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.
* 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!
Showing posts with label the enfleshening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the enfleshening. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Why I Like Tribe 8 and The Whispering Vault
Tribe 8 and The Whispering Vault are very different RPGs which have a few things in common. One is that they're both horror games; another is that they dwell on the absolute highest peak of the Pretentiousness Range. In Tribe 81, characters are members of the Seven Tribes, the last remnant of humanity in post-apocalyptic Montreal, serving inhuman goddesses made of scrap iron. Eventually you find out that All Is Not As It Seems with your beloved gigantic twisted metal mother-figures, and do a runner to hang out with the exiled eighth tribe, thus justifying the title.
The aforementioned pretentiousness comes in a variety of forms. The Fatimas (the junkyard goddesses) are named for various mythological/historical women, including both Mary the Mother and Magdalen the, uh, "Lover", just in case you weren't getting enough brick-blunt Judeo-Christian imagery in your media diet2. There's absolutely scads of background material, including the kind of poetry even OWoD-era White Wolf would blush at3, which illustrate and flesh out a rich and involved society which is, at its heart, actually kind of boring. NPCs have keywords attached about the kind of impression they're supposed to make on the PCs. Credit where it's due, this is actually a good idea, but the keywords are often at odds with each other: Playing a character as "subdued, demanding and understanding" is a hell of a feat, and it doesn't help that the keywords often have bupkis to do with the character's written description. Magic involves contacting "the River of Dream" and patchouli-er concepts still, and the rules are about as clear as a six-bonghit conversation. And all the characters look like post-apocalyptic Goths or D&D psionicists (not that there's any difference). I find the game's artsy faffings-about especially delightful because Tribe 8 uses Dream Pod 9's Silhouette system, which started as a set of easy, simple wargame rules and became the system used for DP9's hard sci-fi mecha games4 Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles. Silhouette is big on rules exactitude and realism5, but low on the kind of narrative-mechanic interplay that Tribe 8's artsy attitude would seem to require6. But hey, if you want to run a crossover between post-apocalyptic magic poetry barbarians and hot-blooded mecha pilots from Jupiter, no problem! Well, no mechanical problem, anyway - That sounds like a thematic nightmare, or Rifts, or both.
Hey, Rifts! Speaking of ludicrously overpowered characters (now that's how you segue), if playing a Quebecois savage after the End doesn't grab you, there's The Whispering Vault, in which you play an Enlightened Stalker who incarnates in a Vessel created by the Weavers to Hunt Shadows and Unbidden Aesthetics and Mend Enigmas in the Chronosphere on behalf of the Powers of the Realm of Essence. Yeah, the Law of Capitalization is working overtime in Vault. What that mess of Big Important Terms means is that the PCs are freaky immortals with pocket dimensions, loads of magic powers and personal monster servants who triapse across all of space and time7 doing the dirty work of keeping reality together. Of course, they also used to be human, so you get that same rich vein of What Have I Become that's been buying White Wolf's Cure albums for two decades now. To be fair, Vault at least admits up front the distinct possibility of the PCs using their supernatural badassery to carve their way through the exceedingly fragile mortal realm without remorse - you have to define five virtues, flaws or memories (sorry, Virtues, Flaws or Memories) as your character's "Keys of Humanity", and the most passive-aggressive sidebar since the "violence is bad, kids" intro to Unknown Armies' combat section suggests that one of them really ought to be Compassion. The "monster PCs" thing plays into the other trouble of White Wolf games, the difficulty of having a mood of brooding horror when the average PC can punch cars in half and has a horde of chittering time eaters on numinous speed dial. And, of course, completing the trifecta, there is poetry (Also, don't try to make heads or tails of the illustration on that page. The art in Vault is seriously all over the place).
So there's me making fun of a couple of very '90s RPGs for being oh so very '90s. But this series of posts isn't "What's Goofy About...", so let's turn to the other thing these games have in common: To whit, the baddies. The monsters of both games are spirits who crossed over into the physical plane and went a lot nutso when they were overwhelmed with the assortment of physical sensations we meatpeople take for granted. In Tribe 8 they're called the Z'Bri, in Vault the Unbidden, but the backstory's the same for both. I dig this trope, even though I have to admit it often boils down to a variant on immortality envy. Sure, spirit beings, you exist in a timeless realm of pure emotion and thought, but have you ever gotten a boner? Or eaten ginger beef? Or gotten a boner while eating ginger beef? Apparently, it's enough to drive otherwise peaceable spirits to addictive madness8. Our everyday mundanities are spectral heroin.
Tribe 8's Z'bri are divided into four Houses, based on the four Classical humours9 and matched to the relevant temperament: The Melanis are brooding, the Sangis are way too happy, the Koleris flip out and kill people all the time, and my favourites, the Flemis, are just fat gobs of flesh that want to absorb your body and consciousness10. They were apparently summoned en masse by human ennui, kind of like a horrible monster invasion version of the Phantom Tollbooth, and then got stranded here in Materialville. Naturally, they then proceeded to slaughter the majority of the world's population, tear down civilization and put whoever was left into camps11 for body horror-related purposes. This gets conveniently overlooked by a lot of the game's writing, which advocates a more Sympathy for the Devil approach. Yep, apparently they wiped out most of humanity and tortured the survivors because they know they don't belong here, but can never go home again. Because in '90s RPGs, even the alien Nazi spirit rapists have tragic and sympathetic backstories.
There's no sympathy on hand for Whispering Vault's Unbidden, though. As spirit Aesthetics, they're responsible for creating our world and everything in it, but it's a strictly build-but-don't-touch deal. Rules get broken, they bugger off to the physical and leave a hole in reality where they should be creating it, and it's up to the PCs/Stalkers to Hunt12 them down, Mend12 the hole (sorry, I mean the Enigma, god forbid we leave such an important concept uncapitalized) and Banish12 the lawbreaking dope to the titular Whispering Vault so he can wait out the apocalypse. Unbidden can have hordes of lesser manifested spirits to help them out, too, because what good is physical existence if you can't share it with your friends? While the Z'Bri conquered the world, most Unbidden know they can't really fight the Powers and their rules and are just trying to hold out as long as possible, which casts the Stalkers as jackbooted reality thugs enforcing laws they don't understand.
I can understand that the concept doesn't grab other people, and an 'addiction to physical sensation' can be argued to be just 'Chaotic Evil goes to art school'. But I've always dug spirits, faeries and similar critters from places where the rules are different, and the hijinks of the the enfleshened seem like fun times. Plus there's something about the conceit that really seems to free up the artists - a lot of these guys look really cool13.
The aforementioned pretentiousness comes in a variety of forms. The Fatimas (the junkyard goddesses) are named for various mythological/historical women, including both Mary the Mother and Magdalen the, uh, "Lover", just in case you weren't getting enough brick-blunt Judeo-Christian imagery in your media diet2. There's absolutely scads of background material, including the kind of poetry even OWoD-era White Wolf would blush at3, which illustrate and flesh out a rich and involved society which is, at its heart, actually kind of boring. NPCs have keywords attached about the kind of impression they're supposed to make on the PCs. Credit where it's due, this is actually a good idea, but the keywords are often at odds with each other: Playing a character as "subdued, demanding and understanding" is a hell of a feat, and it doesn't help that the keywords often have bupkis to do with the character's written description. Magic involves contacting "the River of Dream" and patchouli-er concepts still, and the rules are about as clear as a six-bonghit conversation. And all the characters look like post-apocalyptic Goths or D&D psionicists (not that there's any difference). I find the game's artsy faffings-about especially delightful because Tribe 8 uses Dream Pod 9's Silhouette system, which started as a set of easy, simple wargame rules and became the system used for DP9's hard sci-fi mecha games4 Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles. Silhouette is big on rules exactitude and realism5, but low on the kind of narrative-mechanic interplay that Tribe 8's artsy attitude would seem to require6. But hey, if you want to run a crossover between post-apocalyptic magic poetry barbarians and hot-blooded mecha pilots from Jupiter, no problem! Well, no mechanical problem, anyway - That sounds like a thematic nightmare, or Rifts, or both.
Hey, Rifts! Speaking of ludicrously overpowered characters (now that's how you segue), if playing a Quebecois savage after the End doesn't grab you, there's The Whispering Vault, in which you play an Enlightened Stalker who incarnates in a Vessel created by the Weavers to Hunt Shadows and Unbidden Aesthetics and Mend Enigmas in the Chronosphere on behalf of the Powers of the Realm of Essence. Yeah, the Law of Capitalization is working overtime in Vault. What that mess of Big Important Terms means is that the PCs are freaky immortals with pocket dimensions, loads of magic powers and personal monster servants who triapse across all of space and time7 doing the dirty work of keeping reality together. Of course, they also used to be human, so you get that same rich vein of What Have I Become that's been buying White Wolf's Cure albums for two decades now. To be fair, Vault at least admits up front the distinct possibility of the PCs using their supernatural badassery to carve their way through the exceedingly fragile mortal realm without remorse - you have to define five virtues, flaws or memories (sorry, Virtues, Flaws or Memories) as your character's "Keys of Humanity", and the most passive-aggressive sidebar since the "violence is bad, kids" intro to Unknown Armies' combat section suggests that one of them really ought to be Compassion. The "monster PCs" thing plays into the other trouble of White Wolf games, the difficulty of having a mood of brooding horror when the average PC can punch cars in half and has a horde of chittering time eaters on numinous speed dial. And, of course, completing the trifecta, there is poetry (Also, don't try to make heads or tails of the illustration on that page. The art in Vault is seriously all over the place).
So there's me making fun of a couple of very '90s RPGs for being oh so very '90s. But this series of posts isn't "What's Goofy About...", so let's turn to the other thing these games have in common: To whit, the baddies. The monsters of both games are spirits who crossed over into the physical plane and went a lot nutso when they were overwhelmed with the assortment of physical sensations we meatpeople take for granted. In Tribe 8 they're called the Z'Bri, in Vault the Unbidden, but the backstory's the same for both. I dig this trope, even though I have to admit it often boils down to a variant on immortality envy. Sure, spirit beings, you exist in a timeless realm of pure emotion and thought, but have you ever gotten a boner? Or eaten ginger beef? Or gotten a boner while eating ginger beef? Apparently, it's enough to drive otherwise peaceable spirits to addictive madness8. Our everyday mundanities are spectral heroin.
Tribe 8's Z'bri are divided into four Houses, based on the four Classical humours9 and matched to the relevant temperament: The Melanis are brooding, the Sangis are way too happy, the Koleris flip out and kill people all the time, and my favourites, the Flemis, are just fat gobs of flesh that want to absorb your body and consciousness10. They were apparently summoned en masse by human ennui, kind of like a horrible monster invasion version of the Phantom Tollbooth, and then got stranded here in Materialville. Naturally, they then proceeded to slaughter the majority of the world's population, tear down civilization and put whoever was left into camps11 for body horror-related purposes. This gets conveniently overlooked by a lot of the game's writing, which advocates a more Sympathy for the Devil approach. Yep, apparently they wiped out most of humanity and tortured the survivors because they know they don't belong here, but can never go home again. Because in '90s RPGs, even the alien Nazi spirit rapists have tragic and sympathetic backstories.
There's no sympathy on hand for Whispering Vault's Unbidden, though. As spirit Aesthetics, they're responsible for creating our world and everything in it, but it's a strictly build-but-don't-touch deal. Rules get broken, they bugger off to the physical and leave a hole in reality where they should be creating it, and it's up to the PCs/Stalkers to Hunt12 them down, Mend12 the hole (sorry, I mean the Enigma, god forbid we leave such an important concept uncapitalized) and Banish12 the lawbreaking dope to the titular Whispering Vault so he can wait out the apocalypse. Unbidden can have hordes of lesser manifested spirits to help them out, too, because what good is physical existence if you can't share it with your friends? While the Z'Bri conquered the world, most Unbidden know they can't really fight the Powers and their rules and are just trying to hold out as long as possible, which casts the Stalkers as jackbooted reality thugs enforcing laws they don't understand.
I can understand that the concept doesn't grab other people, and an 'addiction to physical sensation' can be argued to be just 'Chaotic Evil goes to art school'. But I've always dug spirits, faeries and similar critters from places where the rules are different, and the hijinks of the the enfleshened seem like fun times. Plus there's something about the conceit that really seems to free up the artists - a lot of these guys look really cool13.
- I am legally obligated, every time I bring up Tribe 8 in any context, to mention that the game shares its name with a "dykepunk" band which consistently kicks its ass in Google rankings.
- I may be overcritical on this point because I legitimately thought the Fatima naming convention was really cool when I was 17. There were a lot of things I thought were cool when I was 17.
- Then again, they greenlit the Book of Nod, so they pretty clearly have no shame.
- "Hard sci-fi mecha" is of course a contradiction, as any number of unfun nerd types will tell you.
- Well, tabletop RPG realism, which is to say 1) lethality and 2) multiplication.
- The alternative-bookstore magic system in Tribe 8 does actually patch one of the major weaknesses of the Silhouette system, namely that there's absolutely no reason not to dumpstat Psyche, since you don't use it for anything. Which is how I ended up playing a hotshot starship pilot with psychotic depression.
- That's the old Doctor Who version of "all of space and time", which is to say "Mainly Earth, mainly the present day or easily recognizable/stereotypeable historical periods".
- Of course, since the most obvious overwhelming physical sensations are sexual, this gets real pervy real fast. 90s game designers loved that shit, since it gave them a ready-made excuse to put taped nipples in the illustrations and toss sly references to weird ghost rape (or, at best, weird ghost consensual sex) all willy-nilly.
- Which makes so little sense that it actually reduces the net total of sense in the universe, but whatever.
- Certainly a unique take on "having a calm, unflappable disposition".
- No, really. Camps. Just in case the "Eighth Tribe" thing was too subtle for you. And yet again, White Wolf did it first.
- Hunt, Mend and Banish are apparently capitalization-worthy concepts. I've mentioned this already, but damn that's stupid.
- For the reference nobody will get, they're kind of like the monsters from the Book of Unremitting Horror, but without the weird obsession with lakes and drowning. There are like four lake monsters in that damn book.
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