Subplot Kudzu

This is my first post here at the latest iteration of Subplot Kudzu. Given that Dreamwidth is meant to be for creators, I want to focus here on the act of creation. Specifically, creation of Tabletop Roleplaying Games. 

Both the creation of the game itself - the intent, the engine, the presentation, the emotional drive - and the creations of the game - the emergent stories, the shared narratives, and the planned outcomes that are maneuvered towards. Why does any of these work, and how. And sometimes just story time with Uncle Brian as I spill out what happened last session. 

Why do this?

Well, I like the act of sharing these stories. I know game write ups can be stilted things, but I have found reading other peoples write ups to be both inspirational and comforting in times of stress, and I'd like to be able to give that back to people if they feel the same way. 

Plus, blogs act as halfway decent repositories for game write ups. They won't capture everything, but they will be enough for the players to look back on for clues (if the game is ongoing) or reminiscences (if its finished), and I also find that to be of value. 

Finally, the act of creation itself, in our day and age, is an act of defiance. The RPG is an art form that no corporation can own; they can't license your game to you on a subscription model and take it back if they decide that's better for them. It's a communal experience, a communal creation, that you can share with others that can't be monetized or censored. Its yours. Forever. Better still, when I'm gaming with kids, that act of creation is modeling to them what it means to be a creative adult, to live a creative life, how to mentor others, and how to create safe spaces for them to be who they are and explore what they could be. I currently have had neurodivergent, trans, and queer kids of all stripes at my tables (including my own daughter), and right now they need that space as much as eve before, if not more. 

These are our games, our creations, our stories, and no one can take them from us. 

I will also be adding book reviews on how the books can be inspiration or fodder for those creations, and cooking because its one of my other creative hobbies. And I suppose just ranting about life as a special needs parent in the ongoing dumpster fire that is the United States. 

That line is, of course, from Brian Michael Bendis' "Fortune and Glory", the story of his attempt to pitch his screenplay based on the true crime saga of Elliot Ness taking on the Cleveland Torso Killer. It also includes one source of of my still present disdain for the new Star Trek movie.

No, I haven't seen it yet. Yes, I know it's getting good reviews. But let me unpack my primary complaints:
1) there is no reason why this movie has to be about Kirk, Spock et al.
2) there is no reason why this movie has to play hob with the existing Star Trek history.

I just don't see it. I don't see that the original show characters are so iconic that they have to be revamped, modified and then recast. The Trek universe has been re-examined from different angles for decades now, and there was no mass exodus from TNG because it didn't feature the original characters. Ditto the other series. (There may have been a mass exodus because the scripts and plots weren't particularly good, but that's a whole other issue.) I just do not see a compelling reason why Paramount couldn't have spent the degree of money and advertisting pushing a new Star Trek movie with a different crew in a different time period.

After all, they're already messing with the existing characters beyond minor tweaks - from what I have heard there's a romantic rivalry with Kirk and Spock after the same woman for example (!?!) - so there's no overwhelming reason to apply the old names to them.  By making all of them younger we trample into the realms of the absurd - Trek canon went to great lengths to explain how Kirk got to be a Star Ship captain as young as 30, with Roddenbery coming as he did from the actual military, but now he's captain right after his Cadet cruise. Because younger is better, apparently, disregarding how the 'aged' Captain Picard became a bit of a 90's sex symbol.

I have also heard that there are a half dozen or so references from the characters about how their future isn't writ, so there will be no attempt to hew to the continuity of the old show - in which case why bother even worrying about it?

As for not playing hob with history, why not set the movie say, 75 years after the events of Voyager where the Federation has been upended and is starting from relative scratch, with the fanboys itching to find out what happened to get to this point rather than looking for the things that are being ignored? Or have it be in the Christopher Pike era but make the characters the crew of the USS Constitution, so we aren't tied to a pre-existing set of character concepts.

I know that in Hollywood there is a strong, strong preferece for redoing what has been done (a Footloose remake? Footloose?!?) rather than breaking new ground. But Trek is one of the few franchise entities that has successfuly broken new ground, so falling back shows a fundemental lack of faith in their material. This has been evident for some time - with Enterprise eschewing all constraints of what has gone before and relying on Vulcans in belly shirts to draw viewers - but I don't understand it. And this movie - which might be a lot of fun and enjoyable - is just another part of it.

( Enterprise Rant )

About how Gmail makes me see way more gaming in the world than there is, I found myself rather perturbed by a recent Newseek article on the evolution of Vampire portrayals in modern culture (culminating with Edward the vamp who is so chaste and good that he even insists his virginal human girlfriend wear buckle up her seat belt - no 1970's LeStat hedonist he!). While it had some interesting points it managed to completely skip the entire 1990's Vampire the Masquerade Goth-Punk scene, the existence of which surely had an impact on the current Vamp portrayals. Apparently gaming is still way too under the radar (or history is easily forgotten, take your pick).

On a similar note, we've been having a few discussion threads in A&E regarding genre tropes, specifically around Horror, and how games need to break away from the cliches now in order to engage the players - Dead Man Stop, the C0C5E sample adventure is apparently a yawner because it's just a run of the mill, Nyarlythotep backed animated dead horror. When exactly did that become run of the mill (not that I doubt that it is)? And is it still run of the mill in the larger culture? Would people who never played an RPG or COC before have the same response it it, or is it because gamers have gotten bored with the "same old thing". (As a counter, Dig To Victory, a COC scenario set in the trenches of WWI, is apparently creepy as all hell, likely because it's not the sort of thing you see every day.)

They hate that.

I read a lot of children's books to Elizabeth, and I always wonder about the varied scales of animal anthropomorphizing they contain. In Franklin's Pet Problem the titular turtle queries his friends Bear, Goose and Beaver as to whether he should have a dog, cat, bird, bunny or fish as a pet. How come some of these animals merit human characteristics and others are relagated to pet status? And this happens all the time!

This completely skips all the books where the animals (usually mice) living near humans use thread spools as tables and tea bags as throw pillows and have little houses inside people's walls. I am gathering that if humans ever did learn that some other animal was tool using at that level we would freak out beyond all measure. But in the realm of children's books this is commonplace. I know it's just one of those things that we have to accept for the myth part of the story, but eventually it gets to me, especially in books like Mary and the Mouse, the Mouse and Mary, where as Mary goes off to Brown in the 1960s to become a hippy peace freak Mouse is also going off to college (Gouda U) to become...a hippy peace freak.

One reason why I always liked the book Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH because the book is pretty clear on this - the rats have human-like tool use because they're Genetically Modified MUTANT FREAKS!

And I respect that.

and I missed it. Just as well I suppose. The flurry of press reports today confirmed that as part of their incredibly inane but high selling cross universe crisis Civil War, Marvel comics has just killed Captain America.Now you might expect that I would use this space to go on a rant about said incredibly inane civil war, or how it's just more evidence of 40yearsagotoday's astute theory that by and large comics nowadays are essentially fanfic ("Let me tell you my Bullseye story! it's so wicked cool, and only 85% stolen from Miller's original ones!"), but I have to disappoint you. I'm instead going to complain about the collapse of one of the last, if not the last, moments of tangible continuity in comics. Go back and read that NYT story I linked to. 

Further down. 

A little further. Do you see it? I'll help. "More recently, Bucky, the Captain’s wartime partner — who was thought killed by an explosion as he tried to defuse a bomb — was revealed to be alive. Bucky was saved by Soviet forces, who put him on ice and thawed him for their own missions. Captain America broke the Soviet hold on Bucky, and the two had a brief reunion. Bucky, who has taken on the name the Winter Soldier, is now on a quest to redeem his actions."

They brought back Bucky. They f'k'n' brought back Bucky!?!? The one actual tangible touchstone death in the continuity, the one that wiser writers and editors had sashayed towards and then turned away from at the last minute on multiple occasions (I am particularly fond of how Peter David had the immortal leader of his greek god descended supporting cast organization look amazingly like a young Rick Jones - who as we all know was a dead ringer for Bucky Barnes - commented on how said immortal last wandered the earth in WWII and then had him die/vanish while escaping on a rocket in a scene drawn in lovingly rendered Kirby-vision without every stating that this was indeed Bucky) and they undid it?

The wind and the rain, why? WHY? So we could have Bucky and Jean Grey make out and produce offspring who will look nothing like Cable and marry Peter Parker's cloned daughter (or daughter's clone, or something...) when she returns from being vanished and never spoken of again? Gyyyyaaaaaaahhhhhhh!

OK, I'm better now. Well, no I'm not, but it's the best I can do. Time to go take two

Tom Strong and try to feel better in the morning.

I had always intended this journal to be primarily gaming related with some (hopefully) amusing life anecdotes, but I feel the need to rant for a moment. This quote is from an Explainer article in yesterday's Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2149359/)

(The centers in Iowa, for example, are able to collect from 12 percent of the population, compared to a national average of 3 percent.)

3%?

3 goddamn percent?!?

This five years after people were banging on the doors of the blood rives insisting it was their moral and religious duty to donate? Speaking as arrogant git who just got his 5 gallon pin, I'm trying to figure out what the problem is here. I know the article I'm quoting from is focusing on the cost factors of blood donation and transfer, but I can't be the only on to find this depressing. Surely we can do better than this.