Internationally Acclaimed Author Lydia Davis Discussing The RPG Community Specifically

Lydia Davis may be a name unfamiliar to gamers but she is no slouch. She got a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit medal and a Booker Prize.

Here is the story, in its entirety:

Fear

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families too, to quiet us.

Imagine my surprise at finding here writing here, specifically, in a short story, about RPGnet, StoryGames.com, the Forge, etc. and the many other hugbox communities that caused trouble onlint because of their desire to comfort their local lunatic.

I have written these things many times myself, but nobody really took it to heart.

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The Theory of the Labyrinth

A good part of the magic of D&D is from a specific aesthetic effect it shares with several other types of fiction that I'm going to call The Theory of the Labyrinth.

It's this:

So theres

• The Known
• The Unknown, and
• The Labyrinth. 

The Known is like: so you go to Boston, you see a statue of a man in the town square. Who is it? George Washington. Easy to know who that is, why he has a statue here, what it means. You eventually ignore it because its so familiar and easy to understand, it's as unremarkable as a chair--despite the remarkableness of George Washington as a figure. 

The Unknown is, like, you go to the desert and see Newspaper Rock. This is the Unknown. No-one will ever be able to explain all these glyphs, painted across centuries, they are forever a mystery. Intriguing and a spur to the imagination but ultimately you know you will never understand it the way you do the George Washington. You won't access the lives of the people who made them, you won't be able to see what this meant to them--it is -unknown-and also, to a certain degree, not-knowable. It is from a time with no written records and oral traditions conflict. 

Then there's The Labyrinth:

You go to Croatia or something. You're in a tiny village. There's a statue of a man on a horse. You are with a French friend, a Spanish friend, you ask them "Who is the man on a horse?" they shrug.

Now you know this:

That guy has a name--you don't know it but he does. You can ask around and go to some archives and find out who he is, why he is important, what he did in this tiny village, this is --you know-- technically all knowable despite the fact it reaches into the distant past. 

You don't know if it'll mean anything or be relevant once you find out--you also don't know if you do the work to find out whether it'll just go in one ear and out the other. You don't know how connected it is to your current concerns (perhaps not at all, perhaps very much so) , but you know that it is both real and--to you--unknown. You -could- find out. And this weird in-the-middle space is where megadungeons live. Even for the DM--they can't take it all in just by reading it, they can't say how it'll play, it always represents more knowledge than a person can hold in their head. So it is an object of eternal fascination, even once it's explored. 

It is a Rabbit Hole. You can go down it. There is definitely -something- there.

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Although The Labyrinth effect requires reference to the past, it is (in my reading, anyway) most common in modern authors who marvel at the complexity of the past as an aesthetic effect in itself.

Labyrinth-aesthetics in literature are frequently the result of an American author's encounter with a culture that has a long(er) and less morally-legible recorded history. The author from the younger country is more capable of being dazzled by the vastness of these functionally-infinite stories.

So: Thomas Pynchon encounters Europe and the tangled international histories that lead to WW2 in his labyrinthine novel Gravity's Rainbow.

Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges encounters the world of Old Europe inside his library and explores bookishly infinite imagined pasts in his short stories.

William Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith also partake on occasion--though their fascinations often lie further east.

And, of course, Gary Gygax, Arneson and co encounter versions of European history (via fantastic fiction and realistic wargames) and turn it into D&D, a great engine of infinitely explorable, infinitely interconnected histories.

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(I don't know about Tolkien. British but mazy. He always seemed to exert a storytellerish mastery over his fiction where you got the feeling he knew what every stray reference was to. I think his references to the deep time of his setting were to give a feeling of myth rather than an unknown of tangled obscurity.)

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I am tempted to wonder if this is one of the few clear advantages D&D's fictional background has over Warhammer's--the British authors at Games Workshop were happy to detail for you what life was like for everyone and exactly who all the bad guys were and what they were about (the better to make playable, legible factions), whereas D&D always pointed to ragged edges of the unknown--a lich is what now? The rakshasa is from India? How do you get there in Greyhawk? What is the Invoked Devastation? Who is Vecna and why are we only speaking of him in whispers?

The unfinished quality of the game fiction had a tacit flipside: if you played the game long enough you'd find out.

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HP Lovecraft, Racism, and Educating James--New Video

A new webseries (?)

Zak and James attempt to discuss Lovecraft and racism, while also bringing up: Jordan Peele, Lovecraft Country, Kingdom Death, Alien, Jaws, nerdy introversion, Taxi Driver, James’ Lovecraft-movie picks, Blue Velvet, James’ fear of stuffed animals and the sea, turn-of-the-century WASP atheism, avant-garde fiction and band-aids, amateur press associations, PG Wodehouse, Bertrand Russell on romanticism and Hitler, deer are scary, a plot hole in Lost Boys, X-Men vs Dracula and more

The Demon City Hardcover Is Now Available To Everyone

You can get your copy of Demon City, the world's best horror RPG here.

Also there are currently two adventures available for 20$ each on pdf--email zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm for those.

For more info on the game, check out this tag.

Weekday Side Quest

Since I have a large game group with players who shift in and out week by week I've been experimenting a little bit with what you might call solo side-quests.

The idea is they keep players up to date when they miss a session or two, plus they deepen that players' connection to some part of the game world relevant to their PC.

For instance:

A few weeks back, Dave's cleric of the Black Grip-Olaf--lost his arm. This is a big deal as spellcasters need to be able to gesture freely and that's hard with one arm that isn't actually, like, there. He asked if there was a Temple of the Black Grip nearby that could regenerate his arm.

The standard choices would be:

-Mean DM says No

-Nice DM says Yes

-Make Dave try to convince the whole party to go on a Quest For Dave's Arm even if Dave won't be there for weeks at a time in the middle of the entire continent being invaded

Instead, one monday evening I set up some miniatures on a table and just texted Dave this:

I further texted some details on the tactical situation:

The general mechanic I'm using for this mass battle is: 2 guys square off and each roll a die, high roll wins, so big dice are good, small dice are bad.

Dave texts back:

Dave further elects to hide his D30 giant skeleton guy underneath the giant skull thing on the left of the map and have it spring out only when goblins roll up.

Further, once the fight starts, he carefully deploys some Fog Cloud spells to confuse the goblin advance and channel them into places where they're easy to take out.

We can watch the battle progress round by round, with the goblins (mostly on square white bases) coming up from the bottom:

The Grip sends the bulk of its forth to the left of the screen and a few elite units go right:

A detachment of goblins probes to the right and gets wiped out by the elite forces. A fog cloud covers the goblin left.

This channels all the goblins through the center...

And they get wiped out as undead pour in from both directions!

The Black Grip wins!

Olaf gets a new arm (but it's a skeleton arm).

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Because David Lynch Died

This is an old post which I'm re-posting because David Lynch died. A stray observation here--that his work frequently nailed the distinctive spot where you don't know whether to laugh or be terrified, has come up for me over and over in the years since it went up.

Mood and Morality

This is about achieving a mood in a game (or in a movie or book or whatever).

A basic rule of aesthetics is getting one desirable emotional effect generally means letting go of another desirable emotional effect. Like: the epic mood and the zany mood don't usually peacefully coexist--Kermit the Frog is good and Achilles is good but having Kermit show up in the middle of the Iliad would fuck the Iliad up and make it something else. And we're all familiar with the great "Should I allow my player to name his/her PC Jimbob the elf?" question.

Now what we're specifically gonna deal with here is: the moods that are especially accessible by using the fantastic--the nonreal. That is: magical or sci-fi or otherwise surreal elements.

Here's a scale:
So there are 4 categories of mood here lined up from least to most serious.

The basic idea is: during any one specific moment in a work you can get any 2 adjacent emotional effects simultaneously fairly easily and if you're real good you can get 3 adjacent effects in a specific moment. You can't get nonadjacent effects without the one in between. So: no horrific-funny without also weird and no heroic-weird without horrific. You can also loop around and get heroic-funny (generally in the form of "we-like-the-hero-and-root-for-him/her-because-s/he's-funny"--a swashbuckley mood) but heroic-funny-weird and funny-heroic-horrific are stretching it and are pretty hard to pull off all at once. Again, we're talking emotions/moods achievable in a specific moment--like Hellboy comics are sometimes horrific-heroic and sometimes heroic-funny, but no single moment is heroic-funny-horrific all at once because the emotions involved somewhat contradict each other.

In a long work you can get all of them, but it's a challenge. In an actual session of a game you can get all of them comparatively easily (you have hours to fuck around and drift through moods)--but in a game product effectively articulating even one dominant mood is hard--what with the rules and details mundanifying your every step--much less 2 or 3.

The reason for this is because all these moods require a different point of view toward what's going on. "Funny" requires a degree of detachment (or hostility) toward whatever its object is, "heroic" requires investment in its success--attachment to the object (note also that "heroic" doesn't just mean "containing a hero" it means authentically feeling that blood-pumping I-hope-this-guy-wins-and-that-guy-loses emotion), "weird" requires a level of confusion about judgment, and "horrific" requires deciding something's threatening.

In the example I used several ways at looking at the fantastic idea of "part-man/part-bat".

So way over on the left we have the image that pops into our heads when someone makes the familiar observation that "Batman is a guy who goes around dressed like a bat". Like any fantastic conjunction, the idea can be made to sound silly. We are all well aware that anything in D&D can be made to sound goofy if you just say it right: "Elves are like people but with pointy ears and better". The fantastic is incongruity and incongruity can always be made funny.

Now in the middle is simply "weird". Simply weird is hard to achieve, because it means it's genuinely in the middle: an incongruous element which is neither frightening nor funny or is both frightening and funny. The hard part is that different people will see the thing presented as "weird" in different ways. Like that middle picture of the bat with the horn-ears might scare some children but might strike some adults as hilarious and strike others as just, simply, "weird". Weird in its pure form represents a collapse of moral judgment altogether--if we are sure we can just laugh (funny), we know it's harmless, if we are sure we should just run (horrific), we know it's harmful.

The vast majority of things in the world of entertainment which are described as "weird" end up sliding off toward also being "funny" or "horrific". When they do neither it's impressive (classic Surrealism occasionally achieves this) and when they do both it's impressive. For a master class on the emotional multivalency of "weird" see the films of David Lynch--though which parts are funny and which are scary and which balance perfectly being neither but still weird will vary from viewer to viewer.

It's an aesthetic disaster when something intended to funny-weird just comes out scary-weird (see: clowns and small children) or vice versa (see: low-budget horror movies or the Fiend Folio). The important point is just as how--when considered from a historical point of view--"weird" represents a fulcrum between fantasy and sci-fi--when considered from a mood point of view "weird" represents a fulcrum between "so out-of-place-it's-funny" and "so-out-of-place-it's-scary".

Now we get over into horror, and the horrific is not funny. Mating a human with a bat is definitely a scary idea. (And most incongruities can be made scary--maybe even rabbits with unicorn horns). Horror movies can be funny sometimes, but the moment of horror--if that emotion is to be maximized--cannot be at all funny in that moment. If you are going full-on for as-scary-as-scary-can-be, then levity has to be banished. The funniness (on reflection) of the talking rabbit-head in Donnie Darko or the guy in the bear suit in The Shining can't be in our minds during their scenes or else the effect is ruined--we need to be so emotionally close that the detachment necessary to see how essentially funny these things are is short-circuited. A good sign you are really scaring people is that all jokes made fall flat and seem weak. Black humor can work with horror, with weirdness as the translator, creating a vertiginous, giddy, creepy funny that probably won't send you running from the theater, but might give you nightmares--see: Eraserhead. This is more the realm of the disturbing than the shocking.

Now at the far end of the seriousness scale is the heroic. A man with characteristics of a bat is more than a human, is able to achieve what other humans can't. The heroic mode is even more serious than the horrific because, basically, the humorous undercuts and limits the heroic to a huge degree. The jokes have to be very specific: If the jokes are at the expense of the hero then the hero is no longer sympathetic, if the jokes are on the villain then it no longer seems like a credible obstacle for the hero and if the jokes are on the world then it risks seeming like a place not important enough to save. As said above, almost the only way to effectively have heroic-humorous is if it's the hero telling the jokes, which puts you in a pretty specific genre quickly (Spider-Man/Pirates of Caribbean/Ghostbusters territory--"lite") which makes it hard to get to the weird.

If a heroic story tries to go the long way around and tries to meet the weird by going through funny either the weirdness or heroicness has to be sacrificed. Like the timewarp Bill Murray faces in Groundhog Day never really feels emotionally "weird" and the adventures of Barbarella never seem emotionally "heroic" (you might like her but you don't really root for her). Either the weird part makes you more interested in seeing crazy stuff happen (regardless of what it means) and so not become invested in the heroism or the heroic part makes you more invested in judging the rightness and wrongness of things through the haze of humor to feel the eerie burn of weirdness.

Agent Cooper and Pee Wee Herman both achieved a certain level of funny-heroic-weird--if we like them and want them to win, it's because they're charmingly funny and weird. And when we experience this charm, we are unafraid--when Agent Cooper is credibly threatened by horror, he narrows down to simply heroic. And when people say Pee Wee was scary--well, they weren't talking about horror movie scary.

Also, the heroic can't blend with the "simply weird" without going through the horrific. Why? Because the heroic requires moral certitude--a hero (as opposed to a mere protagonist) in this sense is someone we can get behind and what they're doing is something we believe in doing and most importantly--the emotional "high" of seeing heroism (rather than simply knowing a character is the "hero" and going along with it because it's in front of us and we want to see some action) requires the audience to share this moral certitude. We cannot thrill to the slaying of The Emperor if we like the emperor. The aesthetic effect of the "simply weird" is, on the other hand, achieved by it purposefully not telling us what to think. Horror is the translator. We can only root for Dr Strange when he faces Shuma Gorath if his weirdness is frightening. If it's not, we'll just sort of be baffled by the situation and not emotionally sure enough to want Strange to defeat him.

When totally achieved the feeling of weird-horrific-heroic is (and should be) fundamentally emotionally unsettling. We are rooting for the hero to destroy something s/he and we do not totally understand. When Jeffrey defeats Frank in Blue Velvet it doesn't feel exactly right--it's like he's destroying part of himself, when Elric kills a freakish monster we aren't totally sure he has any more right to live than it does, when Lovecraft's protagonists escape the terrors in his stories we kind of don't care--the terrors are more interesting than the characters.

Which is all to say the certainty of the truly heroic and the uncertainty of the truly weird coexist as uneasily as the attachment required for the heroic and the detachment required for the humorous.

A good example of how this all works together in games is the mythos of the original Warhammer: It hung out largely in horror-heroic, but could migrate over to horror-weird (Realms of Chaos) and over to funny (orks--and the general black humor throughout) but funny-heroic just couldn't authentically happen. When the orks fought the space marines, either you have to feel like the space marines are the butt of the joke (no longer convincingly heroic--emotionally speaking) or the orks are just one more inhuman abomination (the Space Marines not getting any of their jokes). Another example: sometimes the Joker is funny--but as soon as Batman comes around, he isn't any more (though he is often, in these moments, weird and horrific) and if he is, then Batman suddenly looks impotent. You can have all these "notes" but not at the same time, and not without considerable effort.

Which is all to say: Morality and mood are tied together. Certain effects become almost impossible in the presence of others and so, as always, you have to realize that people who want one are going to have to make less of a big deal of the other. Deal.

The Trial of Tor Gunnar Magnuson

 So when last we saw our heroes they had rolled on the Carousing Table and all had gone sideways.

I actually made a diagram to keep it all straight

So this time, I set things up to deal with the consequences:

Olaf, halfling cleric of the Black Grip shows up with a skeleton arm, a replacement for an arm he got torn off a few sessions ago, he is hanging with, Bleezy aka Cargin, the sea-elf wizard—who is hungover. They’re in the sumptuous apartments of Arvikk, a humble dealer in silks who they rescued from some toad demons a while back.

A servant comes in and tells Arvikk they their pal has been hauled into the courthouse.

Tor the barbarian starts the session hauled into the Port Gobelins courthouse, charged with arson. 

The good news is: he has a witness in his defense—Bob the Ranger!

The bad news: he’s a pig.

The magistrate asks Tor who his attorney will be—he can name anyone in the city. He names himself!

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Horg the half-orc wakes up in bed next to…the court wizard!

The court wizard thanks Horg for a wonderful evening but says “Look, sugar, I gotta go, I am expected to testify agains that rapscallion Tor who burned down the entire port district!”

Horg casts Charm, the court wizard rolls a 3 and so they get back in bed--thus missing out on opening arguments

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Glutenberg the half-elf and Oni-Baba the witch are in yet another inn, having both been absent last session.

Oni-Baba decides to go buy some armor. But….the door to room is locked from the outside.

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Tor’s opening argument is powerful: he speaks of the Magnuson family’s long history of…something? I forgot, but he rolled well. A dissenting NPC cries “I lost my home and all my children were burned alive!” but nobody listens.

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I call up Christoff, who has a cold, and put him on speaker.

“Hey Christoff, you’re a pig. But you’re the only witness at Tor’s trial for arson. What do you do?”

“Can I talk?”

“Um, no.”

Then I squeeze the pig toy

“Is the witch who turned me into a pig there?”

“Uh…(roll roll)…yes!”

“Ok, I’m going to hop off the stand and go over to the witch and try to, like, charm her.”

“Roll Charisma”

“19!”

“The witch looks into your piggy eyes and feels sympathy for your plight! All eyes fall on the witch!”

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Meanwhile back in the bedroom, the court wizard, under the influence of Charm, reveals that he framed Tor because he (the wizard) is secretly colluding with the chaos hordes outside the city gates preparing to overtake Port Gobelins and burning the Port District clears the way for the raiders to enter.

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Glutenberg and Oni-Baba discover they’re just one of dozens of folk locked in their rooms by chaos cultists who are preparing for their fellows to invade. Fighting begins in the streets!

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Eventually most of the other party members make their way to the courthouse. Olaf secretly gives Tor a potion granting him 18 Charisma. Tor’s doing great up there, lifting up witnesses and impressing the entire crowd with his strength.

Suspicion then is thrown on the witch!

The witch throws suspicion on the Court Wizard!

Bleezy says fuck it man! and casts Dispel Magic on the Court Wizard, revealing him to be a creepy goat-headed cultist!

Horg is really mad at Bleezy because this also ruins her Charm hold over him which she was gonna use to manipulate him into…something…

This dramatic moment was captured here:

Several other members of the courtroom rabble reveal themselves to also be creepy chaos cultists.

They start just killing citizens.

A general melee begins

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After getting past the initial wave of chaos warriors, the players are finally all together and have a big argument about what to do.

Save Port Gobelins?

Run back into the dungeon?

Become exporters of fine silks?

Steal a ship?

Which ship?

Eventually Tor get sick of all this talk, runs up to one of the chaos warriors’ ships and goes “Who do I have to kill to take over this ship?”

He still has an 18 Charisma so the chaos rabble goes: “That guy!”

They have a fight using the Red & Pleasant Land duelling rules, Tor takes a wound to the leg but the other guy gets both his arms cut off.

The chaos warriors cheer their sexy new captain “TOR! TOR! TOR!”

Where to sail?

Given an ocean’s worth of options, the party sets sail for Nephilidia, the continent of aquatic vampires.

No accounting for taste I guess.