Gamer Blogs
What is it with bald Lunar women?
Cos, you know, the Goddess had hair.
I guess it started with that picture by Tom Sullivan, with the Lunar priestess with her plunging neckline standing in front of a statue of a Bald Goddess. I mean we all love a plunging neckline (though it isn’t that flattering to my aging skin), but really, what is going on here? Even MoB lampooned it with princess Anderida of Raibanth and her bald pigeon.
Is it that they shave their heads so they look like the moon or is that they are so preternaturally absent minded that they keep forgetting to put on their wigs?
The Goddess, in most of her aspects, has sport an assortment of highly complex coiffures. Each hairstyle has distinct meaning, and there is a good living to be made in the Heartland as hairdresser or wig maker. Style denotes social status, cultic affiliation and even intent of the wearer. The Balancer style (as worn by Natha), for instance, is often worn when seeking restitution. The implied threat is obvious to all, and is never invoked lightly.
Not only the women sport elaborate hair in the Empire. The noble boys of Alkoth and Carmania grow their hair as a sign of devotion, as do professional soldiers. On reaching adult hood if the man wishes to pursue a life other than a devotee of Shargash, he ritually cuts his hair and gives his braid to the high priest. In the event of war this will be presented back to him and he will be told Shargash Commands! He will wear his braid as a crown.
Devotees of Shargash, of course, never cut their hair, but bind it in blood red silks, which they wind around their heads and tie in elaborate knots. Many a visitor to Alkoth has met a brutal death by beating for comparing this tradition to the habit of Rufelza to loop her hair 7 times upon her head.
Part of the reason for the domed helmets amongst Heartland corps is that soldiers tradionally have their hair tied up upon the crown of their heads in cloth of their regimental colours (this is a conceit that dates back to the defeat of Sheng Seleris, & is considered a minor inspiration of Moon Son).
As officers progress in the herocult of Yanafarl, they are taught the correct hair knot of their rank. Cultic awards take the form of elaborate hair ornaments, pins and hair cups.
Don’t even get me started on Orlanthi hair etiquette. It amazing what they’ll do because they know their god will keeps their hair out of their eyes.
Random yelping!
I’m not sure if I’m a good fit for an art blog as I am officially the Laziest Artist Simon Knows. So, what this will mainly be will be my random musings on marginal things.
There may even be some artwork*.
Note: I am the Art Greg; my artistic ideas about Glorantha are fickle, and tend to be contrary. I don’t subscribe to a lot of what has now become canon**.
* only if I can overcome my own indolence, of course.
** I’m very proud of my Babeestor Gori player, who scaled CliffHome to petition CragSpider… in the dark & the rain… while 5 months pregnant. And so was CragSpider.
20/10 Hindsight
Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.
A year ago, more or less, I got an out-of-the-blue phone call from Mongoose, informing me that my contract was being terminated. I was Mongoose’s longest-serving staff writer by far, having started way back in May of 2003. That equates to roughly five million words, by the way, the vast majority of which were delivered on deadline.
The termination came with a month’s notice and a thank-you, nothing more. Such is the lot of the freelancer.
2010 was a chaotic year. I’m still dealing with the aftermath of my mother’s death. I got married. I ran a marathon. I tried to have a kid, found out I’m very close to infertile, started on a course of IVF. Meanwhile, of course, the world decides to go into meltdown, and I watched as the government pushes the country to the brink of bankruptcy and oblivion. 2010 was almost entirely interesting times.
So, what have I learned? The emphasis here, of course, is on the ‘I’; these lessons are painfully obvious to everyone, but they’re what I need to internalise and take from the past year.
Quality, not Quantity: I was successful at Mongoose primarily because I was able to produce lots of moderate-quality material on command on almost any topic. While that’s useful, I need to aim higher. I must break myself of the mindset that the first draft has to be the final draft. When you’re producing a book a month from scratch, there’s no time for planning, editing, rewriting or anything other than getting words out as quickly as possible, but other companies don’t work like that. Not everyone is Mongoose.
Constraint is Focus: I need to relearn the skill of juggling overlapping projects instead of working on them in series, and to do it all without the pressure of monthly deadlines. I’ve taken to using pomodoro for time management, with good results on days when I can get a good run-up at work. Other days, I’m so squeezed for time that I’m forced to focus. I need to make sure that every day is one or the other, and stop wasting time on the internet.
Fail Better: Remember those five million words? I own none of them. They’re all work for hire, and most of them are written for licensed games so they’re doubly not-mine. For someone who’s allegedly prolific, I’ve written only a tiny amount for myself, and an even smaller amount for public consumption. I’m afraid of failure and obscurity, so I don’t even try. To hell with that. Write, fail, write better.
The World is Strange: It was a year when ‘low orbit ion cannons’ were in newspaper headlines, when the roleplaying industry slouched and mutated, when people talked about twitter being an essential service even as the water pipes froze and burst. The older I get, the stranger the world seems, and that is terrifying and inspiring. The lesson to draw from it is that there may be people interested in my stranger ideas, and to break out of my comfort zone. Stop retreading what worked in 2005… or, more accurately, 1982.
Learn Until It Becomes Habit: I have said and blogged these things before. Every year is next year in Jerusalem, the year I finally write that novel, write that game, change the world. So be it – if I have to repeat these assertions and plans until they are become real, then I will. What I tell you three times is true, and what I tell myself a dozen times will eventually become true.
Love is Enough: And I stood on a beach in Kerry in impossible sunshine and I married her, and that is enough. Everything else builds on that.
Gaelcon 2010
Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.
It could be argued that going to Gaelcon in my current mental state was unwise – it’s hard to relax at a con when your embryos are being defrosted and transferred the next day. I also learned that I actively need to GM at least one game early in a con. Apparently, if I can’t get my godhead on early, I’m too nervous to be social. Instead of GMing, I made the mistake of larping for the whole of the first day. Eamon’s Yes, Grand Duke was fun, and amusingly paralleled a lot of the design of PARANOIA: High Programmers, but then I went straight into a six-hour JumpTech game.
Nick’s JumpTech series is more than two years old now. It’s an ongoing sci-fi epic. It’s primarily intrigue and trade, but there’ve been costumed aliens, nerf gun shootouts, space battles, props and all sorts of other ambitious elements. The six-hour Gaelcon game included a life pod prob that turned out to contain an NPC, a change of set half-way through, an awful lot of heavily armed nerf warriors, and free alien food. In the first half, I continued my ongoing efforts to bring the various factions together, encourage peace and stability, and supported the establishment of an interstellar police force.
In the second half, the fascist Sol Unity showed up. Suddenly, all the factions I’d been trying to unite found a common goal – going to war with Sol. As the ranking human diplomat, I had to choose between joining this alliance (and dragging the human colony into war) or opening up our own negotiations with the Sol Unity. I picked the dark side. It was an immensely frustrating decision, and not one I was in the right headspace to enjoy. Six hours of larping meant I was far too invested in the character and his failure.
I took the next morning off, then played a moderately entertaining Vampire session and a lot of boardgames, which was just what I needed. (Prosperity for Dominion is the craziest set ever).
Monday morning, I was unexpectedly dragooned into running Necessary Evils for Savage Worlds, as the GMs they’d lined up couldn’t make it to the con because of the Dublin city marathon. The game was ok; the characters were relatively rules-heavy, but one of the players knew the system and we bumbled through to an acceptable finale. The afternoon slot was a test drive for my own Rakehell setting, using a simple take on FATE as the engine. It went unexpectedly well; more on that once I get the scenario rewritten and up for download.
The d4 hotel continues to be an excellent venue. My only critiques of the con organisation are minor ones, and the event ran very smoothly. The con’s improved markedly over the last year or two – and having finally gotten to GM and throw off my funk, roll on next year.
An RPG in the Lonesome October
Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.
From the Twitterz: emopod Been reading a chapter of this every day:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_in_the_Lonesome_October Thoroughly enjoying it. MylesC @emopod That’s a marvelous book. I prod my wife every October to run a RPG based on it after she admitted the urge to some years ago. emopod@MylesC Ooh, month long rpg? MylesC @emopod It would be lovely to play out each day in October a day at a time. Can’t see ever getting it together logistically though. That’s a design challenge. One aspect of gaming that rpgs often handle poorly is the issue of attendance – what happens when a player misses a game? I’ll handle that in another blog post, but it’s obvious that getting together every night would be infeasible for the vas majority of groups. We could have done it back in college, when everyone was living in gamer-houses and playing four or five nights a week was not considered at all excessive, but we were young then, and foolish, and highly caffeinated. Getting together once a week, though, is doable. A putative rpg version of A Night In The Lonesome October would have to be a mix of play-by-email and tabletop. Each player sends one email to the GM per night, describing their actions for the day. Then, once a week, the players meet up and play through a night as a group. The nebulous rules of the Game played in the book could support this – assume that extended meetings between players are forbidden except on certain nights. During character creation, each player would secretly choose to be an Opener or a Closer. You’d also pick your companion animal (or play the companion animal, and pick your mysterious master) and your other talents. During play, the challenge would be to assemble the list of ingredients you need for your ritual while investigating the actions of the other players. Each player would have their own list of things they needed, but some items would appear on multiple lists. The final session would be on the last night of October. The ultimate decision of Opening or Closing would depend on how far each player got in their ritual, and which side they stood on at the end. System? Right now, I’d be tempted to try the new Smallville rules on it. It’s set up for player-vs-player conflict, and the complex relationship maps it produces do look just like ley lines…Beatdown, Part 2 – Skin, Setting and Future Development
Originally published at Figures of Text. Please leave any comments there.
Continuing on from the last post about my abortive Game Chef entry, the one major thematic element I didn’t manage to handle properly was Skin. When a character loses a scene, he may suffer an Injury – a negative trait that breaks the character’s Skin.
If your Skin’s broken, the Desert gets inside you. The scenes in the final two acts of the game should be based around the character’s injuries. If you lose your girlfriend in Act II, and that’s marked down as an Injury, then she’s bound to come back as a ghost or hallucination in Act IV. If you get bitten by a rattlesnake in one scene, then in the Desert you run out of anti-venom.
Setting: As the parameters of the game are defined in the opening scenes, the setting has to remain nebulous. The Desert’s assumed to be somewhere in the American southwest, but not quite in our reality. Lots of low-key surrealism; a Moorcock heist movie.
(If I go with Ye Traditional Atomic Wasteland for the Desert, then the meaning of Skin may change. In this variant, character start with some form of protection against the hazards of the desert, but can lose this protection over the course of play.)
Future Development: The first thing that needs to be done is number-crunching and playtesting. The game lives and dies by the Edge economy, so the cost of winning has to be correctly balanced. The players should have to think seriously about whether or not they want to win the scene, but they should win enough that the game doesn’t become a completely oppressive beatdown.
Party!
Next Saturday (12th May) is my birthday, so there will be the by now traditional BBQ at our house. Everyone(*) is welcome. The party will start around 7pm, but if anyone wants to turn up in the afternoon and help with the last minute tidying and gardening, feel free. Lifts from/to Linlithgow station will be available. Please bring booze and something nice to cook - we'll have some stuff, but probably not enough...
If anyone needs directions, crash space, or whatever, please drop me an e-mail. Or leave a comment, or whatever.
Word of warning - we will have two large dogs (and one fat cat) wandering around. So, please keep the garden gate shut, and guard your food!
* - Everyone I know is invited. Everyone I know is also welcome to bring anyone they know. As are those people. Really - the more the merrier.
The Seat with the Clearest View?
Anyone care to explain this to me? Or did the writer(s) just go for the horrible "let's leave it so vague that everyone thinks their theory was right..."?
Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3
In other words, my computer died last week, and I have had only limited Internet access since. It might be next week before the new laptop arrives, so expect little from me in the meantime.
The other downside to this is that since money is very tight at the moment, the cash to pay for the new computer is the same cash that was supposed to pay for our flights to Tentacles. We've had to pull out, and all the stuff I was hoping to run will now not happen, or be run by someone else. Apologies to anyone that I've let down.
I'll try to make the next post a bit more cheerful, for my sake as much as anything.
Tentacled Plans
The Curse of the Crimson Sail
30 player pirate freeform
Sir Gerald Fernley-Hamilton, governor of the small Carribean island of San Julianna, looked out from his palace window, and sighed. The ship tacking into the port was the Black Pig, a run-down privateer, crewed by villains. As if he didn't have enough trouble with the pirates already in town. Sir Gerald turned away, reluctantly returning to his desk, and its piles of paper. He glanced swiftly over the latest rumours and reports gathered from the town. Buried treasure, oaths of vengence, assaults, arrests. Nothing new there, then. Sir Gerald pushed the reports aside, and turned his attention to the most horrifying sheet of paper - the seating plan for his only daughter's wedding banquet...
Crimson Sail is the game I was going to run at the Student Nationals, running at Tentacles in its full, 30-player version. Assuming enough people want to play, that is...
Pub Quiz
The Blank Sheet
4-6 Players
Improvised Tabletop RPG.
Players take it in turns to ask the GM a yes/no question, and to make an in-character comment. By this means they create their characters, the scenario, and indeed the world setting.
The Grouse
approx. 1 hour
You have five minutes to convince the audience that your wildest theory is correct. Think Glorantha is round? That the Egyptian Gods were Cthulhoid entities? That Gregging is a good thing? Here's your chance to prove it to the world!
I ran this at Scotscon, and I think it worked pretty well, so we're giving it another try.
Timetables for all this are a little vague at the moment - Crimson Sail at some point on Saturday, not clashing with other freeforms, Blank Sheet Sunday morning, and the other two some evening...
Pub Night
A Quantum Party?
Anyway, we've been looking at the garden, and the lack of time, and wondering what to do. We could invite some people over for a gardening party (do some gardening, eat pizza or whatever, drink wine, and chat) but that means picking a day, and what if it rains? Well, then we'll have a house party, which is basically the same, but the "gardening" bit gets replaced by "maybe play some games, or whatever we feel like at the time". The eating, drinking, and chatting stays the same.
Anyone up for it next Saturday (30th June)? Turn up roughly lunchtime? We're open to suggestions for the kind of food you want to be bribed with. Let me know...
***
I was going to make this a jokey post, with references to the parallel between this and Schrodinger's cat, what with you not knowing what kind of party you've been invited to until you turn up, but I didn't. I suspect you're glad.
This Hole in Me
Okay, I've got no medical diagnosis for this. I did try to talk to a doctor about it once, but he only said "try to get more sleep and sort out the underlying problems". Helpful. My father is dying of cancer, I can't hold down a job, and I'm addicted to daydreaming, to an extent that half the time the real world seems more like somewhere I heard of than a place I ever lived. That sort of stuff just works itself out...
Anyway, I should give a definition of my symptoms, I guess. I'm not talking about the "I listen to Marillion and have the odd bad day, but I'm basically happy" kind of manic depression. That's just attention seeking. Alright, I do listen to Marillion, but that's just to cheer me up. (Take this seriously - "Brave" is *cheerful* music to me...) No, I'm talking about this :
First off there's the down cycle. The I can't sleep without drinking myself into a stupor first, because if I can think, I lie there going "oh shit, I'm a bastard". The I want to die. (I've attempted suicide before, and would have far more often if I could get hold of something which wouldn't involve enormous pain. Including today.) The I'm worthless, useless, pointless, unloveable, unattractive, nothing I do is any good. Your basic self-hate/self-harm trip. That's the depression side.
Then there's the up cycle. This is all, I'm going to win the lottery. I'm going to be a rock star, a famous author, a film director. I'm going to solve P=NP, write the perfect OS, win the Noble prize for computing that they'll invent just for me. I'm going to become Prime Minister, or run the BBC, or... This isn't just daydreaming, this is stuff I seriously believe. This is my life, just waiting to happen, any day now. Just hang on till the weekend, tomorrow, tonight, for another five sodding minutes. Doesn't matter what you do to get there, it'll all come right, cos you are the chosen one! That's the manic-bordering-on-delusional side.
But the bitch is the cycle. While I'm manic there's the voice going "Don't be daft". It isn't sensible. It isn't saying "look, finish a novel while doing some other work, and maybe you'll manage to make a bit of spare money, and at least you'll have fun". It's saying "You're a talentless loser, if you show that to anyone they'll laugh in your face, why bother?" Listen to that voice, down cycle. Ignore it? Only by staying manic, ignoring half of yourself, ignoring reality, clinging to the dream... And when I slip, depression. Getting out of depression is hard. It takes something big, something exciting, something I can get really into. Something that will make me manic, because normal, small pleasures, they don't seem to work.
That's my life. Daydreams that stop me from paying attention to the real world. Or depression that means I can't stand up. Crying or laughing. No middle ground. And it's wrecking my life. I can't interact with people normally. I'm up, and I joke too much, laugh too loud. I'm an ass. Down, and I'm sullen and bad-tempered. I can't just talk normally. That's middle ground. I never learnt how. As a result, I've never got close to anyone, even those who try to get close to me. I don't have friends, just people I've met.
Stuck in the middle of this is Claire. Poor girl.
