It Slices! It Dices!

It was the Shadowrun game to end all Shadowrun games. I mean, we had everything. Vampires, kender, ancient Aztec gods, feathered serpents, crazy riggers, a three-eyed troll, a toothbrush salesman, and it ended with a bang, as the house exploded.

Somewhere in there, my main NPC, a burned-out mage, and Maxi, the rigger, fell into something more, something...different. A burned-out mage who discovered her real feelings, something to ease the eternal ache...

...and the first gaming erotica to which I was ever exposed.

Oh, I suppose in retrospect it was like most good first times, kind of clumsy, and messy. I remember it with a fond, sentimental smile. Just an e-mail I ran across after school, I never associated it with the fellow behind it as a flirt. It felt so much like a part of the story, just another scene, even if I hadn't written it as GM. I never even questioned its appropriateness.

A few months later, the same fellow introduced me to Amber.

Dopplegangbanging.

Let's put this in the same place we put...

Illithid Liathionth.

and that Miskatonic University Craze...

C'thulha Hoops.

I got my "contributor to RPG.Net" T-shirt today... Very encouraging, although its very large size means it gets put into the NightShirt pile. I'm sure I asked for "as large as is made," because, well, I always do.

The sweetie, having discovered our jewel-tones dice decided that she would make me some dice jewelry. Dice are expensive these days. (About $1 a die, bought individually.) I now have a rainbow collection (no d30, no d100) with two pink glow-in-the-dark d12s for earrings.

I'll combine that with something that specifies that I play diceless and go to a gaming convention...someday.

Have I mentioned I have the greatest girlfriend in the world?

I really don't have a lot of places to wear this, but it's made me smile.

The idea started when she went through our dice box while we were looking for dice for our Monopoly game, and she found a beautiful sharp-edged (aka hard to find nowadays) green d20. I called it a "gem-tone" die, and we got the idea... she, however, did one of the things I love her for: developed the idea.

I wonder how many questions I'll get wearing the earrings at my next job... [grin]

postscript:
She also put together a couple of photos for The Diabolica (from the Supers Dream I had) and sent them to me... oooh-thumpa-thumpa!

Our favourite "jaded, debauched urbanite," Epoch, posted "the Big List Of Games He'd Like To Run... Someday" on April 26th, 2002.

I've been mulling my own.

I've said many times, but I will reiterate for this forum, that player masturbation and GM masturbation take different forms.

If you'd like to call it "playing with yourself," go ahead, but I'll call a spade a...shovel-like thingie...if I want.

Player masturbation takes its most common form in creating characters for campaigns that don't exist. Because there are not a lot of solo-adventures (and those that do exist are rarely a step above "Choose Your Own Adventure" books) a player with unspent gaming-libido has little outlet.

Have I recommended the Badlands of Hark recently? (The sequel, Invaders of Hark isn't quite as good. Hey! They're both available in Spanish!)

GM masturbation, however, is a more indulgent fantasy. GMs spill their creative seed in worlds that may never see the light of a campaign. Their succubus is always, "The next game... the next game..."

Did I say succubus? Maybe it's a chimera. See, "the next game," for me for years has been "the definitive urban faery game." I've been working on it for those same years in my head.

It's got Black Annis, and the Wild Hunt, and it has houses where doorways take you to different realms, and it has an order for two-hundred and fifty cheese pizzas. It has leprechauns with sawed-off elfshotguns, it has nursery rhymes, and it has muppet ghettoes.

It'd be fabulous, if...well, if other games didn't demand my attention.

I'm running "The Glitter and the Glamour." Which is in kind of a lull, with players off getting married, moving, and working on other projects. There's "B?te Noire," the letter game I started (and wherein people keep insisting I'm GM for some reason). In the works is, "To My Enemy's Enemies" which I haven't really had a chance to even look at in two months, and now I have to start thinking about AmberCon NorthWest games, because, heck, they're only 6 months away and I only have ideas for one game so far...and that's the Katie Karnage serial.

That's not including the list of games I still want to run in the future.

• I want to run a Nightlife game based off of a political election.

• I want to run another Shadowrun/Middle Earth crossover.

• I want to run a Kult game loosely based on both Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House.

• I want to run a Shroudling/Vampire crossover.

• I want to run an In Nomine game with rules for the equivalent strength of pagan deities, and their avatars and angels and whatnot.

• I want to run a good, old-fashioned dungeon crawl, with miniatures.

• I want to run a furry pirate game outside of the Furry Pirates! rules.

• I want to run a Kobolds Ate My Baby/Ninja Burger crossover, with Kobold Ninjas delivering food and stealing babies.
  

That's just the beginning of the brainstorm of ideas I have considered. Those are games I want to run. That's not the list of games I merely want to design, or even near the games I want to play.

Astute readers will count how many times "Amber" is mentioned in the list.

So, I court my particular succubi. I feed them gaming ideas. I arch my back and purr in the pleasure of reading sourcebooks. My toes curl as I come up with yet another setting... but I must have more.

I'm still not satisfied.

Having heard about last night's amazing "five planets in a line," I marched downstairs a couple levels at sundown to do some kid-wrangling and bring them out to see it.

Dressed in nightgowns and all of us in bare feet (a bad, bad thing around here) we wandered over to the park and climbed up the new playground equipment to watch the sky. Chatterbox and the Barbarian got cold, but Rainbow K and I waited for dark.

"Will that happen again?" she asked.
"Probably. I don't know when, but it has to happen occasionally." That's me, big time researcher, mentally thinking, "This is what the Internet is for."
"That was cool," we decided, together.
"Educational," she explained, knowing I let her stay up past her bedtime for it.
"And important for gaming," I added.
"Really?" she asked.

"Well, generally we probably should have been tracking down the cultists who were using tonight's conjunction as an excuse to do a virgin sacrifice so as to let a great evil spirit into the world. Or C'thulhu." I nodded, sagely.

She nodded in return. "Yeah, you're right," she decided, with a definite, "Next time," in her voice.

For those of you on "cultist watch," May 26th is (apparently) the next Saturn-Pluto alignment, complete with lunar eclipse. I expect you know what to do.

While brainstorming things that the "gaming world needs," we decided that there was a large market in fantasy porn that wasn't quite being met. Coupled with a dream I had in which our sweetie suggested that there really wasn't enough work with special effects in pornography, we have been considering an irregular fantasy erotica magazine.

The problem is, "Fairy Meat" has already been taken as a name.

Have any suggestions? (Best will be publicized, and if we choose yours you'll get a free subscription.)

Through a Glass Darkly discusses one of the not-so-pretty situations in gaming:

People living through their characters.

While his discussion mostly focuses on those few who seem to express the poison and vitriol of their lives through their characterizations (which, as Strike Team Charon points out, is a fair catharsis), I consider it a fairly strong warning sign about crossing the lines between fantasy and reality.

"What do you consider insane?"
"The inability to determine the difference between fantasy and reality."
"Are you sane?"
"I'm sane enough to know I can't make that determination."

That's not to say that it hasn't been done, and that it hasn't been done well in my life. There are moments I have lived through my game, if not so much through my characters. At one point, there was a situation where I (inadvertantly, as GM) made the LintKing's character, Unakai (whom, if he blogged, he could tell you much more about) very unhappy and it was miserable for both of us, despite his and Unakai's obvious differences.

Notice that I'm primarily a GM: if anything, it is my games that define me. You can find echoes of me in some of my characters, but it is the worlds I create that would more likely give you insight, rather than the individuals.

I started considering it (probably somewhat cynically) this morning, in regards to what my characters express about me. Jinx-Jobina might express my feelings of frustration in trying to express what I synthesize of the world, only using a language that has not only a verbal and somatic requirement, but gestures that need four arms and hands to really get out "right." Maybe Trahern represents my tragedy of having my "sight" stripped from me. As for Damascus, she's the only character name Our Sweetie ever tends to use for me. And sometimes it's very true: I'll leave the subtlety to others and bash my way through things.

(There are a couple of people who know me as my Fiona. With her, it's fairly obvious that she's reflecting my taking a moral high road that while it has its rewards, will eventually end up destroying my emotional needs. [snort])

Realistically, however, I don't think of myself as my characters. There are some who have paralleled me fairly closely at times, but maybe that's the real difference as to why I don't think of myself as a player: I will act as the puppeteer, but I will not give the final breath of life to my character creations.

Can I play a unicorn? How about a human with a horn? Can I fly? Can I be an elf? Can I have two swords? I have boomerangs, too. I can heal people. I tell them to stop fighting. I try to get between them, without scaring the horse. I hit the man on the horse. "I didn't know you were the good guy." I try to heal him. I accidentally killed the wrong person, didn't I? I go on to the city. I'm not scared of the dark. I tell the man on the road it's none of his business. I tell him I'm pretty good with my swords. I don't want any of his orange juice. I don't want any of his toast, or his oatmeal, or anything. Yes, of course he can come along to fight werewolves if he doesn't get in the way. Can we go save the world now? Can we do more gaming? Can we do more gaming? Can we do more gaming?

She's six. She's hooked.

Ooh, hey, marketing opportunity: Little glass bottles with greenish water in them, labled, "In Case Of Troll Break Glass". Flavoring the `acid' might not be a bad idea, get people to buy more than one...but I don't know.

Hey, we could try to set up a whole line of Gamer-oriented snacks. I mean, who eats more snacks than gamers? Purple-colored cheesy poofs called Purple Worms, 50' licorice ropes (c'mon, name a group of three or more gamers who couldn't go through 50' of licorice in one night...), doughnut portable holes...and that's not even getting into ochre jelly. <gryn>

Unfortunately, before we can go anywhere with this, we probably have to buy out Wizards of the CoaHasbro. I've got $1.50 and some rootbeer candies.

What can you throw in? <gryn>

I dream gaming.

I'm not the only one. I just found out this morning that my boss also dreams her Everquest. Not just playing the game, but being one of the characters.

I have full-scale, in-character, epic gaming dreams.

Sometimes they run me ragged trying to save the world before the alarm clock buzzes. (There is a special kind of frustration in having come up with the Plan You Know Will Work and then hitting the snooze button only to dream about going to work without your shirt.)

Sometimes I dream I'm the GM. I can subvert reality as necessary. It's very munchkinish to maintain my personal NPC's survival, but apparently I am also in the habit of trying to kill off the main players. (Somehow being the Game Master is akin to being a very powerful mage. I'm not going to blame A Certain Cartoon.)

I sometimes use my dreams for gaming, too. One recurring nightmare became the plot point behind, "Shrouded in Mysterlings," a game I ran at a past ACNW.

I keep thinking, "When you dream, what do you game about?"

The obvious antidote to a barbarian horde is a bevy of butlers. (We're not sure about the venery for butlers as they tend to be singular.)

[In my dream last night, the castle chatelaine did not care who, actually, controlled the castle, only that the proper procedures were met. I imagined him having to tell a barbarian conqueror, "Sorry, but until you learn some decorum, I cannot allow you within my keep."]

[slightly reconstructed]

The LintKing comments idly, "I want her to have a ghost ship under the mecha rules."

"I suppose," I consider, "maybe the stress of another sea journey might bring out that particular pirate ancestor."

"But it's not very practical," he sighs and takes a sip of his tea.

"How about a ghost life raft?" I offer.

He starts chuckling. "How does that work? `Arrr, me mateys, we'll haunt this raft 'til our curse be lifted!'"

"Ghost ships getting scuttled by other ghost ships," I say in an 'of course' sense.

"`Alas, bein' forced to walk the plank after I be already dead...'"

[from a recent G&G post]

> there are as many truths as there are those to hold them,

> even if never a falsehood is spoken."

"Yet my kind and yours can be bound to a word whose translations are myriad and meaningless all at once. Seek you a Puck for riddles and reasons, but never for wisdom: theirs is only the wisdom unsought. Like trying to sneak up on the edge of a rainbow in the dead of night." He chuckles.

> "What hospitalities would we travel under?"

"Mine is the path of earth, stone, and metal, and yet I can take razor's edge as wing. I am not an uneasy companion in my journey, for I share as shares alike. I travel in darkness and in day with equal ease. I drink no flesh and eat no blood, and yet the taste sustains me. I call on allies to guard my sleeping, but I may not dream until my quest is done. My feet are not hooved, milady, and I dare no trespass before its time."

You know, sometimes I wish I had the annotated version.

And yes, I am the GM. [laugh]

Yet my kind and yours can be bound to a word whose translations are myriad and meaningless all at once.

This acknowledges the similarity between the "kinds" of fey they are, yet also noting differences. That they can both be bound is telling as it suggests that perhaps that may happen or may have happened, especially in light of other things this character has expressed. "Myriad and meaningless," is a key phrase in indicating that there are many ways the trickster may interpret a binding.

Seek you a Puck for riddles and reasons, but never for wisdom: theirs is only the wisdom unsought.

Continuing the thought of the trickster, I'm introducing the Pucks slowly to the world. We have one Puck PC, and their role as trickster is important in changing the realm of Order. In this case, asking a Puck for advice will get you nonsense. The Puck simply cannot give you a "straight answer." Worse than those muppet philosophers, really. The answer may be simple. The Puck probably knows it... but he can't give you it upon request. It's tied to the rules of "Thank You"s and their nature. (Frankly, I have the same disadvantage at the two point level...but that's another story for another time. [grin])

Like trying to sneak up on the edge of a rainbow in the dead of night.

Just a phrasing I was amused by...but telling.

"Mine is the path of earth, stone, and metal, and yet I can take razor's edge as wing.

He named himself "Crow's Iron Egg." Iron is of the deep elements. Personally, I've nicknamed him Skarmory. This is in reference to that, as well as suggesting he can fly as well as walk.

I am not an uneasy companion in my journey, for I share as shares alike.

In other words, he follows the laws of Hospitality. On the other hand, this is also a jab at the keeping of secrets.

I travel in darkness and in day with equal ease.

Important as there are many fey who do bind themselves to natural cycles.

I drink no flesh and eat no blood, and yet the taste sustains me.

Notice he carefully didn't say he doesn't eat flesh and drink blood.

I call on allies to guard my sleeping, but I may not dream until my quest is done.

Which suggests either spirits or that he has a number of allies (some of whom may be "unseen travellers") that protect him. He also gives up that he does, at times, sleep. That he may not dream until his quest is done suggests that it is something of value to him, perhaps geased. It may be a personal vow, but it is a binding nevertheless.

My feet are not hooved, milady,

A reprimand lest she think him a fool (sometimes literally a donkey.)

and I dare no trespass before its time.

Which tells quite succinctly that he is not on the side of Light. Light dares no trespass. He understands that there are times when it may be appropriate.

I've got The Itch. I bet you've had it before, too. When you've suddenly had a wonderful character idea burst into your head, and no game to play.

Sometimes you can satiate it with writing, but this one just clicked in that way that explains why I've had that edge-of-writer's-cramp feeling all day.

Now I'm going to have to run a game to play him in, I think. Arrrgh.

A padded straitjacket would still only be armour class 10. Call it "9.5" if you must.

All the short people I play hail from Ho.

Because there's Gnome place like Ho, of course.

I've mentioned Jelica enough on here it seemed like a good time to talk about her stats... this is her "starting version" - there have been quite a number of changes since.

At least my spam mail is trying to attract my inner gamer.

"Getwellhung" sounds like a great berserker name to me.

Could a wizard as artist be mostly intent on his 'aestheric' considerations?

"I can't quite open a spreadsheet on my napkin. But I wrote all of my other game notes on napkins." - me
"You go through the north door. There is what appears to be a smudge of mustard. Call it an ochre jelly." - tLK

"The Blues Brothers and the Easter Bunny find high school boring; unfortunately, they accidentally time travel to ancient Rome, and are put to death."

"A crippled Irishman with a dream to be a samurai and the crew of a starship are Earth's last hope at stopping an alien invasion; unfortunately, they must wait for the signal to fight in a Chinese restaurant, where amusing antics take place."

"Some sentient hydrogen and several bison wish to become vampires; unfortunately, an army of 17-foot tall undead boars challenge them to a duel with their champion."

Nevermind, maybe I'll run them myself...

We play a lot of Dots and Boxes. (Oh no! There's places you can play ONLINE... I'm doomed!) Well, not as much as we used to, because we don't have money to eat out anymore, but it used to fill up a lot of the time between ordering and receiving our meals. That time some folks use to do silly things, like catch up on all the daily events each have instigated, we use to trash talk and intimidate our opponents. Well, actually, the last few games I've played have been tutorials, but you have to build 'em up to knock 'em down, right?

So, we've gotten kind of tired of lines and boxes. We've got a new game, we call, "The Map Game."

I do a lot of random connecting through the 'net. I mean, forget the surfing metaphor; I'm a spider crossed with a magpie making all the hyperlinks to the shiny. [If I weren't the worst rapper in the world, I'd have something there...]

So, I read something on the Birch Aquarium except I'm tired and it was a funny font and I read the "r" in "Birch" as a "t."

Gives "Shark Week" a whole new meaning.

SPOILERS INSIDE.

Briar's the mostly-NPC character I am "playing" in the Elfquest game. She was Recognized in the last session. I knew a little of her background, but it wasn't until that hit that I realized the reason why she was going to fight this. Nevermind it's like refusing water, and it might kill her and her potential mate. She's got a story, and this is what is behind it.