Picture Notebook For 'Eat Me'

"...if you don't know what that means," said the blog "click the tag where it says "Eat Me" in small friendly letters at the bottom of this post. You will be delighted to find it tells you everything you need to know."

Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats?

Rules of Wonderland

"Wife is now fooling around on the tablet I bought so I have email access when traveling. It has the Alice in Wonderland books preloaded on it and she is amazed. Me, I'm suddenly struck by the idea of putting a young blonde in a blue dress on the cover of an adventure I'd call "Eat Me," said James Edward Raggi IV.

"I will write you that adventure," I said, "for a modest advance."

And so it was decided.

So I am re-reading the first proper book I ever read.

The principle challenge will be making Wonderland and the Looking Glass world metal enough to be the kind of D&D adventure I'd like to actually run, while avoiding all the Horror Alice cliches we've seen since the '90s.

Today's notes:

Rules of Wonderland (So Far)

1. Minor actions have major consequences.

2. (Perhaps due to awareness of this literary rue): Wonderland creatures seek to persist in a continuous, ordered and repetitive state.

3. They become agitated when that state is disrupted.

4. Offense taken is inversely proportional to offense meant.

5. (Corollary of 4) Real violence, oppression, and injustice are ignored or purposefully misunderstood. Minor, accidental or imagined breaches of etiquette are met with violence, oppression, and injustice.

6. In all situations (including trials), tangents are more important than the purported purpose of the conversation

7. While physical space and causality are often ignored or distorted, the division between interior and exterior is observed. You have to go through a door or other threshold to get into a building or out of one.

8. Exterior spaces are like gardens.

9. Interior spaces are like homes.

10. Food makes you shrink or grow, the opposite of whatever you just did. Exception: Mushrooms.

11. Size changes are relative until you cross a threshold.

12. Everyone is difficult.

13. No-one is unalterably hostile.

14. No-one can be made to understand anything.

15. Objects are immutable, lifeforms aren't.

Trust The Weird

Ok, the first thing to do is read this.

The second thing to do is realize it's very very good. It's a good D&D idea. It's a good short story.

The third thing is to know that James Teleleli Hutchings sent me his book, months and months ago ("The New Death and Others") and asked if I might review it. Which he did with a lot of bloggers.

More things:

So I read The New Death at the same time I was reading How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu. A much more celebrated book.

Aside from the fact that both of them--the "compelling new voice" and the total unknown--represent people steeped in games and sci-fi movies and comics and things like that turning themselves into writers (which is going to be a very big theme in American and British lit in the next 15 years, I think), they both have 2 other things in common.

The first thing is: both authors are really good at writing about weird things. So they're worth paying attention to.

Like I said: the link at the top is a short story. Some dipshit may come in my comments and demand that stories have beginnings, middles and ends in narrated time rather than simply be long descriptions but this person would be wrong and ignorant of many authors including probably the patron saint presiding quietly over both Charles Yu and James Hutchings' work here, Jorge Luis Borges. And even if the person was not wrong, they would be ignoring the fact that the text above does whatever work a short story is supposed to do, so it comes to the same thing.

Now the second thing Charles Yu and James Hutchings have in common: both of them are less good when they try to use their very good writing about weird things in a more conventional story format.

Hutchings presses his concisely imagined, poetic, inventive worldbits into service as plot set-ups in horror stories or otherwise tales of the post-Gaiman post-Barker weird genre. Yu sends his sci fi brain ("a certified network technician for T-class personal-use chronogramattical vehicles, and an approved independent affiliate contractor for Time Warner Time, which owns and operates this universe as a spatio-temporal structural and entertainment complex zoned for retail, commercial, and residential use.") to work meeting the demands of middlebrow literary fiction (the main characters has a...sigh...distant father and a...yawwwwn...inscrutable mother and is...zzzzzz...concerned about it).

In both cases, the writing goes all flabby and flat when it's just doing the work of weaving the details around a plot we are supposed to (by broad assumption) all care about.

You can have a story about a boy who does something bad and there are terrifying consequences and you can do a story about a guy who wants to understand his dad, but in both cases you have to treat trying to communicate these things in a new and real way as if it were as hard as communicating about a time-distortion shark that chews people open from the inside-out.

Our traditional interest in traditional concerns should not be assumed, and in both these cases I think it is.

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And here's the point.

Crazy weird inventive things are not just a new set-dressing for ordinary, traditional stories about ordinary traditional people with ordinary traditionally humanistic concerns.

It's a truism that you can tell the same story in Camelot as in Brooklyn as in the 3000th century but, as a writer, if you do exactly that, and don't let the style inform the form at all, you are missing some important differences between Camelot, Brooklyn and the future.

Set dressing means something (though this is not necessarily easy to decode). It's not just the art direction is new, the whole thing is new.

A JG Ballard story not only is not about the same things as an Isaac Asimov story, it goes to different places and requires different kinds of characters. The same goes for Lovecraft, Vonnegut, Orwell, anyone who has successfully used Weird New Ideas. They have to warp the entire form and all the characters to accomodate the new ideas.

I wish The New Death had been a little braver and just decided "Ok, a description of some Cold People who live in a forest is a story. I don't need to tell people to be afraid of them or not afraid or have a character meet them, I just have to put the best of what I have to offer and nothing else out there by itself and see what kind of story it is. And if the story needs more that more will have to be written with the same energy of invention as the new idea was.".

As is, I'd rather read every day of James' Teleleli blog than James' stories. And I get the impression he'd rather write it than write his stories.

I think this is a challenge for every RPG-influenced writer that has come along or will--and many will in the next few years, there are more of them every day.

How many awesomely conceived and animated Japanese cartoons have you seen weighed down by yet another moony love-triangle where people hug their knees and stare off at falling leaves? How many pop fantasy novels combine one or two great worldbuildy ideas with 300 pages of He moved like a shadow through the whatever toward the imposing whatever.

What James and Charles have done is a more sophisticated version of the same bait-and-switch: hedging their bets about the resonance of their new ideas with tried-and-true formulae about beginnings middles and ends and relatable characters and emotions that stories are supposed to make us feel.

I wish people who lived and were clearly raised in worlds of ideas had more confidence in the power of ideas alone to be compelling. When I was 10 I didn't need Batman to have a kid sidekick in order to be able to render it readable, I still don't.

Either leave Robin out or take on the hard work of making him as interesting as Batman.

There is an idea that these stock plots and forms exist because they resonate with something eternally unchangingly human in us. But there are a lot of things about "us" that do change. We like new ideas because we are new people, and the forms need to change to respect that.

I could go on and try to explain how this all relates in my mind to recent trends in RPGs related to commodifying gamable ideas into stock drooler-story formats, but I finished my review and those thoughts are still half-formed.

The Space Opera Bar Just Went Up

"Beneath the pocked and gouged surface, choked with God knew how many million years of dust, lay what came to be called the Pearlant Labyrinth.

"Two generations of entradistas hacked their way in. That was a story in itself. Lost expeditions, weird fevers, death. Every side-tunnel full of ancient machinery incubating an acute sense of injustice. They contended with fungus spores, cave-ins, passages flooded by non-Abelian fluids at room temperature. They were driven mad by the feelings of being observed. Worse, the labyrinth, clearly some kind of experiment in itself, had been constructed with such exquisite fractality that the term 'centre' could only ever be a distraction. The experimental space,through which temporal anomalies ticked and flared in direct response to events deep inside the Tract ('As if,' someone said, 'it was built to tell the time in there'), would always contain more distance than its outer surface permitted. Eventually a team of maze-runners from FUGA-Orthogen - an EMC subsidiary specializing in nuclear explosives, capitalised out of New Venusport on the sale of mining machinery somewhat older than the labyrinth itself-hacked its way into the vast, ill-defined chamber which would come to be known as the Old Control Room. Their shadows scattered, jittery and spooked, across its perfectly flat allotropic carbon deck. They gathered at a respectable distance. They cracked their helmets and let fall their thermobaric power tools. They admired the fluttering opalescence of the Aleph where it lay suspended in its cradle of magnetic fields. They knew they had struck it rich."

M John Harrison, big Warhammer Fantasy influence, author of Viriconium--the absolute best Weird and D&Dable City novel/short story collection (only it knows which it is) of all time, and, (note, Redditors) avid rock climber, has just written and released something called Empty Space, and after about a dozen slow pages, it is shaping up to be the best postrational sci fi novel of all time. At the very least since William Burroughs died.

And it has a dungeon in it.

No, you don't have to read the other books before it to get it. Or at least: it won't help. It is definitely in a class by itself.

Inasmuch As The Donkey Continues To Experience An Ongoing Tug At It's Nether Regions...

Last year around this time I received the prestigious Medal of Yavin Award For The Actual Best Product Regardless of What The People Who Give Out Ennies Say from the even more prestigious Jeff Rients.As the caretaker of the Medal I now have decided (rulings not rules, right?) that I get to decide who gets it this year now that the Ennies have yet again continued to completely stiff many hardworking and obviously innovative teams of funmongers.

So, the Luke Skywalker Yavin for Best Product You Could Reasonably Expect To Bring Home To Meet The Parents in 2012 goes to...

Goodman Games Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG!

Seriously. Good stuff.

The Han Solo DIY Scruffy-Looking Scoundrel Yavin goes to...The 2012 One Page Dungeon winners!

Also:

The Chewbacca Mention Yavin (You're A Winner But You're Too Hairy For A Medal) goes to Small But Vicious Dog

And the Princess Leia Award (You did a good job, pat pat, but I was somewhat involved so it'd be like giving myself a medal and that's bullshit) goes to Secret Santicore 2011.

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The people on the DCC RPG team and the One Page Dungeon winners choose next year's winner. Whatever product gets the most votes from members of those two teams wins. No, Joseph Goodman does not get any more votes than anyone else.

Summer FASERIP Crossover Update

So, in my Marvel Super Heroes game Madame Hydra had taken over Berlin and set up HQ in Alexanderplatz...
I gave them this map and told them they could parachute in where they liked, or SHIELD could smuggle them in to the train station (away from the anti-aircraft guns).

Thanks to Hawkeye's diversion, Deadman's treachery, Deadpool's doorkicking, Michael Morbius' timely grab, Cloak's...um...cloak...and, of course, Captan America's able leadership, Berlin is once more in the hands of Angela Merkel.

But Earth isn't out of the woods yet...





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