You Got To Appreciate What An Explosive Element This Bonnie Situation Is

On Quentin Tarantino, GMing And The Art of Anti-Mystery

0. This will all have to do with games, trust me.

1. Pulp Fiction was in a small class of films that changed movies forever. Directors like it, arty people like it and audiences liked it--which is rare enough by itself--but also it changed what Hollywood thought regular people could put up with in a movie. Only a few other movies did that and most were genre movies with special effects showing you something only movies could show you (realistic moving space ships, dinosaurs, demonic possession, etc). Pulp created a director-centric frenzy not seen in a decade that lasted basically until the Marvel movies--which Pulp strongly-influenced.

2. There's no one simple explanation because, as so many peopl-- including QT--have pointed out, all the cool things in it have roots somewhere else. The lurid subjects appear in all kinds of old B movies, Shane Black and Howard Hawks did good dialogue in crime films before Pulp did it, Scorsese did those needle drops and cool characters, Godard and the French New Wave did a lot of the experimental film techniques, the plots were standard potboiler fare (thus the title), etc.

3. A common thesis might be that he did them all at once, but then you've got things like The Long Goodbye which arguably did as well, and a million movies since (including ones with Samuel Jackson, Uma or Travolta), which don't hit as hard.

4. I think I have a piece of the puzzle:

5, For all his interest in genre films Quentin Tarantino has never done a spooky or mysterious movie. Death Proof is mayyyybe a horror movie but it definitely is not spooky.

6. One thing Tarantino does not do is mystery. And not just spooky horror mystery but also another kind of mystery.

7. You've seen the other kind of mystery in a lot of the foreign films that Tarantino loves: a character appears and is doing something and you don't know what. It may turn out to be something banal, like shopping while waiting to hear back from her doctor about a life-threatening illness, or something crazy, like running from the mob or stepping through a time warp to talk to a machine consciousness from the future.

And, crucially, even when you do know what's going on, you aren't told what the interesting part of it is supposed to be. The point is: you don't immediately know what's going on and part of what the film is saying is: I know you're confused, we have to watch other peoples' lives carefully to see what's going on. The mystery around simple plot points is part of the aesthetic. The poetry is in the difficulty of extractng any meaning from anything in this crazy world. David Lynch was an American director who definitely did take on this kind of Euromystery. He could make a diner or a police station as strange and new as a black dimension of evil spirits. 

8. Basically these kinds of films trust the audience to eventually notice there is some kind of beauty in what's going on. But it is also possible that the audience won't "get it" because the movie never signals "Alright, here's where its supposed to be awesome". You either notice The Week-End is beautiful and surreal and as absurd as life or you scratch your head wondering where those sheep came from. 

9. Often this is when a film critic is brought in to explain the art movie to the audience.

10. So here's my thesis about Quentin, with Pulp as the prime example:

Quentin managed to use all the techniques of arty filmmaking to make a blockbuster by chucking out the mystery and instead making the explaining-what's-going-on part of the movie. The film critic has been entertainingly imported into the movie.

He shows instead of telling---but then he also tells.

But he doesn't do it in a Deadpool way, as a winking meta-comment, he does it by making the explaining part of the movie--sometimes the best part.

Quentin Tarantino made an arty, creative movie that does not trust the audience at all. He tells everyone everything multiple times, but somehow manages to not make it condescending either.

11. The stakes, context and meaning of basically every single big plot event in Pulp Fiction is hyperexplained by characters in the movie--in ways that don't suck:

-A European director would've just let that diner get robbed in the middle of Jules and Vincent's conversation about walking the Earth. This would disorient the audience, making us feel like we were getting robbed of the one thing we now know Jules and Vince reliably supply (great dialogue)--which is fun! But QT is making a blockbuster. 

Tarantino doesn't want audiences confused by where this new two-person gun crime is coming from and what it might have to do with the previous two-person gun crime (nothing, but Godard would want that confusion--America is just full of guns and violence and so its absurdly funny for two violent criminals to get robbed at gunpoint just after a crime of their own). 

So what does Tarantino do? QT gives us a prologue at the beginning of the movie where the two diner robbers extensively discuss why anyone would rob a diner (Denver omelette, anyone?). We don't know why they're doing it when we see it, but when it pays off, our confusion evaporates.

-J &V discuss Tony Rocky Horror and the foot massage. Why? It sets up the stakes of the Mia Wallace date. Tony stepped out of line and got thrown four stories. Almost every other director would've let us realize for ourselves that touching the boss gangster's wife is a high-risk activity (Hell even I know that), QT makes sure we know, but does it fun, and with swearing.

-At the end of the execution scene, Jules recites a Bible verse and we're left hanging with that--shots fire and the scene ends. Why did he do that? Again, an art movie director would've just let us live with the weirdness of it (David Lynch would've), but no, QT then has Jules explain, scenes later “I just thought it was some coldblooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass.” Then his spiritual awakening is because he is thinking about what it means and he explains that.

-Christopher Walken's cameo. What's he explaining? How important the gold watch is. Again: many other directors would've made a scene where the boxer, trying to survive in a world of murder-capitalism, is fixated on a gold watch he used to own for reasons of symbolism alone. Not QT. You're gonna be told and you're gonna be told by the greatest weird-exposition scene guy in film history.

-Butch kills a guy in the ring. Do we see boxing? No. Do we see a scene where the boxer explains to a driver how he feels about killing a man in the ring? Yes we do.

-Willis blows up at Fabiana for forgetting the watch. He then, in the car, explains it all to himself (and us) again. "I didn't explain to her how important the watch was..."

-Now we have the one thing that's not glossed by anyone in the movie: the pawn shop basement grotesquerie. Why is this happening? Well, its in the title at least: Pulp Fiction. This is a lurid story and you came here for violence and cheap thrills. No explanation needed.

-The Bonnie Situation starts with the unlikely end of the execution previously seen and then Jules and Vince discussing the meaning of the previous scene--was it a miracle?

-Marvin gets shot. Grieving Marvin--Jules! friend!--takes a back seat to Jules (to Vincent), then Quentin (to Jules and Vincent), then Jules again (on the phone to boss Wallace), then the Wolf (to Jules, Vincent and QT) all explaining how dangerous it is to be roaming around The Valley in the middle of the day with a dead body.

This sequence contains almost nothing but people explaining to each other how serious the situation is and other people trying to crack jokes while they do it. And did they have to? No. Like 90% of crime directors before 1980 would've maybe spent one line reminding the audience that cops tend to notice shit like you're driving a car drenched in fucking blood, then gone about the business of having these cold-hearted gangsters get to work doing their mysterious, underground business with hatchets and garbage bags and whatever. Watch, say, Sexy Beast or Gangster Number One for great examples.

-The whole film basically ends with an exegesis--Jules explaining the Bible verse. 

12. So what's all this have to do with games? 

13. Remember: while immersion (mystery! confusion! where are we?) is fun. But the other thing can be, too: just explaining what is going down and why you should care. And in RPGs, with all the numbers, and the players who missed sessions or forgot the rules, or were in bathroom, often requires a lot of explaining--about the story or the stakes or the backstory or the math. But explaining can be fun. Explaining can be the difference between a fun afternoon at the movies and a full-on blockbuster.

Sanctum of the Heresiarch (a one-shot dungeon)

So in the Lands of the Heresiarch, the Xenomorph-worshipping cult (think Alien: Resurrection but in the  middle-ages) has built its shrine around the crashed ship where the alien was first discovered.

This is where the cult performs its creepy rituals and the cult's alchemist performs his creepy experiments.

click to enlarge

We Won The 3 Castles Award (Again)

 Like Red & Pleasant Land before it, Nebulith, our Japanese-themed LOTFP book, just won the prestigious (and very heavy) Three Castles Award.

This award is extra cool because the award jury tends to be composed entirely of game designers from the early days of the hobby, the Red & Pleasant Land jury was David "Zeb" Cook (of the original Oriental Adventures), Steve Perrin (Runequest), Dr Dennis Sustare (as in Chariot of Sustarre), James M Ward (Metamorphosis Alpha), and Steve Winter (Nightmares of Future Past, etc). 

Winter, Sustare, and Grubb, were on the jury this year, along with Allen Hammack (of TSR's Slave Lords series), and Ben Burns (Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds)

Grubb, who wrote a lot of classic stuff including the Marvel Super-Heroes (FASERIP) RPG and Al-Qadim and Spelljammer, had this to say about Nebulith:

The Nebulith is a volcano magically halted mid-eruption, so it is a huge frozen stone cloud hanging over the island of Awa Nikko, and serves as the "dungeon" for this setting. The setting is rich in lore, changing the euro-centric LotFP rules to adapt to samurai, ninja, and martial arts. This is the first Asian-themed product I've read that beats out the venerable Oriental Adventures from TSR. I love the art, I love the lore, I love the game design.

So, that's very cool!

If you haven't got it, its available here and here.

If you ask about it and anyone gives you static, it's because of this and this.

John Blanche Is Dead

 John Blanche is dead.

Probably no artist in the gaming hobby was as simultaneously influential and original at the same time as he was. As artist and art director at Games Workshop, he was the key figure in creating and perpetuating the Warhammer Look that still sells gobs of miniatures to this day, and basically invented modern grimdark.

That kinda sells it short because he was also a huge part of what kept Warhammer weird--he had a creaky, eccentrically filligreed sensibility and a wonderful color sense that combined an electric modern intensity with a feeling for the weight of the past in a way nobody has ever managed to copy--war-banner red and the gold-yellow of bad teeth and age.

John Blanche pictures look like ancient records from an alternate universe where it all played out in a series of enigmatic and brutal cartoons. Like history paintings by a post doom-metal Terry Gilliam, everything is alarmingly vivid and yet completely inevitable. Prog rock in Hell.

His sense of anatomy and composition resisted the emphasis on optically plausible movement and scale that was so enthusiastically embraced not only in the fine art in the 400 years after the Renaissance, but by so many fantasy illustrators influenced by photography, comic books and guys like Frank Frazetta. Blanche figures don't move through space--they have always been there. He and a few like-minded neo-primitive geniuses like Ian Miller turned Warhammer and 40k's "backstory" and "fluff" into lore.

He could summon all the connotations of that word using an alchemy that made everything new old again. Anybody can make a picture and say it's something that happened a thousand years ago--with Blanche you felt it, even when they had space armor and bolt guns.

RPG artists can all depict war, these Blanche visuals were key to Warhammer's very cynical, British, and wargame-friendly sense of eternal war. Think Iron Maiden, Mötorhead, Garth Ennis, once more into the breach (and Bolt Thrower, of course). There's no fucking timeline in Warhammer, no progress, no revolution, no good guys, no solutions, no change in the setting, no leader you can trust, no reasons for any of it--you and another unworthy god met in school and now you will be moving miniature men back and forth on a hilltop you made forever.

His art and that of the colleagues he hired on and managed is the main reason that the British D&D crew at White Dwarf that turned into Games Workshop stood apart from all the other D&D competitors long enough to create a distinct identity.

And as far as I can tell, he was also really cool.

Rest quietly in the void, big guy. You've done enough.

Caroline Pierce Ate A Cat

 

If you know Caroline Pierce--outside of her, ahh, work--pretty much the first thing you know is she's a cat lady. Epic scale cat lady.

But last night she ate a cat.

Ok, technically her character ate a cat, Elaria, the half-elf ranger.

In her defense, it was because she refused to eat a person, so that's a good(?) sign.

I blame Session 2 of Maze of the Blue Medusa.

It went like this:

After last session our heroines wake up in the first room there at the bottom, barricade themselves inside and hope to regain spells etc and heal up for their next sojourn into the Maze.

They are interrupted after an hour by a polite knock on the door from 6 Bondye Reparatè (humans who believe the Maze is heaven and their job is to perform maintenance on it). They would never be so impolite as to bash down the door so they slide a polite offering of two hand-rolled cigarettes beneath the door and move on.

Despite Elaria, being a ranger and all, being able to identify these as ordinary hand-rolled cigarettes, a weirdly lot of time is spent trying to figure out what the cigarettes do (nothing except give you cancer 40 years after making you look cool).

The next hour a Chronomancer (lizard wizard) and a pair of his thrall mammals (ape-morons) show up. They kill one moron and steal the pearl that allows the Chronomancer to control the other and shoot him fulla holes before he can use his time-magic to reverse the damage. The newly-cnotrolled moron thus played an important meatshield/scouting role in the rest of the session.

Also note the girls made extensive use of the wardogs in this fight as they pounced on and murdered one of the morons, though out of deference to a recently deceased real pet Kimberly Kane's was turned into a war-cat.

You might see where this is going.

So anyway after defeating the Chronomancer, the girls went past the living chess pieces (basically a wise decision), used a mirror to investigate the Jade Tiles That Freeze You and inadvertently made them freeze themselves.

(Dialogue in this room:

Michelle: "Uh, I have Trap Sense?"

Zak: "You sense this is a trap.")

 ...and then cast Dispel Magic to make thetiles mundane enough to cross. Halfway through another Lizard Wizard attacks and gets beat up.

All this time Caroline Pierce is taking notes. 

Zak: "You take a lot of notes, CP."

Caroline: "Well the thing is your dungeons are always like a puzzle, none of my other games are like that."

Zak: "I don't know whether that's a compliment or not, but you're still around after 15 years so I'll assume its a compliment."

They investigate some more rooms and pronounce them weird. They are: the room with the snail golem, the room with the light-eating roses, the room with the grape juice.

Then they go into the Gallery section.

Those of you who have played Maze of the Blue Medusa know that in the Gallery section there's a mechanic that speeds up time and spoils food. So the PCs get hungry fast and will start to lose hp if they don't eat.

There are lots of solutions to this--the Create Food and Water spell, moving in and out of the gallery from the peripheral areas around it, stashing food in other places, etc., but a common one among the adventuring classes is cannibalism.

The PCs poke around at the magical artworks, including the paintings that show all the wounds you have, then encounter some cannibal critics! They hate art and want to eat the moron! (Contary to popular belief, Patrick Stuart made these monsters up. They are jussssst this side of too whimsical for me.) The PCs make quick work of them and Michelle's halfling Jinx wastes no time slicing off one's cheek and eating it. Kimberly Kane's cleric of the Great Maggot eats the other. I remind her the Great Maggot has no compunctions about eating flesh.

Elaria, a noble half- elf, abstains.

Soon they find the pit in the middle of the reptile-eye floor mosaic and head inside, down into the Reptile Archive. After accidentally annihilating the Nyctocaust Memorial (a touch-sculpture that is destroyed by light, oops) Elaria takes the multi-lingual warning sign ("please do not use light in this room") to see if she can start to puzzle out other languages from it. Clever.

Soon they wind up in the room with the clockwork needlebirds that tattoo you. They send the moron in first. He gets tattooed to death. Then they send in the pets. The cat gets tattooed to death. Only the terrier escapes.

Elaria helicopters in with her magic morningstar (the Steel Cyclone) and kills the remainder of the birds but it's too late. And she's hungry, losing hit points. She barbecues the cat.

Jinx attached the cat's tail to her hat. "Well we are using every part of the animal".

The rest is conscientiously sliced up into pieces and packaged for later. After a short fight with a chameleon women waiting to ambush them and passing some strips of tattooed flesh and undead bees, the crew winds up in the lair of the Lampen Proletariat, a wax golem who urges revolution against the masters of the Archive.

What will they do???? Find out next time!!!!

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The Testing Chamber

This can be used in any appropriate dungeon or just as its own dungeon. It should keep players busy for an hour or two.

• PCs appear in the chamber colored green. 
• Each of the four doors out of the green room has one symbol: sword, coin, cup, wand.
• Behind each of these doors is a sleeping ogre with a sack of coins worth 100gp. Each ogre is identical to the other three.
• Opening the red doors leads to a magic portal--the portal leads back to the green room.
• To end this loop, each ogre must be overcome by the proper means, which won't be told explicitly to the PCs:
• --The ogre behind the sword door must be defeated (at least partially) by physical attacks
• --The ogre behind the wand door must be defeated (at least partially) by magic
• --The ogre behind the coin door must have his coins taken by the PCs in a nonviolent way
• --The ogre behind the cup door must not be harmed (or robbed) at all--just get to the door
• If an ogre is overcome in the way appropriate to their door, then they will remain in the state they were left (dead, sleeping, etc) any time that door's checked until all 4 of these identical ogres have been properly overcome.
• If an ogre is overcome in an "inappropriate" way, they will reappear in their original state (unharmed and asleep with all their coins) next time their door's opened and any coins taken from that ogre will evaporate.
• Once all four sleeping ogres are overcome in the way appropriate to their door, the PCs still reappear in the green room, but this time each door leads to an ogre that's awake. This is a different ogre (technically a mountain ogre rather than forest ogre) and he has a sack of coins worth 400gp. He must be overcome 4 times in the same ways as above.
• After the mountain ogre, the 4 rooms contain coffins, inside each of which contains 800gp and an (identical) sleeping vampire. She must be overcome 4 times in the same ways as above.
• After the coffin is overcome, the 4 rooms each contain a different vampire (awake) wearing 1200gp worth of jewelry. She must be overcome 4 times in the same ways as above.
• After all that, the test is over and the new, richer PCs can go back to whatever and wherever they were.

Return to the Maze of the Blue Medusa

Oh you all know the Maze of The Blue Medusa, right?

It's the dungeon where Andy Markham of the OSR Facebook Group said "It's definitely one of the best looking books ever published for the OSR, or for RPGs in general," (before he joined in on a giant online harassment campaign to frame me for rape.)

...and where Ben Milton from Questing Beast said "One of the biggest releases, I think, in the history of D&D publishing", (before he joined in on a giant online harassment campaign to frame me for rape.)

...and where Ken Hite of Trail of Cthulhu "Let's put it this way: it's a dungeon you actually want to read the prose in. To grown adults." (before he also joined in on a giant online harassment campaign to frame me for rape.)

...and where Tim Brannan from The Other Side blog said "After 36+ years of gaming, precious little seems 'new' to me. This feels new." (before he, too, sadly joined in on a giant online harassment campaign to frame me for rape.) 

...and where Monte Cook said "Clearly jam-packed with awesome ideas." (before he as well joined in on a giant online harassment campaign to frame me for rape.) 

I wonder if they went back to feeling that way now that I successfully sued five times about this bullshit? I recommend asking them. I recommend asking them any chance you get. Anyway, I always liked it.

So the girls were in a spot of bother

After successfully handling the giant shrikes and some adventures in the Scorned Mountains, the girls...

Caroline Pierce aka Elaria, Half-Elf Ranger

Michelle aka Jinx, Halfling thief

Kimberly Kane aka Dr Feargood, tiefling cleric

...were given an assignment by Dr Feargood's Church of the Great Maggot to clear out a fortress full of moon priestesses and werewolves.

To make a long story short, things went poorly, they lost the element of surprise and several henchmen, their pet giant turned against them and they wound up surrounded, low on hit points and in need of escape. Luckily, Jinx had a book containing a ritual that allows you to teleport away to The Maze of the Blue Medusa. They used it, the session ended.

It's been ages since any of the players were in the Maze playtests and none of these characters have been, so its fun to see how it handles after a few years...

1. In the standard Maze, you steal the painting to open a portal to this room. In this case, they were transported in an emergency by a spell so I figured the painting wasn't actually in the room. There's just a space where it use to be.

The girls decided to rest 8 hours and get back hit points, abetted by a magic lock that could lock any door. I rolled 8 hours of random encounters but the only things that could past the door was Torcul Wort, a friendly ghost, and Pellory-of-the-Walls--usually a dangerous plant monster that could've TPKd the party but luckily the ranger had read a book (The Green Opus: Leveling up with this book allows the PC to know all the stats and abilities of any plant monster on a successful Int roll of 10 or better, received as treasure in some adventure) that gave her info on plant monsters, so they made short work of Pellory.

2. After a refreshing sleep behind a barricade they came out met the artifact hoarding dragon-woman Lady Crucem Capilli.

"So she's all blue, and has like, ram-like horns on either side and..."

"Wait, is she hot?"

(The girls always ask this.)

"Yes, she's hot."

So Jinx tries to flirt the Lady into telling her where things in the Maze are but that's not The Lady's way. The party agrees to fetch her some items for some cash-as-xp because they're in need of a motivation anyway so that all works out.

They take a look through the archways:

3. The room where you can fall through shadows into a floor is always fun. The girls think to throw a lantern in their first and notice it sinks partially into the floor. They decide fuck this room.

4. They look down into the vertiginous tangle of the Escher stairs and think well probably also fuck this room.

7. Poking the floor in 7 causes Cyanoxantha, the Living Mosaic, to speak:

The first to cross these coils must dance,

The second, sing to safety reach,

The third must bleed or risk mischance,

The fourth one dies between my teeth,

The next will be the first once more,

And do not cheat, I’m keeping score.

That's an immediate 'Nope' because nothing is more fearful than poetry.

Being like "Ok, we gotta go somewhere..." they eventually pick the stairs.

4. (again) Jinx bravely sends her war terrier, Kevin, to investigate by throwing a biscuit onto the stairs. Kevin luckily rolls a Nat 20 when the stairs violently re-orient midway down which reveals their magic, and allows Kevin to avoid becoming one of the corpses at the bottom of them.

Dr Feargood (played as she is by longtime barbarian Kimberly Kane) briefly considers going back into room 2 and just beating the shit out of Lady CC before accepting that the stairs are are a problem that can basically be solved with rope. They decide the locked door's not worth the trouble and head into the dark fastness of Subfoetens and his Filomel Shell.

8. Since the girls aren't carrying much treasure, the Shell is perfectly happy to let them pass while it tries to keep Subfoetens asleep. 

Jinx tries to talk to it. It goes "Sssh!", points to the sleeping baby, and keeps singing its lullaby.

Frustratedly, she mimes uselessly for a bit, then threatens "Let us pass or else!" with sword drawn at which point I remind her the Shell is not in the way and they can just walk past to the next room and they do. 

9. On the rope bridge through the next passage, I roll a random encounter and its the Decadent Waste--a valuable mechanical hummingbird that leads you into danger.

They remember they have a net, catch it in one round, and then try to figure out how to get back to Lady Crucem C to sell it.

7. (again) They prod the living mosaic again, this time from the north end. It delivers its second spiel:

You didn't listen to my rhyme

And talked amongst yourselves like fools

You’ll pay attention more next time

Now risk your death to find my rules

It's deal with this shit or go back the way they came, so they opt to deal. Jinx tosses a dust that distorts magic onto the mosaic, making the serpent only partially able to become three-dimensional. Dr Feargood using a potion of being invisible to reptiles to sneak over and deliver a Nat 20 to it while Elaria bashes it with her magic morningstar. After getting bit twice, Jinx coup-de-graces it with a silver rock hammer she picked up somewhere.

2. Back to Capelli to get paid for the hummingbird, more flirting.

1. Back to the start. Door closed. Magic lock in place.

They try to sleep but after 15 minutes there's a pounding noise--six chameleon women start trying to machete the door open. 

Dr Feargood lives up to her reputation and Causes Fear to one of them and Elaria takes the rest--luckily these were the first Chameleon Woman encounter so they were just 1HD hatchlings. 

The girls close and lock the door again. Maybe next time they'll be lucky and no more random encounters? Maybe KK won't have a migraine? Who can say? Find out in the next episode!

Starting to think 4chan's not a reliable source of information on games