The Agony of the Feets

I can’t remember my feet ever hurting this much. Not sure if it’s a testament to my waxing wimpiness or that this truly was the last rodeo for my sneakers. Poor things had a blow-out.

I saw lots of amazing and cool people this week. If you encountered me on Saturday or later, and I seemed terse or distracted, it wasn’t you; by Saturday the fire-hose of social interaction and ALL TEH AMAZEBALLS GEEKY THINGS!!! had me feeling more than a little punch-drunk. Next year, if you’re going to be at GenCon and want to hang, let me know and we’ll do a better job of arranging things.

Honestly, getting to sit down and debate theory with the likes of Zzarchov Kowolski and Jacob Hurst, discuss the ins-and-outs of the industry with folks who have less sexy but vital jobs that keep the wheels rolling, and just laugh and “OMG have you seen this?!?” with fellow geeks is one of the very coolest things about GenCon. But the coolest is almost certainly the Exhibition Hall. Even though I think a third of the things I saw were “kickstarting in the next four months,” (or maybe even because of it), the things to see and touch and play, and the excitement of everyone around you (shining through the “haven’t slept in two days” exhaustion in some cases), is amazingly inspirational.

The LotFP GenCon exclusives didn’t quite sell out, so there are some copies over at Noble Knight Games. I’m pretty sure the inclusion of She Bleeds, etc. is an oops and they only have the first four available. No idea what the quantities are, so if you want ‘em, best to snatch ‘em up now!

Murdered by Pirates is Good

This year started off with so much promise for the blog but, obviously, I fell off the wagon in May. So what has the Troll been up to?

Quite a lot. I'm involved in three regular campaigns. One is weekly, the other two switch off weeks, so that's two evenings of gaming every week (plus regular meet-ups for board games and the like). What's crazy for me is that, due to quirks of fate, all three games are 5e D&D. What's really crazy? I'm a player in one.

The big news is that I'm getting an adventure officially, professionally published for the first time. I've written one of the GenCon exclusive adventures Raggi will be selling at the Lamentations of the Flame Princess booth this year. Being a fan of the Orientalist painters, I wanted to do something involving the Barbary Pirates, who were busting out of the Mediterranean and onto the world stage in a big way during the default time period of LotFP adventures.

I worked with Tabby L. Rose on this one. She's DMing the 5e game I'm actually a player in. Her experience with RPGs is very different from mine. She got started later (because she couldn't find anyone who'd let a girl join their games until after high school) and played very different games from me. Where I've been accused of treating most RPG rules as variations to add to Moldvay/Cook, Tabby had an extremely varied RPG diet, ranging from first edition Rune Quest and FASERIP Marvel to Talislanta and Shadowrun. The longest running campaign she GMed was a Firefly game that started using Margaret Weis Productions rules but later migrated to Fudge. This makes her fun to collaborate with because her expectations and assumptions are often very different from mine.

And this was very important on Menagerie of Exiles because, hoo boy, was this a reminder of how odd my games are. When my players' PCs board a pirate ship, whether as guests or crew or cargo, they want to know all about what's happening: who are the pirates and where did they come from and what are they doing right now (at 3 PM on a Tuesday afternoon) and when can we get the quartermaster alone without anyone else overhearing our conversation? They're going to want to seduce the First Mate, and if they see an opening, they're going to prep a mutiny plan, even if they don't necessarily pull the trigger.

Most of my notes for something like this would be almost-kinda bullet-points jotted into my moleskin or possibly just scribbled on post-its tucked in as bookmarks into the rulebooks. Now I had to make it intelligible for other folks all while keeping it within the word-and-art limits of a GenCon exclusive booklet.

We were absolutely overly ambitious. What you’ll get is a ship and crew with the broad outlines detailed and a bit more focus on particular individuals. There’s a dark secret on the ship that threatens to split the crew apart, a secret that the enslaved prisoners in the hold are part of. And that’s probably skirting too close to spoiler territory, so I’ll stop there.

If you’re running a LotFP campaign, you’ll get a creepy little adventure on the high seas that you can use to move the campaign to more exotic locales. In the decades before the start of the English Civil War, the Barbary Pirates were raiding as far afield as Ireland and Iceland (and, in both cases, absconding with the entire populations of small villages). So you could have these pirates pop up just about anywhere and transport the PCs to just about anywhere. If you’ve been looking for a way to move the campaign to North Africa for Rafael Chandler’s World of the Lost, here you go!

If your game is not set in a real-world analogue of the 16th through 19th centuries, you still get pirates with a dark secret. They can transport your PCs across an ocean and give your table something to do with that journey, rather than just handwave it as “time passes.”

If you’re going to be at GenCon this year, be sure to stop by Raggi’s booth (#3010) and check it out. For myself, I can’t wait to get my hands on Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas. Zzarchov always does neat stuff. And I have a sneaking suspicion I know what James’ mystery book is. If I’m right, yeah, it’ll twist more than a few noses out of joint.

50 Shades of Blueberry

If you are of a certain age, largely congruous with being there when AD&D was the new hotness, you probably remember when entertainment aimed at children was rife with kink.

No, I’m serious. The Adam West Batman show was probably the most well-known. Every story was a two-parter, and the first part invariably ended with Batman and/or Robin captured and tied up in some bizarre, slow-acting death trap. Like a rotisserie cooker, or beneath giant magnifying glasses, or inside a giant mousetrap, while Julie Newmar (or Eartha Kitt) crawled all over them wearing tight spandex and purring.

That, ladies and gentleman, is the sort of image that will stick in your subconscious and never be dislodged. Especially if you saw it five times a week.

Batman was, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. Saturday morning cartoons were rife with this sort of thing. A single episode of the Speed Buggy cartoon, “The Hidden Valley of Amazonia” involves not just the female doms/male subs the title implies, but also forced feminization, objectification (people as widgets on a conveyor belt), togas, and the ever-popular mind control. And that was probably a rehash of a nearly identical plot from the not-fetishy-at-all Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space episode, “Warrior Women of Amazonia.”

The bizarre thing was how much all of this was hidden in plain sight, a sort of purloined chain-letter of kinky deviance all over the place. Part of that, I’m sure, was the dominance of the counter-culture at that time, but there also seemed to be willful blindness about things. Things like the twisted and macabre horror-film-disguised-as-a-kid’s-film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

This movie is a magnum opus of body horror and industrial objectification. Kids have their bodies warped and twisted in numerous ways, or get trapped in industrial machinery, or burned alive in a furnace. (At least, that’s what’s strongly implied.)

Maybe it’s his relative youth that allows Kiel Chenier to not treat any of the murder and mutilation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as normal kids fare. Instead, he embraces the kinky body-horror of the whole thing and plays it as a straight-up Lamentations of the Flame Princess probably-kill-you-all-but-in-amusing-ways adventure.

The thing that Kiel does that the movie doesn’t is linger on the effects of all this body-horror. In the movie, children die off-camera, while the horribly disfigured and mutated are dragged away by the creepy Oompa Loompas. In Blood in the Chocolate, warped bodies become classic OSR-style challenges. Getting inflated isn’t something that just happens for a moment; it’s an ongoing condition and slow death-by-degrees that has to be dealt with (or possibly even capitalized on). And, honestly, that’s one of the more normal things that can happen to PCs in this adventure. Characters can be forced into cannibalism, literally uncontrollably eating their buddies to death.

This is really warped stuff, and even above-and-beyond what I’ve come to expect from LotFP; there’s some twisted stuff in Broodmother Skyfortress, but none of it is as twisted or personal as what’s in Blood in the Chocolate. In Broodmother Skyfortress, you see ugly, twisted, icky stuff. In Blood in the Chocolate, your character becomes ugly, twisted, icky stuff. And then explodes.

The use of cultural icons for humor purposes does make this look, at least on the surface, similar to Venger Satanis’ Alpha Blue stuff. However, where Alpha Blue implies a certain amount of Yakkity Sax playing in the background, Blood in the Chocolate is deadly earnest, which makes the silly bits go from comedic to downright creepy, the same way Pennywise the Clown isn’t in the least bit funny, but all the more terrible because of the associations.

This all means that Blood in the Chocolate is a welcome step in the right direction for including fetish content in your RPGing. It’s not just window-dressing (as is often the case in Pathfinder adventures) but something the adventure (and likely one or more PCs) wallows in. It’s not exactly the focus of the adventure, but it certainly is both unavoidable and central to the fun, if not the plot. I don’t think you could really play this game straight, though I suppose if you did and just ignored all the implications, hey, that would be an awful lot like Saturday mornings in the ‘70s.

Twisted Cheetos

The other day, Zak wrote:

Attitude one:

Like pre-modern art, the game is like a window into another world. Just as brushstrokes and picture frames are considered necessary but distracting elements in a traditional painting, dice, rules, Cheetos are necessary but distracting elements in the game. Whatever can be done to limit their hold of the mind of the player and promote pure immersion is appreciated.

And that describes my games fairly well. Aided by the fact that nearly all my play is online via text-chat these days, I strive to make the rules fade into the background as much as possible. Setting and character become the primary focus, and the trappings of play fade into the background. And there is nary a cheeto-orange fingerprint on any of my gaming books.

And yet, while Zak is clearly a proponent of “attitude two,” I love Vornheim. Sure, I wince a bit when Zak extols the virtues of letting players know that such-and-such an event is the result of random generation, but when it comes to building a world that is both insane and hangs together, Zak is a master.

I’ve never played with Jeff, but I get the feeling that, at his table, mutant plant doxies engaging in fishslapping contests with wookies is crazy-wacky-ha-ha fun. Nobody looks deeper into what’s going on, or what it means. They just enjoy it for the gonzo fun that it is.

I don’t get that feeling at all from Zak. Sure, it looks like playful gonzo on the surface, but... There are three adventures included in Vornheim, and while all give only a cursory brush at the details (Zak’s stated goal is very much to supply tools and raw materials in this book so that you can build your own things with them, and the adventures are very much in that spirit), those details invoke a chain of connections all through the work. In one, the seemingly random nature of the architecture is a clue as to the nature of the place. The villain of another appears on a random encounter table later in the book. Other random encounters invoke long-lost friends, clowns driven by a sense of justice, ancient festivals, mysterious watchers, capers-in-progress, or domestic disputes.

And many of them are just freaking bizarre! Ok, sure, you’ve seen the stuff on his blog that’s disturbing, right? You know about maggot nagas, nephilidian vampires, and hollow brides. This book is full of stuff like that. Zak dribbles more creativity and inspiration on page 3 (territories surrounding Vornheim) than most books manage in their entirety. And that's a pale shadow of page 7 (oddities in Vornheim). And much of it hints at darker unpleasantness. As Zak says a handful of times, the results of certain actions depend “on how goth the campaign is.” Other actions can result in drastic transformation of the gameworld, kinda-sorta similar the infamous possibilities of Raggi’s Death Frost Doom.

Frankly, I don’t understand how Mandy Morbid sleeps at night after playing in Zak’s game. Maybe the cheetos keep it light and fun, but in the right hands, some of this stuff could easily be the stuff of nightmares.

Podcasting Part Two: Weird Finnish Boogaloo!

Hot off the success of our first podcast, Oddysey and I return with a second.  Since we've run out of things to say (Ha!  Not!), we're joined this time by James Edward Raggi IV to discuss his newly released (and soon-to-be-sold-out-in-its-first-printing) boxed set, Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying.  It was a very fun interview, in large part because Raggi is a great guest.

A few words of warning: James asked us at the beginning of the interview what our language policy was.  We told him the truth: we don't have one.  So the interview is liberally sprinkled with the occasional four-letter word.  We also (briefly) discuss the whole "Spokesmodel of the OSR" thing.  So don't say you weren't warned.

Links of interesting stuff we talk about:

The Infamous Spokesmodel Image (WARNING: not safe for your SAN score, forget viewing at work!)

James (have you noticed just how many of us Jameses there are in the OSR) Maliszewski discusses his theories on the different Ages of D&D.  And more on the Silver Age in particular.

Elmore and the "you are there" school of fantasy art.

Cynthia Sheppard's art page.

The Patty Duke Show.  (No, really, this is a vital part of Raggi's design process.  O.o )

In related news, Oddysey has tracked down an option for proper podcast posting, and I'm still trying to figure out how to make it work.  (Utter troll fail! D:< )  The plan is to have it properly set up before the next part of the interview is posted.