Exchange of Realities

Some things are worth setting the editorial calendar back a day for. This is one of them.

August 11, 2008, sometime in the evening. I’d just gotten home from a day of data entry, and just as I walked in the answering machine (our virtual secretary) picked up a phone call. My younger sister (wait a minute, wasn’t she on vacation in Utah?), distraught. Our father had had a fatal zipslide accident.

There went the neighborhood. Not in the way I expected. Shock probably had something to do with it, and distance—I’d left that particular nest, and I was a thousand miles away—and the fact that five minutes later I discovered I’d had my first article-feature on the RPG Bloggers’ Network can’t have made things any less confusing. People asked me how I was doing a lot that first night; my default response was “surprisingly, still calm”.

I told my friends, of course—they needed to know why I was about to cancel session for two weeks—but it didn’t seem like something I’d want to blog about. Partly because at the time I was avoiding personal topics like the plague, partly because I didn’t want to seem like I was begging for sympathy, and perhaps partly because that would make it real in a way that nothing else had yet. Words are powerful things. That’s not to say there wasn’t a tribute; the day of the thing-that-wasn’t-a-funeral-so-we-could-hold-it-at-the-hospital, I released a post celebrating healers.

How do you describe someone like that? The main things I note are the medical practice and the love of airplanes, a pair of interests which spent a lot of time dovetailing. He’d paid for med school by signing up with the Air Force, and while he’d managed to keep off the front lines, it had resulted in my having been born in Upper Heyford, England, rather than somewhere in California. I’m not sure which I have more childhood memories of, air shows or visits to the clinic. We moved twice because of family practice matters, once a budget cut layoff and once because he’d stuck his neck out for someone else’s patients.

Which wasn’t to say that was all of it. He was fond of music, both playing and listening; he introduced me to a number of bands older than I was (including taking me to two Moody Blues concerts). While I was a flute player and later a percussionist, he’d been a trumpeter, and made sure I at least knew my way around a brass mouthpiece.

And he and I were close. He’d divorced my mother when I was six, remarried when I was seven, and had primary custody ever since then—and if one were to divide the resulting family unit into groups, I would have been grouped with him, and my stepmother with my younger sister. Certainly, he was the one who supported all my endeavors, even the more geeky ones; he never missed a concert unless he was on call, had read my first novel-length story (trite though it was) when my stepmother had vowed not to (then convinced her to read it; I never did thank him for that), took me to and from just about everything I needed to go to—in fact, he was even the first person outside my target demographic who read this blog on a regular basis, and for a while the only member of the family who bothered using my primary form of communication. I could tell him about my interests; sure, it took me years to realize that he was listening when he poked fun at some of their more absurd aspects, but it was still listening. Family dynamics have been odd for the last year, let’s put it that way.

I haven’t mourned the same way the rest of my family did, not even now; after all, between college and the custodial arrangements, I spent enough time away from home that being present in spirit is more than enough for me. When, a week after the not!funeral, a friend of ours who’d known him since he delivered her was married, his teachings allowed me to sound the shofar in his place (apparently even with that many people, nobody else had ever played a brass instrument), and he was there. When I got my job as a Marine library tech, we joked about what he would have thought (the Marines, apparently, were the only branch of the military he didn’t consider), and it was through him that my mother learned a lot of what she knows, and the stories she tells, about the differences between the branches. (My favorite, I think, is the momentary confusion when an Air Force captain calls in patients at a Navy hospital.) When I write about mysteries, I owe him for having introduced me to the genre. I wear a little silver shell pendant everywhere I go, and a green cap with the wrong name on it to outdoor events, and in that, he is there. It’s always been my belief that we mourn not to the people we’ve lost, but ourselves for having lost them, and is one who still feels there and is remembered ever truly lost? As long as I can live up to what he was, I think not.

Thanks, Dad. You’re still missed.

Regular topics will continue tomorrow. Thank you for your patience.

I’m not talking about game this week; I haven’t managed any good sentient location scenes there. Yet. So instead, I’m going to talk about something I wrote about.

It was a simple story; I called it “For Alexandria to Weep”. While I originally intended it to be a love story, it went sideways; either way, the narrator was, of all things, a sentient library.

Why did the library think? This is one of those special exceptions to having to explain why the thing’s sentient, since the story is primarily a what-if. Though I figured that out as well—a library’s thoughts are the sum of both the knowledge within its books and the order in which these books are arranged. Which leads to its own interesting points. For one thing, the intelligence depends on the books staying in order; you start messing up the organization too much, and there goes the coherence. The story began with me exploring that. Enough routine that they could figure out what my character was, and then the earthquake struck, and the coherence left. Not shorter sentences, per se, but fragments, strung together. Here a quote, there a quote, everywhere a quote, and as the books fell the disjointing increased, babbling tangling twisting, until all the books had fallen and the Library was reduced to word by word lucidity in a sea of lorem ipsum.

Then I got into the culture of libraries. From my experiences as an employee, I knew that libraries aggregated in systems. Not quite a hive mind, per se, but pretty close. Information and books circulate between the branches, boosted by the computer system. The libraries themselves are in constant contact, part of a greater whole, guided by the Main Branch. And then I got to what they wanted to do, or be, since existing for existing’s own sake is boring:

Every one of them is a child of that which the humans called Alexandria; babies, remnants, rivaling her size but never quite reaching her enlightenment. - a note from my writing journal

We all need to have role models. For the library, who else would it be but the Great Library of Alexandria?

With aspiration came fear. What’s the opposite of a library? A warehouse. No learning here, nor sharing; everything’s private, and what leaves doesn’t come back. There isn’t a soul to the places, just rows on rows of the same things over and over. Not something you want to consider yourself becoming.

And then I had to figure out the Library’s view of the patrons. They feed off of people’s reactions to their books, so there have to be patrons, and they have to be kept happy. But to a library, a patron’s pretty transitory. She might not come back, for one reason or another; she might change her interests, or stop reacting the same way. High-risk. Low-reward. So knowing them by name, getting attached—bad idea. Employees? The same story. And think of it this way: the employee is the library’s hand, doing something it just can’t physically do itself. Do you name your hands? I didn’t think so.

Then I cycled back to the importance of organization, and by the time I was done there I had my story.

Ever had an inspiration like that?

Last Sunday I got tagged by chameleonsdream, a fellow Today network writer and longtime gamer. The instructions are simple: name 7 things that people don’t know about me. I’m not ordinarily a meme-passer, but it’s been long enough since the last one that I figured I may as well go for it. So here goes!

1. I’m an American citizen born abroad; my father was an Air Force doctor stationed in Upper Heyford, England, when I was born.

2. I’m not very good at remembering dates, even when monumental things happened on them. I’m a walking counterexample to the idea that the woman’s the one who remembers the anniversary, often have to use a lot of temporal “landmarks” to remember the year in which something happened, and only remember what day of the week it is once I hit Friday because that’s when game is (I remembered the tag was Sunday because of the Generic Villain, let’s put it that way). I can remember dates if multiple notable events happened on them, though; while I’d have to look it up to tell you what day last year I started this blog (it was in late June somewhere, and I’m pretty sure it was a Tuesday because I was gaming that night—at least I think I was, that might’ve been the week we were just talking—but that’s as close as I can get without peeking), but I can tell you the exact date on which the Perseid meteor shower peaked in 2008, and the exact date of the first time my blog was featured on the RPG Bloggers’ Network, partly because they were the same day. (This is really ironic when combined with my photographic memory for game events; I had two different GMs who depended on me to remember names and details for them.)

3. Despite the generally personal nature associated with blogs, I’m not very good at telling people what’s going on with me through said blog. Okay, yeah, that’s something everyone probably knew, but not the extent to which I do it. Remember in Point 2, my knowing the date of the Perseid meteor shower and the article feature? They were on the same day. They were also on the day my father had a fatal zipslide accident. (You want awkward, try learning about the accident and the blog feature within five minutes of each other. I don’t think I viewed the whole mess ‘normally’ since.) I didn’t really tell anyone, and I managed to keep my daily schedule, even the day we had to drive up to the middle of Oregon from San Diego and had tire trouble and a brush with engine failure. Closest I came to acknowledging it was the post that went up on the day of the funeral.

4. I played youth soccer for four years running when I was younger, and was on some darn good teams the first two years.

5. I haven’t followed a TV series on cable in getting on for five years now. College got me out of the habit; let’s face it, when you’ve got fifteen people and only two television sets, and most of the people there don’t like your shows, it’s pretty easy to decide it’s not worth the bother. Then I got home and there wasn’t too much point in starting up again.

6. I have the rather odd record of having been the first person in my college ballroom dance class ever to take the choreographed dance portion of the final solo. By the time I figured out what was going on, everybody had been paired off, and I had an idea involving a tune I was fond of, waltz and tango footwork, and some skills and equipment picked up from my partial semester of Noh Drama two years before. (While I was not surprised to be the only one in the class who took that part of the final in tabi, I was mildly surprised by being the only girl to take it wearing pants.)

7. My undergraduate thesis was on the plausibility of silicon-based life. While my conclusion was that it’s chemically impossible, a carbosilane base strikes me as being a plausible backbone for organic molecules. (And I will cheerfully go into details if anyone wants me to.) This is also where I became a Cairns-Smith fangirl.

Normally, people pass these things on, but all the Todayers I know either have been hit already or don’t pass memes, and I don’t want to clutter up the RPGBN with non-gaming content, so I think I’ll pass on passing.

So how much did you see coming?

Recorded live from a presentation by the Generic Villain at this year’s EvilCon.

All right, ladies, listen up.

I just got a note from PR saying that women in evil are still having issues with their intimidation quotient, particularly among secret agents, the educated, and snarky accidental rulers of major geographic locations.

Something’s got to change here.

First off, the dress code. I understand why so many of you seem to think leaving nothing to the imagination is a valid strategy. Many of you are from the Succubus school of villainy, and firmly entrenched in the idea that the way to defeat every hero is to get him out of his… armor. Others seem to be clinging to that outdated principle that the less you wear, the harder you are to hit.

To the first group, I would like to point out that the guys in the field have been doing it with considerably more success, for two reasons. One, they don’t depend on seduction as a tactic; it’s more a secondary thing. Two, they often appeal to things other than the immediate “SKIN!”, with the added bonus that they can do that particular job and still wear pants, and that people looking for the “SKIN!” tactic are less likely to figure out that they’re bad news. But even leaving that aside, the strategy only has a 5% success chance, and is even less likely to succeed among protagonists with Designated Love Interests. And since protagonists with Designated Love Interests are becoming more common by the day… let’s just say it isn’t going to work too well.

To the second: The Inverse Female Armor principle is a myth. While we do not have an actual time period for it, the current perception was that it was first begun by the perverted bard known as Amato the Red as a way of making his job more… satisfying. If his ghost is found, you will be the first to know.

In sum: For the love of all that’s unholy, GET DRESSED!

Next item!

This one goes out to the flirty fighters. There are limits to what we do. Teasing your protagonists is all very well, but do you really have to turn it into an extended sexual metaphor? Particularly when it’s always going through the same few lines about fire users, magic swords, and prowess? I can see a little leeway for teasing someone about how compensatory his four-loaf cleaver is, and I love witty flirty banter as much as the next dark megalomaniac, but if you’re going to use this tactic, at least make sure you’re good at it first. Research those who have come before you. Focus on the ones who were clearly respected, and emulate them. And whatever you do, if a line crops up more than four or five times in one research session, DO NOT USE IT. It’s long past the day it should have died. Instead, record it and send it along so it’s eradicated from the banter files.

This goes double for the BDSM crowd. Look, I know not everyone gets their kicks the same way. I know some of you have even managed to turn your skill with whips and chains and how you interact with pain into a source of power in combat. But then you take your proclivities there as well, and start engaging in lines that… well, I suppose if the object of the game is to scare the really innocent ones off the battlefield or confuse them, you might be on to something, but the rest of your foes are just rolling their eyes and deciding they’ll kill you first so they don’t have to listen to you.  Again, make it witty or don’t do it.

Unfortunately, the individual on the ground with the recorder was discovered by the guards at this point and had to change locations, interrupting the relay. Further portions of this presentation will be relayed Sunday if all goes well. Until then, GV speaks here.

I had an idea for what I was going to write tonight. Had been going to tie into that article I wrote the other day about familiars, using one of my favorite familiar NPCs. The key word here is had.

But something tonight happened that I just had to share. I’d been having a little trouble with the game; one player who was having motivation and participation issues, two I hadn’t talked to in a week, the conversations felt like a game of whack-a-mole, and I still wasn’t entirely ready. But it took off, and I managed to keep it going. One dropped plot hint. One incident that led off with a very silly little innuendo. One argument that involved the entire group and four NPCs. And then I discovered the secret to making everyone just plain light up at an Exalted game.

One elder Sidereal. One First Age DDR pad. A little bit of setup, and a nice piece of nifty background music.

And the session just… soared. That’s the only word I can use for it.

My players are throwing a party today. It’s a wide-spanning thing, lots of guests—all in costume, which has made my life very interesting, particularly since I’m trying to make all the costumes make some sort of statement—and absolutely perfect for getting to play with crowd-noise.

So there they are, meeting up with a new party member as their guests begin to arrive. And what a guest list it is! Every few lines or so, I send another one past them, describing the costume in as much detail as I can, or have two of the present characters run into each other and something interesting happen. (Three cheers for chat games; you can actually sort of make this work.) So far we’re about a third to a half of the way through the party, and over their shoulders the group has seen one conversation in a language practically nobody speaks, one play-fight between two old friends, and… well, there would have been more, only people kept doing things that weren’t particularly conducive to introducing new characters.

I’m learning something about crowd-speak, though. It’s all very well when you first plan it, but it’s a lot harder when your group has fissioned into between three and five separate conversations. Doubly so when they’re all talking to characters you aren’t very good with, and you’re having to make up everything as you go along. Triply so when the only people they want to talk to are the ones you planned on introducing later because you still haven’t committed on their costumes and you want them to mean something.

Another note: Never put too much effort into any one thing. Just because you spent an entire summer coming up with nifty-thematic costume choices for most of your NPCs doesn’t mean anyone’s going to actually ask who they are, or even talk to most of them. Particularly if they have an Agenda, and that Agenda involves people you haven’t quite internalized yet.

And when your entire cast is in costume, expect difficulties. Fun ones, but difficulties.

Yesterday, I discussed how different characters might describe people in different ways. Telling isn’t enough, though, so let me show you how it works. Remember our friend Ruby, from the character development sequence? I’m going to describe her from a few other character viewpoints.

Lirit, her mentor: “Ah, Ruby… you’ll know her when you see her. She looks young and sounds younger. There is a good mind in there, though, and a lot of enthusiasm. She’s come a long way from the girl who dropped onto my doorstep with no idea what she was supposed to be doing or even what she was. I just wish she hadn’t gotten so overprotective…”

Esemeli (yes, she has a name!), demon-researcher: “Hyper girl, that one. Short words, long sentences. Don’t think she has any idea how to hold still. Can never really tell if she understands what I’m talking about or not. Doesn’t matter, though; she’s too noisy for my workroom. And the mess she made when my idiot brother tangled with her—I’m not messing with that. Even my life’s too short to deal with the kind of chaos she’s likely to create on a bad day.”

Kestrel, enemy-turned-ally-turned-utterly-confused: “She’d pass for normal, if you didn’t know what to look for. Doesn’t usually have the fangs out, isn’t as pale as the rest of her kind. Just this sweet, innocent kid who can probably tear you apart with her bare hands if you tick her off, and beats up whichever side started the fight when she can’t tell who’s in the right.”

Ereth, professional soldier and passing acquaintance: “Ah, the kid with the streaky hair. Seen her around the camp a few times. First time she’d had a bellyful of rock candy and couldn’t hold still, but there was the one time when she was hanging over the game tables, pointing out possible maneuvers with one hand, snarfing up popcorn with the other, and chatting incessantly. Knew what she was talking about; we were surprised, but we probably shouldn’t've been. She sounds oblivious, but there’s something about where she places herself—few scuffles I’ve seen her in, she’s always been exactly where she needs to be, or made where she was into where she needed to be. Odd girl.”

Shizuyo, ferret familiar to one of her friends, through some sort of translation: “Big, loud, but fun. Cold and warm at the same time, and smells like earth. Knows where to scratch, but squeezes too much and too hard. Should really start keeping raisins in her pocket. Good for keeping people out of trouble, though.”

If you look at all of these, you’ll notice that most have something to do with the personality or profession of the character involved. Lirit, for instance, focuses more on Ruby’s inner qualities and improvement, while Ereth is more concerned with her understanding of how a battlefield works. Kestrel’s understanding is more based on how Ruby differs from the norm for her type (given that “her type” are usually Kes’s enemies, this is pretty logical). Shizuyo looks at her from the ferret-perspective of comfort, discomfort, food and protection (and, you might note, emphasizes scent, sound and the size differential). Esemeli is the most interesting case, in my opinion: being generally antisocial and academically inclined, she looks at Ruby in terms of the differences in their educations and in terms of how inconvenient dealing with the girl would be.

This week’s Impractical Apps is going to be a little different, mainly because I couldn’t run game this week.  Or do much of anything else.  I’m going through a bit of a rough time, if you’re prone to massive understatement.

So instead, I’m going to ask a rather touchy question.

The adventurer–the PC–is often the one standing between the world and its end.  They’re the ones who get the tearful NPCs dissolving on their shoulders, the first target of the foe, the light in the darkness, running from one issue to the other with nary a pause for breath because that’s their job.  And in some groups, particularly the ones for whom RP is secondary to a good series of conflicts,  that’s fine.

But consider looking at it from the other side.  How are these heroic souls functioning?  Can they really handle being the ones on whom the world depends, not having someone else to fall back on?  Who heals the healer?  Who comforts the comforter?  Who rescues the hero?  To whom does the party go when they’ve lost one of their own and need shoulders to cry on themselves?  And what effect does the answer to this question, or the lack thereof, have on them?

I played this question once, a while ago, and never quite came up with an answer.  In the real world, I’ve been looking at a question like this from the inside.  I’d rather not, honestly.  But that’s the great skill of a really good GM or a really good writer:  can we distill this pure horrendousness that is life and the real world into something that gives our players or our audience a chance to deal with all the really juicy feelings, and yet allows them not to have to be brought down by those things that in the real world destroy us?

This is what we’re for.  It could even be–gasp!–good for us.  If they’re interested, and we’re interested, then by all means, let’s do it.

This week just isn’t good for being impractical. Murphy’s Law as applied to the weekly feature:  between the transitions, the rather scattered topics and the gifts of the players for not following the path that’d give me a clean post, showing you how I used what I discussed this week just isn’t going to work too well.

So I think I’ll just sketch a character instead.

Those who didn’t know her might mistake her for a ghost, as she stalks between her room and the library when she thinks that the hall is empty, a formless silhouette in red silk and gauze. Those who know her better might almost prefer that she be replaced by a haunt. She sits in the library, within a fortress of piled tomes and precariously leaning scrolls; to those who are brave enough to speak to her, she responds in few words, and even those rapidly become more insulting with every misstep her potential conversational companion makes. She doesn’t look up at them to speak—not that they can tell with any certainty which way she’s facing under all the veils—but when they in turn look away, she turns to watch them.

Her room is shelves—one might mistake it for some sort of puzzle. Books, papers, chalkboards covered with sketches and diagrams, all carefully sorted and filed away. One who can manage to avoid being caught reading her materials, or one fortunate enough to be allowed to browse, will see information on the dreams of demons, on transmutations that nobody has imagined because even the most clever know their limits, or just on the generally irritating nature of the world in general and the people around her in particular. Lamps in the corners surrounded by small canisters occasionally spark with lilac or chartreuse flame. Far back in the room beyond the literary labyrinth rest two large, loosely stuffed cushions, both indented with regular use. The indentation in one is smallish, about consistent with her size, but the other is much larger and tends to smell of ashes and something slightly moldy; the wood of the floor around it shows arcing, nearly parallel scratches that curve around the cushion, and scattered around it are the occasional scale-shaped crystal . A small box nearby overflows with burned-out candle stubs, most likely from the single candlestick that rises up from the floor between the two cushions.

 Feel free to make your guesses as to what I’m not telling you about her.

Ravyn’s note: I am pleased to announce the return of The Generic Villain, mentor and adviser of fledgling Hands of Darkness everywhere, who after acquiring life and personality has graciously agreed to dish out wit and wisdom on serving the darkness and how best to further such goals every so often here. As yesterday was my first day of work, I rather appreciate having someone to cover for me, particularly someone in my own mind whom I can chew out with impunity if the writing isn’t good enough. So…. Take it away, GV!

Maybe you can’t find any redeeming qualities to it. Maybe you’re serving some dark god with really skewed priorities. Maybe you’re just completely insane. Either way, you’ve decided to go for world destruction rather than world domination.

As an experienced Hand of Darkness in the multiverse, a veteran of one failed world destruction plot in my world and another successful one in another one (don’t ask how I survived. It’s complicated), and a longtime mentor of troublemakers in training, I have one piece of advice for the evildoer considering adding the destruction of the world to his portfolio:

Don’t.

Yes, destroying the world is about as good as villain-cred can get, and impossible to top. Yes, it’s the height of ambition. But let’s assume for a moment that the plot succeeds. Who are you going to impress if everyone’s gone? How can you be satisfied if you’ve gone down with the ship as well?

Then consider the following: Destroying the world is a logistical nightmare. In nine situations out of ten, preparations for world destruction are very, very obvious, both in terms of existence and of purpose. Moreover, because it’s so flashy, not only are you going to get an unusual number of the standard goody-two-shoes meddlers trying to interfere with your plans, but even the most expensive and apathetic antiheroes are going to find a bone to pick with you. And don’t forget the people on your own side! Most Hands of Darkness have objectives that involve taking over the world, and it’s kind of hard to dominate something that doesn’t exist anymore. Particularly if you’re dead. This makes any Shatterer of Worlds into Obstacle #1. Now, hero-types can get away with being Obstacle #1, but they’ve got narrative protection. Do you really feel that lucky, punk? And even aside from that, there’s morale in your own camp—how many of your minions would knowingly try to execute a world-destroying plan? Be honest.

If you’re doing it because you hate the world, reconsider. We have the power to remake the worlds we inhabit in our image; it’s part of the contract. Certainly, if you’ve got the strength to destroy the world, you’ve got the strength to change it. And changing it ostensibly for the better confuses the living daylights out of those pesky heroes. Wouldn’t you love to see their heads explode in a fountain of shattered preconceptions?

There are alternatives. Find them. Use them. You’ll thank me for it later.