiend actually has to buy street drugs and give them to some hapless dope so he can feed. The need to get money to fund these operations has made the Fiend an information broker of necessity. The Fiend has an almost preternatural understanding of the current drug situation in the city, knowing every rumour and trick, and knows a great deal about peripheral areas of knowledge, such as violent crime. This would make him extremely useful to the police, if he weren't so antagonistic towards them. Attempts to bridge the gap with police informants have been unsuccessful - The Fiend knows if anyone is planning to give his information to the cops, and has no qualms about fingering such "narcs" at the worst possible times.

Aside from such cruel tricks, the Fiend has never behaved in a violent manner, preferring to flee from any direct confrontation. This may be an actual ban on his behaviour, or a personality quirk. The Fiend speaks in a extremely stilted manner, and frequently uses outdated slang.

Over The Edge maps