This Is Not Okay

Full disclosure: I definitely have said "Fuck Joe Biden" on more than one occasion. Loudly. I think him a buffoon, a thug, a geriatric who should be in a nursing home. There's less than a handful of Biden voters I talk to willingly now, because the mental stress of remembering these people were making fun of Biden for being the fool he is has become so high that I've found the interactions more than they're worth. 

But when I saw the above flag my jaw dropped.

No.

Let's be clearer: I don't view the above paragraph as a prideful disclosure. I've made it a point to eradicate rage and spite from my life as much as I can. It is my cross, my battleground, possibly the only real foe I've ever had. So I get being angry about the election! The oligarchy played the long game and won. Consent was manufactured, stunningly well. Souls. Were. Bought. But that doesn't justify selling mine.

Putting up that flag has got to feel good. It's a small bit of power you can claim. But I've found desiring power to be so toxic that it's physically painful. Power is the one thing rage demands, because if only I had a bit more power I could make things right!t It's like saying that if only that stripper could get to know me she'd love me. And then I wouldn't be so lonely. Apparently we've forgotten that strippers aren't actually in love with us. And we've definitely forgotten that desiring power is usually a very bad thing. Most of us wind up happy with just one person; the rest are right out.

No, voting Biden in or putting up that stupid flag aren't exceptions, folks. Sorry.

Another thing that makes me scratch my head is the idea that Biden is the end of the world and deserves this sort of vitriol to begin with. Biden is a puppet; he has as much impact on the government as you do on a prostitute. We've ignored that it's special interest groups and lobbies who have power, along with the actual government bureaucratic organizations, far more than any president. Trump found that out first hand! The house won, folks. The house always wins. And we're letting these snakes dictate what we feel. Before, every four years we had this funny little ritual where we pretended that the person who we voted for actually mattered. We pretended we were making a choice between candidates we wanted, pretended that our lives weren't being guided, and picked someone the oligarchy liked, one way or another. As a reward we get brought to a political and emotional climax that leaves us only slightly more pitiful than a soldier in a South Korean local, dollar bills clutched tightly in her hand. Every four years we did this shame dance. But now? We seem to think the political whore lets us screw her because of our personality, not because she gets something out of it. Or, y'know, because her pimp told her to.

So yes, this flag is vulgar. In every conceivable sense. It's another nail in the coffin we bought for our society when we accepted the Trump-Clinton competition. The desecration continues. It is a desecration that we are being told we want to do, and so we do it. Manufactured consent never had it so good! 

Regardless of my opinion of Biden the man is the president of my nation. He wields the avenging sword of God over America. Even if we have made our society a political whore house we have to remember that whore houses are unholy because of what they misrepresent.

Desecration doesn't remove the value.

But it does make us forget it.

Don't. 

I know I'll keep seeing this flag. When nothing is sacred it's all up for grabs. As we degenerate into our camps that can be milked like cows in a factory we'll find new things to defile. 2016 saw to that. But seeing that flag jolted me. I know so many that have lost themselves to this lie. Fox and MSNBC are not alternate realities, they're two different whore houses who do their best to convince their clients the prostitutes love them. I certainly wasn't going to those two... Sources... But I'd be lying if seeing that flag reminded me of just how much I've dehumanized those around me.

Fuck that. They're not winning.

Design Journal: Shadow's Tower

CAVEAT: These are the half-mad rantings of a designer who has not tested these ideas.

I've never played Dread. For those of you who don't know what that means, Dread is a roleplaying game where you play with a Jenga tower. Each time you do something you pull a block from the tower. When the tower falls the person who knocked it over dies. It's a gimmick that either lands or it doesn't. I've always meant to try it.

We'll get back to the tower in a minute. First we need to talk about what inspired Shadow in the first place. 

The very initial designs for Crescendo were Dark Souls level of punishing. It was flat out oppressive. And, while that design proved to be fun, it didn't feel like a fantasy game should. I'd designed a horror game. And one I liked. 

So I started taking my harsher ideas and saving them in a separate document that I named Shadow. By shadow I mean the Jungian definition: everything you're not. And that's what this game was, at least at the beginning: everything Crescendo was not. For that piece of humor alone I wanted to make the game. 

Crescendo's implied setting is very loosely based upon 9th century Britain. So of course I wanted Shadow to be in 19th century Britain, or an analog thereby. I can think of no spiritually worse time to be alive than the 19th century, with its triumphant neutering and enslavement of Western Christianity, along with the large-scale abandonment of its Eastern counterpart. Western Europe had so effectively ruined Christianity that one would be spiritually safer engaging in theistic Satanism. At least Satanists know they offend God.

Anyone who doubts me should try reading The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman. Actually, regardless of who you are, you should try reading that book. My copy is currently gathering dust because of how relentlessly bleak it is. It is Hell on earth. But it is also showing an unvarnished truth about modernity and liberalism in general. And that horror that book communicates? That feeling of an oppressive system beyond our control? It seems unique to our age. Sure, Nature's a fickle bitch but nobody takes Nature shitting in our lives as personal. You can't say that about the age we live in.

And that's horrific. 

Horror is reaction against this virus of self-defined reality that we know as modernity, against the feeling of artificiality. I feel it, know it all the way down. But y'know what intuitions are worth without sources?

Absolutely nothing.

I needed to read Poe and Lovecraft first. I had my suspicions about what the two had written, but besides a negligible exposure when I was in highschool I didn't know much. Instead of reading Poe I got to read Maya Angelou and freaking Great Gatsby. This is what's known as a bad trade, folks. I found Angelou insufferable and Gatsby is not a highschool book in any capacity. Maybe Angelou isn't either.

What I've found in Poe and Lovecraft is far more valuable: all lies are punished. What is hidden is revealed, usually in blood, tears, and screams. And those lies don't have to be personal; you can (and do) pay for others' lies just as often, if not more often, than your own. No sins are private. Each beat in Poe and Lovecraft the characters strip away another lie, getting closer to the truth. It may be a stupid thing to do, but the essence of their protagonists (by and large) are uncompromising truth-seekers. Most people find Lovecraft's protagonists stupid. But all the stories I've read indicate they're fed up with artificiality. Even if it kills them. Before reading The Proud Tower I'd not have understood why.

But my God I do now.

And I probably would have preferred insanity to the horror show that was their world. I mean, the remnants of that world persist on in the very worst aspects of our society today. 

All of this suggests a story about people poking and prodding, knowing they'll probably be destroyed, but they have to know. Must. The world is so bad , so artificial, that any reality, no matter how awful, would be better than what they currently have. But they don't how deep the lies run, do they? They think they can handle it.

At what point does this start sounding a Jenga tower to you? Pulling at the tower because you want to see how much you can pull away, because you don't know how integral it is to you? Once the image entered my mind it wouldn't leave.

I threw out everything I'd come up with and started over.

Here's what I got so far: every player drafts up what are called Isms: beliefs about the world the characters have that the player wants proven false. A stereotypical Judeo-Christian worldview is not just assumed, but is insisted upon

"God loves me"

"The dead stay dead."

"Sex is everything."

These Isms aren't individual to characters; they're what the group wants to subvert and destroy. This can get hairy, being horror: the Isms require a unanimous vote.  Whenever something touching these Isms comes up any action you take requires you pull a plank from the tower. If you succeed you have to say why you did. Whatever you say, it's a lie. 

"I succeeded in getting away because God has a plan for me."

"I avoided... Whatever that was,, because it was just my mind playing tricks on me."

At this point I'm toying with the idea of the GM writing down all the lies. You just keep pulling blocks until the tower falls. If that takes multiple sessions so be it. But once the tower falls? The GM brings out that list he's been making of all your lies.

You rebuild the tower.

And then the GM begins to bring your lies back to haunt you. He presents situations that mock your lies, that call out the pettiness of it all. And with each new situation a block must be pulled. No more skating by, it all counts now! 

When the tower falls that character is dead,  or insane, or ruined. That player joins in now, becoming a co-GM. And each player who falls after that gets in on it.

When you're out of lies or characters the game is over.

At least, that's what I got in my notes so far. Kinda needs playtesting. But that to me is a horror game.

Spider-Man 94: Season 1

 

This was my Spider-Man until I was about eleven years old. I've been mostly disappointed ever since. Don't get me wrong, the original run until the Death of Gwen Stacy is the comics story. Anything else after that... well I have a head canon for that. I'll talk about that in another post. Corporatism hollows something out real and wears its skin like a puppet. I'd argue that's happened to Spider-Man in general, although that's not the case with this season of Spider-Man 94.

No, it's not perfect. The Chameleon episode has some really silly logic drops, and it's obvious the show had serious budget issues with animation, reusing every single frame they possibly could, sometimes overly padding out those "Previously On" sections. And the first season drops Felicia Hardy entirely. Now, having gone into a bit of the second season, I can see that the writers were deliberately building towards season two, and did not seem to intend season one to stand on its own. That's definitely not perfect, but it is deliberate. Make of that what you will.

But what this season does it does well. Season one is an episodic weird sci-fi, rooted right in the cautionary 60's genre. Horrible accidents happen to ordinary folks and they lose their heads. Peter is the only one who has been able to withstand the physical change, all because his selfishness led to his Uncle Ben's death. All of the antagonists are treated with a degree of sympathy that I admire. Even when they are outright evil there's a humanity, an appeal for mercy, deep down in each of these characters. Folks keep talking about how modern shows have such complicated characters, but there's stuff going on in these eighteen minute episodes that's nothing short of miraculous. And that's not nostalgia talking; I wish I was this economical in my RPG sessions.

Season One feels like it's building a lot of ground in a hurry, not to mention getting the "big names" out of the way. There's a very "check off the names corporate needs us to check off" feel to this season, and even then, none of the takes were by the book. 

Doc Ock being Peter's mentor? Done here first.

The Lizard trying to end weakness? Done here first and arguably better.

Other takes on the characters who haven't been adapted to movies are just as good as those two, if not better than the source material. Hobgoblin is just a common mercenary who was given a bunch of toys. Kraven was driven mad by the serum he received aaà but returns to normal. Smythe becomes a regular supporting villain after losing his father in a tragic accident. Scorpion is just a pathetic bully made dangerous. I particularly like Scorpion, as his patheticness doesn't go away, just that you want to dodge while laughing at how much of a loser he is. And Eddy Brock, the most built up supervillain in the season, is nothing more than a spiteful yellow journalist. Rhino is a large enforcer. He's got a job to do and will make sure you don't stand in his way, because he's a professional.

See the pattern?

They're just regular folks, writ large. In some cases they're even more human than what Lee had originally envisioned.

So, ultimately? A good season. I really enjoyed it. It's not Shakespeare, but they're clearly having to check off some boxes so they can go and do the things they want to do later. It's a good introduction to the world that the show creators want to explore. I really like that world. I'm definitely gonna keep going!

Design Journal: Crescendo's Stones

CAVEAT: this is a journal entry. Concepts talked about here may or may not make it in this form to the final version.

Crescendo's a game about character development in a mythological world, where Mortals and Immortals push their agendas. Crescendo defines characters in three principal ways: their Tenets, Limits and the setting's Movements. Interacting with these elements produces a metacurrency called Stones, which you can use to make sure your agendas succeed. It's meant to be played over a long period time: thirty sessions, forty, 

Tenets are the things about your character that you find to be worth fighting about. Tenets are what your character deliberately goes and gets in trouble for.  When you write Tenets you are telling the GM and the other players what you want the game to be about. Tenets are in the format of a sentence, usually short.

"My father can be saved."

"My sister is the last hope."

"Violence as a last resort."

The bar for these Tenets is if your GM can challenge them. If he doesn't like them then work with him to make it something he wants to challenge and that you want challenged. In general you can expect to only make dice rolls related to your Tenets; the rest are handwaved (or denied if you're asking for absurdities). The point is to get to a situation that matters for your character and then hammer that situation as hard as you can, bringing out the dice to see what could happen when it matters to you most.

Limits are what your character is, no matter how hard he tries. Limits come back and haunt you at inconvenient times, reasserting themselves when you wished they hadn't. Unlike Tenets, which can be changed whenever the players and GM find appropriate, Limits change much more slowly, usually after an arc of play. They're usually one or two words.

"Impetuous"

"Noble"

"Jaded"

You start with two Limits. You can't have more than four Limits at a time. Pick Limits you'll have fun bringing up into the narrative.

Movements are not the player's mechanics, but they are really important to character growth. Movements are what the GM has going on in the world, his top three priorities. These are statements of grand, sweeping narrative, currents of the world the players find themselves caught up in. 

"Kalir's barbarians are destroying the town. 19"

"Vena is corrupting the mayor. 15"

"Saboteurs will destroy the Jarini Dam. 10"

Movements are happening no matter what you do. They will move forward unless you stop them. Assuming, of course, that you want to! There's a number at the end of every Movement. At the end of every session the GM  rolls a d20. If he rolls equal to or above that number he lowers that it by 1+margin of success of that roll. Players can modify these rolls by their actions in-game. Once that number drops to 0 the Movement is accomplished. If a Movement goes above 20 then the GM must write a new Movement.

Schemes start at 20 (subtle background stuff), 15 (something just beginning), or 10 (urgent, well on its way to being completed). Each Stone the players earn increase or decreases a relevant Movement's counter by one, player's choice; the player's earning of Stones changes the world around them.

Characters in Crescendo won't have formalized goals. This may sound backwards at first; isn't the game about players pushing their characters' agendas and thus evolving into heroes? You are correct! It would make sense on paper to have a Goal for each character. I've played games similar to Crescendo where there are formalized goals and it works... well enough. But I don't think it works great. The essential part of a game like this is to subvert information and twist the characters against themselves. And that means that Goals can get in the way of meaningful character and story evolution; it takes time to rewrite Goals and there is a very strong Pavlovian element going on with them, which can straitjacket the narrative. Pavlovian elements aren't bad, but they have their place in a game about character growth. So I think it better to put vectors (Tenets, Limits, and Movements) on the table and have the players put the pieces together however they want.

Which finally brings us to Stones, this game's metacurrency. You push your agenda and get rewarded! Pavlov rings the bell! 

There is only one prerequisite for getting Stones, of which there are three kinds: did using this Tenet, Limit, or interacting with this Movement meaningfully change the story y'all are telling? If so, you get a point! 

Did you betray another one of your Tenets or Limits or a Scheme to get that Stone? Great! Get two Stones instead! Crescendo is about complex characters, which means you should get something special for making characters who are conflicted but utterly sincere in their inner conflict.

There are three kinds of Stones,  each for a different element: Favor (Tenets), Dynamis (Limits), and Persona (Movements). Favor is help from the Immortals, who enforce Fate Herself. Favor is when circumstances change in an odd way, usually with an omen from the Immortal who helped you; the Challenge Dice is lowered a step (d10 to d8, for example). Dynamis is your inner world forcing itself upon the outer world; reroll your Stat Dice. Persona is when your connection to the world makes you stronger; increase your Stat Dice by a step.

The last bit of the Stones Cycle is that all spent Stones become XP. XP, as you can probably guess, is used to improve your character. But suppose you're not spending a lot of Stones? Crescendo has an OSR approach to rolls: if you must roll it's a challenge a gauntlet thrown. Sometimes that's not going to be an issue. Stones are good but you may not use them. Perhaps you won't roll a single dice in a session! And y'know what? That's fine. I don't see that being a problem, given how Stones are situated in mechanical spots you want control over, but it is possible. So any Stones you don't use can be converted to XP. You can't transfer them back, however! That change is permanent. So there will be no bloat. I hope.

Crescendo is meant to produce a flexible framework for all the players to get invested in. The reward system doesn't guide what you do, but  rewards what you're already doing: telling a story about your character and their development. As you play out the story what that looks like will change, right along with the characters. When you get to the end, thirty, forty, or however many sessions later, you'll find the characters and story to be different, but familiar. They've been through a lot. And you've had a hand in their change every step of the way.

The Miserable Mill

This book hurt.

When I was in the Army I tried to keep my spiritual life intact. I'd try to keep up with my morning and evening prayers, to hold to the ideals I believe in, and to keep hope alive. I'd learned long ago that,unless you work very deliberately at spirituality, it dies. Keep it going, even if it makes no sense, even if it's painful, and you will be genuinely sustained.  There is no rational process to it: either push forward or stop. Belief is a verb, not a noun.

Most do not know the absolute... Joy... That is going to The Field. I will attempt to explain, so you may empathize without having to go through such a horrible experience. Imagine that, from the moment you wake up (5 am) to the moment you go to sleep (11 pm, possibly later), you are busy with the most boring, most insipid, most useless and stupid work you can imagine.

No, you're not going dumb enough.

Dumber.

Dumber.

Dumber, I say!

But it's all urgent. All of it is "important", and everyone around you is saying it is. And then they stop to complain about how pointless their work is and how they hate it and how they'd wish they could stop. Everyone says the emperor has clothes, and then turns around to say he doesn't. And then continues to say the emperor has clothes.

Constantly.

There's only one rank who doesn't seem to be complaining, by and large. They actually seem kinda excited. They're giving unreasonable orders, don't complain like the others, and never say what they're doing is pointless. Ever.

I am, of course, talking about the Army Major, in all his profane glory.

What's so special about the Major and his shiny gold oak leaf? He's not in charge. He doesn't have a unit. And that's just it: he doesn't answer directly to anyone, while being the advisor. He is isolated from the effects of his ideas, and may come to like the smell of all his farts. He loses touch with the men and isn't under threat like a captain or a lieutenant colonel.

Nothing will destroy a unit like a bad Major.

Oh, I didn't mention, sorry, you're in a tent with no privacy, whatsoever. If you think you have a spot to take a few minutes, even really a few seconds, you're wrong.

But now imagine you're a kid who only gets one square meal a day, is paid in coupons, and it gets worse, doesn't it?

When you're under that level of stress you just sorta... Go into a trance. You can't help yourself. Life just gets so mind-numbing, so tiring, so exhausting, that you can barely summon anything purposeful. Outside of Field I'd always managed a more-or-less consistent prayer schedule. That was almost impossible in Field: everything was designed to keep me occupied until I collapsed after 18+ hours of work.

Honestly I'm surprised Klaus needed a hypnotist to fall into a trance. It's so easy to do with all the stressors he was under.

How does one stay out of this trance? Well, first you have to acknowledge that all societies are designed to focus you beyond your own problems. 

If it's done right, you will be able to work with others and find fulfillment and answers for your own interior questions in working with others. Humans are relational being first, and that's what society should be enabling. With relationship comes questions, with questions comes empathy.

But if it's done wrong? You're isolated, caught up in a series of stressors that break you down mentally and spiritually, constantly otherizing, constantly asking you not to think, providing rewards for turning your brain off and letting yourself be dictated to. You don't investigate. Your basic function as a relational being is cut down.

Which one are you in, now?

There is no in-between, folks. You're either being enabled to relationship or you're being isolated to manipulate, on a societal level.

Given the society Mr. Snickett chooses to write about here,  I can guarantee he doesn't think most children growing up in today's society, his target audience, are in the former.

The fact that the folks in his book have stopped noticing they're being isolated is the point.

May the Power Protect You: Adam Park, V2 (MMPR Black)

Welp, Renegade did it. They made Gen 2 Ranger decks.

Awesome!!!

What'd they do with Adam?

Well, the big things didn't change: newbies hate Adam. If you're new to the game and disagree, comment! Tell me I'm wrong! I'd love to hear it! All I can tell you is what I've seen. Which I find sad, because Adam, once properly mastered, can just wreck everything in sight. I know, 'cause I've done it. The blood flowed, monsters screamed, and Adam's white portions of his suit went pink from the river of crimson he stood in. He's an offensive powerhouse, able to destroy pretty anything that stands in his way. 

Oh, I didn't say it would be easy. Adam is not an easy guy to master; if you don't he's a mess.

Adaptable, Adam's ability, is... complicated. Once per battle, you can swap the top card in your discard pile for a card in your hand. Six of your ten cards have effects that are relevant, so long as they're the top card in your discard pile. The other four, however, do not. Keep in mind that you play the card, and then discard it; you cannot activate an effect as you are playing it, because it's not in your discard pile.  I don't know about anyone here, but Heroes of the Grid is a huge adrenaline rush for me. Stopping to think is not a forte I have, just in general, nevermind in the middle of a game that gets as intense as this. Now, others may not experience this. But, even after dozens and dozens of games, I still do. I have totally gone and put down a card with no real thought to what that does to Adam's discard pile.

Please don't be stupid like me. Please.

Watch what you put into that discard pile.

Rapid Hit is not an easy card to parse. I generally do not put up card text. Part of it is that I'm lazy. But the other? I want you, the reader, to already have familiarity with the character. That doesn't cut it here. This is the most complicated card I've come acrost so far, and so I'm going to put the text up.

ATTACK: 1D

After you resolve this attack, perform a second attack with 1 die.

While this card is the top card of your discard pile, add 1 die to each of your attacks.

So, first off, it's not one attack, but two, at one die apiece. Now, normally that's not going to matter too much, but this is Adam, so this isn't normal. Suffice to say that, for Adam, this is an amazing card. You can generate two energy with Leapfrog Strike, start chains against multiple GUARDED opponents (others can then throw modifiers onto both attacks).... or do a total of four dice with a previous Rapid Hit...

Or four native dice with Power Axe. Given the nature of how Power Axe works, that extra die can (and does) make all the difference. Without outside buffs Adam can out-damage Zack with the Power Axe. With outside buffs he can make Zack's damage look like a joke, with less outside help.

Leapfrog Strike is just your typical 2D attack. You play it to set up so you can get a free Cosmic Cannon or Power Axe, or a crapton of energy from Rapid Hit. Or, y'know, a no energy 3D attack. It's really that simple. And useful!

Cosmic Cannon is at its most useful when being augmented by Leapfrog Strike, or being used for defense. There are better cards to attack with otherwise, but when being used for defense or a free 3D attack? Or being augmented by Rapid Hit into a one energy 4D attack? Okay, that last one is better. There's some interesting combinations you can get from this card, just can't look at it directly.

Exploit Opening is essentially Hip Hop Kido turned into a card. It's a Reaction, so it's got one use: exactly what you see on the card. If anyone doesn't think there's a use for this card, this isn't the character for you. You should already be paying attention to the board state already. And this card allows you to focus on another card that you know you can kill, altering the flow of combat. This can be a really useful card to have, allowing Adam to one up Zack, once again.

Okay, let's get this out of the way: the Mastodon Zord is one of the best zords in the game. You just kill a footsoldier, flat out. If you do this during a combat, however, the card "linked" to that figure is not destroyed. This means that the Mastodon Zord really only has one use, at one time: right at the beginning of the round, lower the area with the highest amount of figures. It's useful, but it's boring. The other zords usually require at least some strategy, something more than just remembering to use the darn thing.

The Lion Thunder Zord is not as good, technically. You can't just shut down a figure whenever you want, you have to destroy the card, in the action sequence. But this has some more interesting choices. You can team this up with Adam's ability to ignore GUARD to give complete and total access to the board, or just get rid of that one footsoldier that would make things so much easier. They do exist, especially in boss fights. It's not functionally worse than the Mastodon Zord but this is a lot more interesting.

I always found Adam more interesting the Zack, but with this new deck I think he's actually a good deal better. Adam doesn't quite have the defensive capability of Zack, but he's more self-sufficient than Zack. Adam takes a bit more work to pull off, but he's got a diverse toolkit that pays off the investment. 

The fact that Adam is my second favorite ranger has nothing to do with it. At ALL.

Promise.

Really!

Arise, O God: A Relief Long Overdue

 

There are many people I know who were hurt by the modern Christian Churches and so they left. There are many who were hurt by the modern Christian Churches and who did something worse than leave: they stayed. And then there are folks like me, who realized the Church was guarding something good, something wonderful. Something the Church was utterly unworthy of. The more investigation I did the more obvious it became that a great mangling of the truth had happened. Words that meant one thing before a certain point meant exactly the opposite now. Whole concepts had been removed and subsequently forgotten about. The sheer enormity of what happened to Christianity in modern times cannot be understated: we have forgotten almost everything that mattered, that made Christianity The Way. I have attempted, over and over, to communicate the staggering loss we modern Christians live in.

Unfortunately I've been coming off more like someone who just realized they didn't have limbs in a land of paraplegics: I've been screaming about wanting to run when everyone else I know is asking me what the hell legs are. All I've really had to communicate with are experiences outside the pale, along with niche podcasts and books I keep being told are too academic to readily consume. I can't just assemble this stuff into a whole, not yet. Everytime I try I forget something. The picture hasn't been assembled enough by me to do more than point at parts of the missing whole that are so obvious that everyone has seen them, even if they don't know what it is they're looking at.

Fr. Andrew Damick agreed apparently. Cause Arise, O God exists. It is amazing. The amount of work that went into writing this 146 page masterpiece is staggering; it's not quite Michaelangelo drawing a free-hand circle, but it's in the neighborhood, and that can't be claimed by any other English-language book I know of. It's simple, clear, and accurate. You usually get to pick one of those qualities, nevermind all three!

Fr. Damick starts with what the genre evangelia is: the pronouncement of a change of regime. Typically announced after a military conquest,  evangalia were an announcement of who the new ruler is, who they conquered, and what one needed to do to be on the side of the new regime.

You'll notice I've been calling the secular version evangelia. This was a genre; nobody presumed to be giving the definitive news. Just news about their particular conqueror.

The Gospel writers call their works Evangelion, THE Good News. This was a definitive political statement. No other regime would work. This was the definitive regime change. Christ had conquered the demons who enslaved us, sin, and death. I'll sum up Fr. Damick's points here, but I highly recommend you read the book for yourself. It would be very difficult to simplify something that the author had gone to such great pains to make simple already.

First off we need to define what Fr. Damick means by demons. Most of us think of humanoidish figures with pitchforks and in fire engine red. Fr. Damick does not even bother to address the caricature, instead painting the picture of a group of non-physical beings who were given charge to watch over certain geographical groups. They all failed in their task, instead enslaving us, their charges. Demons are beings who interact with thoughts the way you and I interact with spades and other tools; they are abstract in the strictest sense of the word. A demon's goal is to make you like it, to mold you to its ideal of a good person, which is themselves of course! If you need something more concrete pay attention to the next time someone starts talking politics. Notice how everyone starts saying pretty much the same things, in the same tones of voice, with the same glazed-over eyes? Christianity teaches that there is something on the other end pushing those buttons. And you have a physical world equivalent: Facebook and Twitter. Essentially imagine if Zuckerburg had a few millennia to learn human behavior and you're pretty much dead on.

For the record I don't think Zuckerberg is a demon. I do think his tactics are quite inspired, however. Nothing like dopamine kicks to ruin a person.

 

The majority of the Gospels show Jesus Christ exorcising demons everywhere He goes. One cannot read the Gospels without seeing Christ conquering the kingdom of Hell. To ignore this part of the Gospel is to gut about half of it, if not more. If you don't want to believe that Zuckerburg is a cheap copyist that's fine, but understand the existence of demons and angels is an explicit part of the Evangelion.

 

Sin is not just breaking a rule. That's not really what it means. It means to break things, to be broken. It is addiction to oblivion. It is to love darkness itself over light, isolation to relationship, internal weakness to strength. Humans can't get enough of sin. Being made out of nothing, out of dust (which is chaos), humans can't get enough of our base material. To sin is to toss around the raw material that we are meant to grow beyond as if we were a Congress of Baboons.

Christ conquered sin as well. He refused to give into the addiction, into the dopamine kick of embracing chaos. No one else has ever done what Christ did; enter chaos and not be tempted by it. And by doing this Christ defeated sin.

The last enemy is Death. Death was originally given to us as a means to change. The Medievals were right to call Death by its name of change; without being mortal we cannot become something different. Inherent rot is a blessing, insofar as we then have a choice as to what we change into. But humans are meaning constructing machines; meaning does not play well with Death. By rising from the dead Christ subverts Death itself, changing it from a dead-end to a passage.

 

There's a lot more going on in these 146 pages. Each page is packed with another nuclear bomb on our pathetic post-19th century worldview, where God is nothing more than a mean old man "saving" us in the same sense a drunken father "saves" his children by refusing to beat them. Or, in the case of Calvinism, taking Satan's theology and dressing it up to look like God's. 

It's a quick but great read. For me, personally, it's sorely needed.  A nicely laid out and simple introduction to actual apostolic Christianity simply does not exist in English. And that is a worldview I think needs to be spread. Christ has conquered all those who would want you to not be yourself, the addiction that is sin, and has transformed Death. You may accept this truth or reject it.

But it is not going away. What will you do with the Evangelion?

RPG Design Thoughts

Here's the things that interest me while I'm building games. In general I want to build something mechanically dynamic, forcing changes in the narrative as time goes on. I want each session to feel as fresh as the first one, and for longer-term play to yield scenarios that couldn't happen at the beginning, categorically. And this means making the games about change themselves, while subverting expectations about what that change may look like.

A caveat: nothing in here has really been playtested yet. Crescendo hasn't gotten to the point of adding in sparks, while Nephilim and Shadow are hardly even written yet, being in a much rougher point of development. And Crescendo's rough as it is.

So, y'know, caveat emptor and all that.

Subverting Notions of Control and Progression

I do not like the end-game of most RPGs. At the beginning of most games the resolution mechanics work just fine, but then the players get more control... and then the experience begins to die. What made the game so dynamic was the unexpected, the lack of actual control. In my experience an increased amount of control is only fun right at the very end of the story, and even that is debatable. 

So one of my design goals is to always find a way to keep the unexpected in the story. For Crescendo that means the Black Swan and how expending Thaumaturgy (which let you muck with the dice rolls) always ripples out into the narrative, creating larger stories that you now fit inside. You're constantly creating a larger thing than you anticipated when exert control over the narrative. And the Black Swan, one of which always happens at the ends of a session, always introduces a twist into the narrative, forcing everyone to renegotiate their place in the story.

Nephilim, however, will be entirely diceless. Outside of combat you simply say whether your succeed or fail, depending on how you think the situation should go, which earns you tokens you can spend in combat. The tension, of course, is in how many tokens you can pick up before everyone agrees a battle should start. When you run out of tokens you're removed from the fight, so you want to get as many as you can. An idea I'm currently tossing around is to give more tokens for failures that the players narrate. This not only allows their battles to go more smoothly but then gives the GM more room to work with when coming up with new battles.

Shadow will use a jenga tower. Each time you pull a block and the tower doesn't fall over you have to tell a comforting lie to yourself about why you succeeded in the narrative. Obviously, no matter how good you get at pulling out those blocks, eventually the tower is going to fall over. And when it does one of the lies you told then comes back to haunt you, which is engineered by the GM. There may be a mechanic where  the surface the tower is on will be hit, jarring the tower, from time to time.

Defeating Entropy

I view gaming as one way you can experience things without consequence, without entropy ruling the roost. However, as I've come to understand myself and what I like playing... I like mechanical entropy. I like it when the ground inevitably shifts beneath your feet. I don't want static stuff.

But I do like having control to respond to changes. I like going "Well, time for a new plan!" So anything I build is going to just... rot.... on a mechanical level. But you will have the ability to deal with it.

Crescendo's biggest example of this is Stress. Failing rolls gets you Stress, which either needs to be gotten rid of or it generates Conditions. Conditions make your rolls harder, which necessitates you having to stop and get rid of them. There's a very deliberate death spiral that, if not respected, will screw you up. Fortunately, getting rid of Conditions can be pretty simple and, in some cases, involve some really deep RP, which is the point of the game. There's also the Crisis Point: your character is always weak to Stressors, that the players chose, which the GM can throw in to get the character to act out. If they fail badly enough they actually get hurt. And these Crisis Points can happen pretty frequently. Succeeding at a Crisis Point, however, allows you to spend XP.

Nephilim's entropic features are that of the Overload mechanic. Every time you actually injure/kill an opponent everyone else has to resist the urge to one up that action. Did you cut someone in the stomach and they fall over? Then everyone else will want to cut them in half, and will have to do something to counter that urge. Without a strong Code and inter-group rules the group will descend into barbarism.

Shadow will have Stress and Crisis Points as well, but they'll come in the form of hitting the table/surface the jenga tower is on. Repeated shocks to the tower will eventually collapse it, and you don't want the tower to collapse; your lies will come a-knocking! I'm not sure what else needs to be added in, as that's already a lot of stress to begin with.

Mechanical Change

As stories progress differing things become important. I find it weird that as stories in RPGs progress they don't add in or swap out mechanics to represent changes in the story type they're emulating. 

Crescendo's initial player focus are Ideals: statements that the player can use to direct the narrative in a specific direction. They're what the character thinks the world is like. The GM hammers and subverts and destroys these Ideals. Eventually the player may swap out Ideals for Sparks, which are important events that happened to the character, along with what they think of that event. The GM then begins replicating the event, changing the context, trying to get the player to change the Spark. While that sounds like a small change, the change in focus leads to a more thematically-based campaign, where the characters gradually find themselves in the position of mentor and hero, as they've seen the same event from so many different angels. From seeker to master.

Nephilim's arc tracks player relationships, which are also written as a memory of an event the two characters went through, along with what the character in question thinks of it. The Relationship then has a number, which is the number of times that number can be applied as a bonus to an action. Only thing is that you,the player who wrote it, cannot use it. The person you wrote the Relationship with? They can invoke the Relationship to get you to help them. You give them that bonus to their action (so you'd give 2 tokens if you had a Relationship at 2) and then the Relationship goes down by 1. When you hit zero a new Relationship is forged, but at a higher rate than before. This means that, as you explore the bonds your characters forge with each other, each time the bond is deeper, more powerful, and harder to get rid of.

Shadow's sliding scale is Perception. As time goes on and as you get more and more exposed to the horrors of the world  what you see actually changes.  I don't have this one as nailed down, but the idea is that, as time goes on you are less able to connect with others in the normal world, as the world of myth pulls you in, whether you like it or not. 

That's just kinda what I'm working with at the moment. I don't know if anyone finds that interesting, but I really like the idea of having a game changing the story that gets told. These sorts of changes should allow for stories to mature and morph in unexpected ways, creating a thematic shift acrost the course of a game.

Batman vs. Superman: Ultimate Cut

 

I can't begin to tell you how much I hate the theatrical cut of this movie. It is all wrong. All of it. There's not a frame that makes sense, not a line of dialogue that adds up, it's a nihilistic mess of a movie. Just writing about it makes me want to spit on my screen, just in pure rage. Now, yes, I've got some attachment for Batman and Superman, but just the craft of the theatrical cut is beyond awful. On a technical level it is an incoherent mess.

You may have noticed I hate this movie. 

And, let's get this out of the way, I like Man of Steel. Clark being portrayed as a person who needed to figure out how to forgive humanity for being shitheads is an incredible thing to portray. Most of the flaws people point out about the movie are overblown, at best, petty and spiteful at worst. It's not my favorite movie ever, but it's definitely a good movie, showing a Superman that I, personally, can believe would exist. My hatred of Zack Snyder's other work is probably to the amusement of all my friends, who periodically poke me, just to see the explosion of spite that results.

And then one day someone told me the Ultimate Cut was coherent. They didn't like it, but it was coherent. Turns out that the corporate morons had completely screwed up the cut.  I was asked if I wanted to watch it. 

And, to be honest, I didn't, not at the time. I still had the words from HiTop in my head: Batman does not kill. Batman is a symbol, symbols teach us how to behave. Batman is all about not repeating the action of losing his parents, all over again, by having some little boy wake up without those parents.  I wanted to believe that Batman's willpower was immaculately iron. Now, all my other ideals are totally incoherent with that. I think people are not invincible ideals, that they're barely capable of good on a good day, nevermind a bad one. The Joker is right: all it takes is one bad day.

In the intervening years my trust in the American mythology of superheroes has faded. Perpetually stuck in a corporate death grip, unable to move on and become something different, these characters are a hollow reflection of what we are: controlled by corporate interests, unable to move on. They're not human, and we don't allow ourselves to be human either. Why I hadn't connected that before, I don't know.

Afghanistan happened.

"Not our country," is a phrase I've heard tossed around. As in, actually spoken. Aloud. The world shook its head sadly and said the most damning words I've ever heard: "Well, it was inevitable."

No, it was not. Damn your ideas right to the hellhole they belong, that was not inevitable, just convenient. Not to mention cowardly.

Something broke inside me, watching the whole thing. Turns out that casual cruelty isn't just limited to fetuses and folks of minority ethnicity, a fact I've experienced far too often, but just hoped that my self-hatred could explain the seemingly boundless cruelty of humanity.

Nope. Turns out people are just cruel, as a matter of course. It's the human condition.

That weekend my family went to the zoo. I love tigers. Thank Calvin and Hobbes for that, I suppose, but man they're majestic things. And they're killers. Born killers. Made to eviscerate and terrify and stuff raw meat down their throats. "God's tenants", as per Psalm 103. A tiger knows what it is. It's a killer. It has no issue with this fact. If a tiger denied what it was it would die, as it's literally made to only eat meat. It's honest because to be honest is to live.

Staring at this magnificent picture of death, a thought began to form in my mind. I didn't quite know what it was until about an hour later, when I was sitting down at a playground with my wife. I tried to bat the thought away. I really didn't want to go where I was going, but an entire generation of people were being left to suffer under a terrorist organization. All 'cause of the red, white, and blue. Reality no longer matched my model of it. And I had to give in. Had to. 

"I can't like superheroes anymore. Because of Afghanistan."

My wife, as thoughtful and quiet as she is, let those words hang in the air a moment, as they mixed with the sounds of laughter and creaking playground equipment.

Me being anxious me, I mistook the silence. "Does that make sense? I don't know how else to explain it right now."

Those green eyes can just cut my soul to ribbons. She looked at me, and as she always seems to, saw straight into the cloud of grief. And through it. "It does."

I sat there, trying to figure out what had just happened. What I had just said, why I had just said it! And somehow I knew. It was time to watch this movie.

I thought I was ready. I was not. 

First off, folks, there is a plot to this movie. And I actually like it. Motivations are clear, the action flows from one beat to another. There's a healthy amount of inference going on, but the movie does actually set up the points to connect between.... unlike the theatrical cut. Which does not. I like having to put the pieces together myself, so long as there's something to assemble with. I mean, I do like Terrio's work in general, so it was nice to return to his plotting.

Superman's depression, as a result, makes sense. Continuously mistrusted and hated for doing the right thing will do that. And Clark needing to figure out he was going to do with his "just rewards" was a compelling hook. The movie paints Clark's deteriorating outlook as a natural progression someone would go through. Clark does his best to fight it, but there's only one rule to the universe, and that's down! By the time we get to the end Clark has been psychologically manipulated and battered.

Now we come to Batman. I'm not going to try to convince you why I like this character now. Tigers are killers, and if you don't like that go get in the enclosure and let me know what happens when mealtime comes up. Bruce has collapsed under the weight of his own failure, something repeatedly brought up, time and time ago. Only one rule to the universe, folks! Bruce is human, he's going to collapse. After twenty years, Bruce had given up. And so Lex pushes him, manipulates him, sets him up.

Yes, the Martha moment actually makes sense in the movie. Move along.

The ending of the theatrical cut was actually my favorite part of the movie. The whole movie goes bonkers, I love the turnaround from Batman after the Martha moment as it's portrayed by Affleck, Gal Gadot is always amazing to see as Wonder Woman. But Clark's arc always felt hollow. It doesn't here. Clark's last moment of trying to reach out to the best in someone else paid off. He finally got through. 

And, with Lois there, Clark realizes that she is his world, and therefore the world must be saved.

Bruce is rejuvenated. Superman sleeps in his tomb.

As I've stated before, there was a hole in my soul, where a narrative of some cultural significance should be. You can't make it up, you must receive it from others. Making up your own narrative is a fabrication of the modern era.

What did I receive from this movie? Which pretty much no one else likes?

That people are horribly flawed, and that if you keep looking at the big picture it's going to destroy you. Either you'll get addicted to changing the world and become a psycho like Lex or Batman at the beginning of this movie, (SJWs/alt-right this is your fate) or you'll drown in despair, like Superman almost did (which is what I'm trying to get out of). There is no way to fix the big picture. Too many profit off of it being wrong to be able to change it. It's just that simple. I can't change the reward system of the world, because entropy is a guarantee and one can always set themselves up to profit off it.

But if you forgive the world? Forgive it for being screwed up, irredeemably so, and find someone to love? You may have a chance. It won't be easy, because you have to give up being addicted to a cause. You have to cut yourself free of the dopamine rush, entirely, and just see the world around you.

Notice I didn't put this in "I've done it" terms. Of course I haven't. I so badly want to fix things, to get that dopamine hit, to feel important. And I've been trying to rectify that need with what this movie showed me. Why on earth should this be sufficient?

The other day I was walking to Walmart and I saw a man trying to carry some furniture out of a store. I could tell he was having a rough time. I just stopped, held the door, and then carried a few things out with him. We laughed about how bulky things were, and then moved on. When I got into Walmart I saw an aisle covered with cans. Employees were scrambling around with a panicked looks, trying to pick it all up. As I went past I bent over, grabbed a bunch of the cans, and helped them get it into their carts.

I didn't even realize what I'd done until I got home and realized I was feeling peculiarly hopeful for someone of my disposition. I just felt... light. Free. I'd seen someone who needed help and I helped, simply because that was right in front of me.

I didn't hear the dopamine scream in my head, demanding I change the world.

I saw someone. I helped. And that was it.

For once I wasn't scared of where things were going. It wasn't loud and noisy like thinking about how to save "the world", it sure wasn't sexy and glamorous.

But at that moment I believed that a man could fly.

I don't know if that's sufficient, but dopamine ain't the way to go. Especially if it does no one else any good.

Which I assure you, screaming into the echo chamber doesn't.