Day 17: How Does Your Identity Influence Your Work?
This is related to yesterday's post. But let's break it down into how I see myself.
I am an aging Gen Xer
Not a Baby Boomer (thank you!) and not a Millenial. I grew up on a diet of MTV, horror movies on basic cable and later on VHS. I learned to program a computer to get the software I needed (no aps or stores yet). So I have learned to make do with what I had available and then create the rest.
My books are often the games or supplements I wanted to play in the 80s but no one had written.
So I also have a preference for some older games. I am not saying they are better (and if you spend anytime here you will know I play and love a lot of new games) I just find them fun. I like them.
I am a Midwesterner
I grew up in the mid-West. My high school was in the middle of two corn fields. We lived through the Satanic Panic of the 80s so "of course" everyone knew of someone that knew someone that saw a Satanic altar. I got the see the power behind a social movement early on and in your face full color.
This also affects my next bit of identity.
I am an Atheist and Skeptic
I grew up as an Atheist in a town whose claim to fame is the number of churches they have. Look I love writing about ghosts, witches, magic, and gods. I just don't believe in any of it in real life. None. In a very significant way, my early explorations into RPGs (D&D in particular) and mythology was a way of dealing with being the only kid in school* who didn't believe in fairy tales. * I have since learned through the wonder of social media that I was not the only one they were just as afraid as I was to say anything.
I am a Father
Becoming a husband and father is one of my greatest achievements in life. Yes, I have had plenty of other really great achievements; my education, my degrees, my books. But being a dad. Nothing ever comes close to that. I write games I want my kids to also enjoy. I want worlds that they would want to play in.
I am sure there is more. I used to have a professor that said culture is like a tackle box that someone shook up. It is very difficult to pull out one thing or separate one from the other. I think that is true here.
Day 16: How does your environment inform your work?
I have talked about this one before.
I grew up in the midwest in the 70s and 80s. My "adventures" were often road trips. My backgrounds included a love of horror movies, a mother who knew some of the most blood-chilling stories I have ever heard, and a fascination for mythology and the occult.
It was a heady brew that only the alchemy of the 70s and 80s could produce.
In my books, I want to recapture the feel of finding some lost occult tome of the 70s. Something a little subversive, a little dangerous and a little outside of the reach of the normal people out there.
Hammer Horror + Occult 70s + NWoBHM from the 80s gives you the environment I grew up in and what informs all my RPG creations.
This was inspired by some recent readings and thought it would be fun to try out. More Basic D&D fun!
Ghoul, Demonic (Ghūl) Armor Class: 4 Hit Dice (HD): 5d8+7 (29hp) No. of Attacks: 2 claw, 1 bite, + Paralysis and Ghoul Fever Damage: 1d4, 1d4, 1d6 Special Attacks & Defenses: Ghoul fever, paralysis (2d6 turns), shapeshift, undead Move: 90’ (30’) No. Appearing: 1d2 (1d3) Save As: Fighter 5 Morale: 10 Treasure Type: B, C
The demonic ghoul also called a ghūl or ghūla, is a much more dangerous version of the ghoul and ghast. This creature appears to be more monstrous than the common ghoul, though there still plenty of similarities to attest to their relationship. Demonic ghouls are believed to be corpses with a demonic spirit inhabiting their body. Similar in a way to vampires.
The demonic ghoul has the hindquarters of a donkey, sans tail, and sometimes the horns of a goat. They have the same ability to paralyze others, including elves, and are given away by their stench.
Where ghouls and ghasts feed on corpses, the demonic ghoul is not above providing their own corpses by hunting and killing humanoids. They are also known to eat living children.
The demonic ghoul can also shapeshift into hyenas and can assume the form of the last person they devoured.
The female demonic ghoul, the ghūla, can also pass as a living human woman. It is said they will lure prey back to her lair to seduce and then feed on them. Children born to these women are still-born but will grow up to become ghouls on their own.
Demonic Ghouls are undead and turn as Mummies. Ghoul Fever is a disease caused by the bite of demonic ghouls. The victim must make a save vs. Poison or become infected. One full day after this failed save the victim loosed 1d3 Constitution and 1d3 Dexterity points. At this point, they must make two consecutive saves vs. Death to survive. A fail on one save adds one more day to the disease and another loss of points. Two fails results in death.
A humanoid who dies of ghoul fever rises as a ghoul at the next midnight. A humanoid who becomes a ghoul in this way retains none of the abilities it possessed in life. It is not under the control of any other ghouls, but it hungers for the flesh of the living and behaves like a normal ghoul in all respects. A humanoid of 4 Hit Dice or more rises as a ghast.
Ghoul fever is also present in 10% of all ghouls and 25% of all ghasts.
You will never, ever see a "Women in Refrigerators" situation in one of my games. No woman will ever be killed to forward a male character's arc. Never.
You will never, ever see rape as a means of helping to build up a character as via a Rape-and-Revenge arc. As in when you take a character down to their lowest levels so they can be built back up into something more powerful. I guess the trope could be called the "I Spit on Your Grave" trope.
"But", you may ask "what if the story calls for it?"
Sorry, but no. Time to write a new fucking story then.
"But aren't you giving 'special treatment' to a certain group?"
No. And also fuck you, go write your own fucking games and don't buy mine if that is what you think.
Day 14: Are Your Game Mechanics and Characters Intersectional?
My mechanics are math which is about as non-intersectional as you can be. Math is math.
Again, not to sounds like a broken record, I go back to my key philosophic design foundation; Is it fun? Everything else flows from that.
Now to be fair. I DID write The Witch: Aiséiligh Tradition AS I thought a radical feminist witch group would look like in a D&D/Fantasy world.
Here I did play with concepts of power and gender as they related to the archetype of the witch. I based it on the "Reclaiming Tradition" in modern Wicca who have decided that they need to reclaim the name "witch" and make it their own positive label.
The Aiséiligh are in a very real sense my Social Justice Witch class. Lawful, Good, and sick your patriarchal shit.
I am of an age where I don't get a lot of time for my games, so I like to run them when I can. Since my regular group consists of my family there is not a lot of interest in me streaming the game.
Plus streaming games have a certain flow to them that my home games do not. Plus there is a ton of inside humor. What's the point in streaming content that really only the people at the table will get.
I have not against streaming games and think they are kind of cool really. The ones I have watched have been a lot of fun. But you likely will not see me doing it anytime soon.
Would I play in one that someone else was running? Yeah, I might do that.
Gavin Norman of Necrotic Gnome has been producing some great products for Old School gaming with his own unique style for years. His B/X Essentials is one of my favorite products.
Well now he is producing an updated version and it looks fantastic!
A faithful reproduction of the B/X-era rules in a digest-sized boxed set or "Rules Cyclopedia" style book. I am pleased the what I have been calling "Black Box Basic" for years is now coming in an actual black box!
Really there is so much awesome about this and I will spend some time next week talking about it.
I have seen what is very, very close to the final PDFs and they look fantastic.
I do want to talk about those covers.
Not sure if this will be the final cover, but it's awesome!
I mean look at that! A castle on the back of a giant turtle? I want to GO THERE NOW!
Kudos to Andrew Walter for these great covers that feel so 70s inspired. They look like the cover to a Yes or Uriah Heep album. That's an adventure right there.
Welcome back to Featured Artist! This time I have an artist who is making a name for himself doing custom characters sheets. That is not all he does, but these are so much fun I had to share.
Today is a big day in astrophysics. The first-ever image of a black hole has been released.
The black hole is 500 million trillion km away, or 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 km or 52,850,042 Light Years.
When that light left the black hole's event horizon the Earth looked like this:
Just some perspective, plus I love those maps.
Much like magic, black holes have "suffered" due to the expansion of science. What do I mean by that?
For much of the 20th Century, the black hole of science fiction was monstrous, mysterious, even evil thing. A star that ate everything that came to close including light and time. It's not hard to see why there were some sci-fi authors who categorized them as monsters.
In fact, this one is a monster. It is 40 billion km across and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. For reference, the Earth has a diameter of 12,756 km and the Sun has a diameter of 1.392 million km. That dwarfs the Sun more than our sun dwarfs the Earth.
In fiction black holes lead to other universes, often evil ones. Or sending people to different parts of the universe in defiance of any laws of relativity. Indeed they were the ultimate "MacGuffin" to break all sorts of laws of reality.
BlackStar, as a game concept, really owes a lot to these older ideas of black holes in more than just name.
In truth, the ideas for BlackStar got their very first start for me in the 1979 Disney movie The Black Hole. I remember seeing this at the 67 Drive-In in my old home town. The movie is full of ideas that characterize what I want BlackStar to do and be even before I add the Lovecraftian bits. We have a crew exploring space. There is a psychic crew member. We have an evil mad scientist in his old castle spaceship surrounded by mindless servants and evil strongman; it's practically gothic horror. Even the tag line is horror, "A Journey That Begins Where Everything Ends".
Another black hole sci-fi/horror movie that was a big, if not one of the biggest, influence on BlackStar is 1997's Event Horizon.
In Event Horizon, we have a black hole, in this case, an artificially created one (like what we see in the Romulan Warbirds) that power the ship. The mystery, and horror, of the Event Horizon, is where was the ship the entire time it's been missing. We learn that the black hole has taken the crew into a hellscape not dissimilar to what we saw at the end of The Black Hole. Claire Weir's, Dr. Weir's (Sam Neill) dead wife, tells us "I have such wondrous things to show you" brings to mind Pinhead's "We have such sights to show you" from the Hellraiser movies. Indeed they can be assumed to be the same sights.
In both cases breaking the laws of physics, in both cases trying to move faster than light, opens you up to the consequences of breaking the Laws of Creation. The black hole becomes the proverbial gate to Hell. Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here.
This is made even more explicit in the Doctor Who episodes "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" from 2006. In this, the scientific portrayal of black holes is contrasted with the classic sci-fi portrayals. In Doctor Who black holes are a means of travel. Gallifrey and every TARDIS is powered by "The Eye of Harmony" a captured black hole created by the Timelord Stellar Engineer Omega. It has as much horror as the engine in a Tesla sedan. Neat yes, but not horrible.
The Satan Pit turns this on its head. Here the black hole "just eats" according to the Doctor. The black hole is The Pit, the jail that the devil can't escape from. It is the Christian Hell or the Abyss.
Consequently, the episodes have been compared to "Event Horizon" and "Alien" by critics.
So that leaves me at today. What can black holes do to inspire horror?
Much like "anti-matter" gave way to "dark matter" in the minds of the creatives, black holes have been largerly replaced by "Wormholes". But even a wormhole is still sci-fi shorthand for "short cuts in FTL travel". Sure they can be like "gates" but the fear is diluted.
I think where I am going to go with all of this is take a page from Event Horizon and make the drive of the new Mystic class ships be the problem. They were designed to move faster than light, the heralded Warp-13 drives, but the real purpose is to open rifts in space-time to allow these horrors to come through. Both sci-fi horrors and cosmic horrors.
Black Holes, like the God of the Gaps, has had its mystical notions removed for the more appropriate scientific ones. As someone that originally studied to be an astrophysicist, this is a great thing. But as someone who loves horror and sci-fi adventure, I feel like I have lost something.
Maybe Dark Matter and Dark Energy can be my new mysterious thing! In any case it needs to be frightening. They say "in space, no one can hear you scream", but I also want "in space, no one wants to hear you yawn".
And this song was on my mind while working on this post.
My design principles start with "Is it fun?" and end with "Is it fun to write?"
I mean sure there are some subversive messages explicitly about Colonialism (and in particular about the British Empire in India) in Ghosts of Albion. But the message is not one of action it is more directed to people who already understand what a bad thing it can be.
So yeah. I guess the scope of my writing is just not that large.
