Return to the Wheel

I used to play Burning Wheel two to three times a week. I did that for three years. The campaigns were dark, personal, sometimes more than borderline crazed fever dreams of fun, adventure, grief, and oh so very trippy. Burning Wheel is the sorta game I’d take with me to a desert island because it’s going to keep challenging me and kicking my ass until the day I die. Whenever I GM Burning Wheel know you will get a brutally honest “AND I MEAN IT” with every session. It was all out there. I loved every second of it.

Afghanistan happened. And something in me broke. It happened to be the part of me that enjoyed the sincerity machine I'd turned Burning Wheel into.

I went from GMing multiple times a week to none. I just couldn't do it. I grieved for months, unable to really focus that part of me at all.

Fortunately at the time I was developing Crescendo, so I threw myself into that with abandon. I wasn't running from Burning Wheel, so much as having to dedicate myself to developing that game to a degree that cut out all other games. And, to be fair, Crescendo is a sprawling mess made coherent. It's taken many a draft to make what one of my playtesters called "actually two or three games working together" (it may  be five or six) actually work together. Crescendo, unlike more than a few of the games that are currently being developed in response to Burning Wheel, decided to take the jank of its mother system head on and make it core to the game. Crescendo is gloriously weird. It's not as rules "intensive" as Burning Wheel, but it's every bit as idiosyncratic and demanding as Burning Wheel, in its own way.

As I developed my mythological character development game I realized that I was, in part, processing what made Burning Wheel so important to me in the first place. With each and every mechanic that I crammed into Crescendo I understood a bit better what I was try to replicate: the expansiveness of Burning Wheel's engine, with the intricate knobs and levers that would take a lifetime to master. I wanted to make something every bit as challenging and unique, in its own way. I realized that I really missed Burning Wheel's expanded mechanics, its demand that you accept it as it is, along with its uniquely idiosyncratic approach to character evolution. Just... the whole damn thing.

As I designed and reworked and reworked and reworked and wrote and broke my brain over and over, I realized that how I wanted to play Burning Wheel was changing. Before that point I was a bit skittish about playing Burning Wheel the way I wanted to: with all the gloriously inconvenient crunch at front and center. I thought Burning Wheel was a session-based game and wanted to honor that structure. Well, with the Anthology I know now that was never really what was intended. So I kinda figured "Meh, why not just embrace that? Let the scenarios be long, messy, and filled with all of these gloriously crunchy bits that I enjoy so much?"

And that percolated in the back of my head, as I designed Crescendo. Which, for the record, is also scenario based, not session-based, and also takes an interminably long time to get anything done. Actually it can take longer than Burning Wheel by a very good margin: arcs of Burning Wheel can take between eight to eighteen sessions, maybe longer. That's one arc. Burning Wheel's probably firmly into its second arc by then, if not its third.

And yes I think that's a feature not a bug.

So the other day I decided to go back to Burning Wheel with Lena. We started talking about what we wanted to do, and all of this love for the game just came washing over me. It wasn't what Crescendo did, but I didn't want it to. I wanted my janky and messy Burning Wheel, which helped create all of these really intense and raw moments of gameplay and emotion! Burning Wheel does really grounded, in the moment character development, really well. It doesn't hop around like Crescendo, which will have you doing intense character work, switch to setting stuff for context, and then into making myths another session later... and then dump you back into the story with some more context to hang your character work off of, the whole time at the same breakneck speed of Burning Wheel (if not faster, depending on how you view it). I love how grounded in the present moment Burning Wheel feels. It's something I had really pushed against before, but now that I've got a game that can go from ground-level to the heights of mythology and back down in an instant... I really like that Burning Wheel doesn't. It's got more of a gritty, pulpy sorta a feel in comparison.

And I've been listening to a lot of pulp recently. I really like it.

Time to go back to Heranyt and see how fucked it is. I've missed it so.

Dear Incompetent Dumbass: Companies Have to Make Money!

 

This is a rant. If you cannot take rough and uncouth ways of handling a subject and you’re otherwise easily offended please: get the fuck off my blog. I don’t make a dime off of it. I don’t need you crying about hurt feelings. If somehow someone misses this memo… well… who’s that on?

Oh right. YOU.

The Verge are shills and we all knew it, but holy hell, I didn’t realize the Marxism had hurt their brainpans that much.

Yes, read the article. It’s stupid, but read it.

For those who care, Marxism is defined by me as the latest iteration of the weaponization of the masses by one group of elites against another. It doesn’t have to be fully conscious. Marxism is the last stage of  classical liberalism: having realized that the masses cannot make decisions that are in their own best interests, the elites try to put said masses in their back pocket and come to a new society, a utopia!

It always ends in squalor and death, both spiritual and physical.

Yes, always.

No, progressives,  your fantasies of representation and a fully tolerant society will never work. Ever. You wanna know why? Because you can’t stop the majority of people from wanting a common religion that isn’t class envy, the opposite sex, babies, good and evil, and a family unit free of political interference. The vast majority of people have these drives and simply cannot have it programmed out of them. Propaganda’s power is in making the masses feel that everyone else has stopped feeling these drives but them. You can trick them but you can’t change them. Screaming “YOU’RE A HATEFUL BIGOT IF YOU DON’T WANT STORIES ABOUT WHAT I AM TOLD BY PARTIES I SHOULDN’T TRUST MY SHOELACES WITH ARE MINORITIES” will not work long-term: those primal drives mentioned above are too strong. They’re not socially programmed. They’re not constructs. They will always win, opinion be damned.

Here’s a truth I bled for, and you can take it to the bank: life and what you think of it are not the same thing. And life, at its base, is about living long enough to fuck someone, make babies, keep them from dying, and then dying after helping make sure the next generation’s good to go. Oh, and others will suffer (sometimes meaninglessly) so you can do it. Sorry, folks, that’s the average life. Pretending that ain’t so is stupid.

Y’know what our current society has decided you need to do the above? Money! And by money I mean made up numbers we throw around in a fake world. Everyone agrees it’s real. God, it’s so stupid. But there you have it.

Now, without this made up stuff you can’t fuck, raise children, or do anything else.

That’s a fact for most of us.

And your thoughts on that process are quite irrelevant. So are mine.

So if you’re going to entertain others to make your money? You better hit the common denominators. Otherwise you lose money. And then you lose your business. And then you don’t eat.

To pretend Warner Bros. wasn’t losing money is a special level of stupid, not to mention the constant bleeding of CW. So when Zaslav took over he did something that ten years ago was considered smart, and it still is. He asked “Who’s actually paying for our stuff and what are they mostly watching?” Surprise! He went along with the major demographics, cause the primal purpose of a business is to make money, because killing each other for food turns out to be a really bad idea and money ain’t great but it’s better than that.

It’s really as simple as that. Sorry, there’s no Marxist bastardization of myth going on here. It’s Zaslav’s job to make money for the company, and he’s going after the lowest common denominator. That’s smart. He should do that. 

Those who think I’m just a shill, like The Verge, have clearly never read this blog. 

And that’s entirely your problem.

Pattern Pattern Apocalypse: A Rant

 

This, this scene right here, should have gotten a loud cheer from the "conservative Christian" crowd, particularly the Catholic and Orthodox crowds. The above scene is a masterful climax to an epic space fantasy, where the value of the nature of life itself is affirmed. If you believe in the communion of saints this scene should have reduced you to fucking tears. Rey, an obvious reference to light, takes on a damningly obvious image of the soul as conceived by apostolic Christians. The soul, which is usually depicted as female, channels the light and goodness of the nature she shares with the world and with God, using this light to defeat evil, with a cross. Two seconds of ascetical reading should have made this image obvious. This image would not work with a man claiming to be all the Jedi. Because the human soul is female, not male; the soul, working properly, receives its light and life from God, and its this reception, in and of itself, that is salvific to itself and to others nearby. If there is one image in modern cinema that is Christian it is this one. This is Analogical Reading 101, it is blindingly basic.

Should I be shocked that the Right missed it???

No, I should not. 

But I am.

Because somehow, someway, using classical Christian imagery in an inventive way counts as SJW NONSENSE. Blind idiots!

The thing that really confuses me about conservative reads on the sequel trilogy is that, in theory, they have preserved the truths and tools from the past that would make this whole Skywalker Saga not just a simple tale, but a profoundly beautiful and hopeful one. Dead or alive, we all matter, one way or another. 

And honestly, if it wasn't for the absolute destruction of an actual spiritual sense in our culture, I think more people could see it. As Spengler puts it, we are in the Civilization phase of our society; we are all, by default, atheists at this point. Atheists do not see with the soul, they see with the mind. Which means that, if you're going to not be an atheist, you have to learn to turn your nous, the perceiving instrument of the soul, back on. The nous sees in repetitions, patterns, and sudden apocalypses that re-contextualize what came before, changing it irrevocably.

Oh, if you don't know, apocalypse originally referred to the moment in a Jewish wedding where the woman takes off her veil for her husband for the first time. The word essentially means "a sudden revelation that was only barely hinted at".

The nous (what us Americans call The Third Eye) sees life in terms of patterns and apocalypses.

So does the Skywalker Saga.

DEATH OF THE MENTOR

Pattern

Pattern 

Apocalypse

FACING THE FAILED FATHER FIGURE

Pattern

Pattern

Apocalypse

FACING THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE

Pattern

Pattern

Apocalypse

Look folks, this is tiresome to me. I don’t enjoy being angry. I don’t find rage entertaining and try to avoid it as often as possible. I’ve avoided writing about Star Wars because I have gotten so annoyed with the popular reception of the sequels that I just don’t want to be bothered. I'm two decades ahead and I know it. And that annoys me. Knowing that in two decades people will have figured that the entirety of the Skywalker Saga is awesome does not make me feel superior, but lonely and inhumanely peeved. I can't just go with the flow, I have to put up with two decades of whining.

Yes, whining.

Yes, you're all acting like children.

Now, the thing is that you could tell me I'm supposed to act with patience about this situation. After all, children need that quite a bit, don't they? If I think you're acting like a child I should calmly and sweetly explain, over and over again, what it is you're missing and then let you put the rest of the puzzle pieces together. After all, that's what adults do, right? They help children grow up.

Whoever says that has clearly never had children. Children are narcissists on a good day and assholes on anything less, and it's frequently less. Yes, patience and niceness can help.... but usually I find you have to hold up the standard of behavior that you expect, let the kid know what it is, and then become as granite in the face of the oncoming storm.

So here's the deal, you supposed guardians of a culture that's been dead for at least a decade now:

The storytelling methods of The Skywalker Saga are the patterns of Western Civilization. Yes that includes the sequels. I get that the corporate buyout of Disney is the deathknell. Yup. I hear you. But the thing they completed? They actually did their job. And you know how I know that? Because I sat down and watched the hell out of all nine movies and think every last thing you'd want a Westerner to relearn to see is not just in these movies but it's the only spot where it's being done currently. This is your shot! You got nothing else! And irony of ironies, a corporation gave it to you!

So you can either sit down and look at the object objectively, without your bullshit lenses, or you can just whine. 

Like a child.

Oh, and progressives, don't think you're off the hook. I don't take your positions seriously enough to comment on them.

So take that as you like.

The Truth Found in Death: Robert E. Howard and Pulp

 

I’ve heard a lot about Conan the Barbarian and Robert E. Howard. I’ve been told his prose is like a fever dream, lurid and crazed. I’ve been told his work is the true inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons, and that Tolkien's influence is but a skin over the Howard skeleton built.  I’d mostly written the author off, just because I don't like DnD all that much. Murder hobos aren't my thing. And DnD takes some real work to not be about murder hobos. So if Howard is the origination of murder hobos? No thanks.

Well one night I got bored. So I decided to listen to two of Howard's stories, one about Conan (see above) and the other about Solomon Kane (see below):

And, since I like Solomon Kane more than Conan:

I get it now.

Howard's stuff is about strong, already-formed characters running into a world that is on the verge of complete and utter chaos. Or maybe it's there already. No, I don't mean the nicely-held "I'm so chaotic!" personality that people like to think is cute. It's not, and that's not chaos. Chaos is when you can trust nobody because nobody is actually out to help. You are faced with a scenario where the law of the jungle prevails. Nobody can handle true chaos long. Ever. True chaos is so bad that anything, even slavery, is preferable to it. True chaos creates situations so desperate that to judge the solution is not just silly, it's arrogant. You either go into a state that's so awful that it's almost beyond imagination or you don't. There isn't a question of what lessons the character needs to do to evolve into the person who is going to handle that chaos. The character can already handle it. It's now a question of how far the character will go and what his process is in handling said chaos.

Oh wait, that's exactly what The Truth Found in Death is about! I mean, granted, the goriness and the eulogies from The Iliad is in there too, but at its core that's what I want TTFID to be about.

...

Reinventing the wheel is a bitch, ain't it?

So, I got some research to do. A lot of it. But what have I gotten out of my two pulps so far? Well, characters are integrated, the chaos is eldritch and sapient, the people are brutal, and all previously held notions of morality need to go out the window. Because yes, it is that desperate.

The biggest thing that jumped out at me was Howard's character work. Conan and Solomon were not people in flux. They were not changing. And it was because they didn't need to. They had what they needed to face the problems at hand. That didn't mean they were cookie cutters, quite the contrary! Conan had his particular sense of honor up until a point, and he stuck to just that sense of honor and nothing else. Solomon routinely questioned his own actions but always deferred on the side of what was going to work, right then and there; Solomon actually cared for life itself ideologically, something Conan did not inherently seem to have regard for.  I could feel who the characters were and, while I wouldn't necessarily be able to break it down into Traits or whatever, I would be able to ascertain if the characters were acting like themselves. There's a consistency to the characters that's simple and direct, but deep enough to where you can always have a decent idea of what they'd do.

There's something lacking in modern DnD discussions that I've poked my head in on: the evil of pulp isn't a common thing, it's an eldritch awfulness. This isn't the type of evil that one can convert or do anything really about, other than kill. The problem isn't "what is there to do?" but "how can we get rid of this virus without losing too many human lives?" Even when the foes are human, they're of a moral calibre so incredibly low that there's nothing else that can be safely done. There's a desperation in these tales that I feel is missing. And I really like having it in there. It makes gameplay much more interesting.

And of course, the main thing I'm really liking about these stories is just how amoral they are, at least by my modern sensibilities. Ever since Wolfe I've developed a bit of a taste for seeing fictional scenarios where "good" solutions are simply impossible. How characters handle these stark scenarios I find really interesting! What does the character value? Why? What will they do? The actions then raise questions, ones of which I find stick with me for awhile. Could I have done better? Could I have made choices in that situation that were of a more moral bent? Is my desire for a "moral" answer coming from a post-Enlightenment  mindset, where abstract principles are more important than what's right in front of my nose, or from an actual sense of right and wrong (and yes there is a difference)?

I'd really like to throw things like this at players and GMs. To see situations where people have to go "Well, this is what's in front of me, and I have to act", and then to process what that looks like. Most of us in the West have forgotten what chaos, real chaos, actually looks like, and why people are so afraid of it, and why we should be afraid of it still! In the face of the real law of the jungle, where only the strong rule and it just so happens that the threat is stronger than most people, there's only opposition. Argue about how the weaker should be treated all you like, that's an abstract problem, and not the problem that I'm getting from pulp, at least so far. And I find it really compelling.

A Post-Modern Catechism: Original Sin

The Catholic Catechism's explanation of Original Sin sucks, and the Orthodox "wE'Re NOt LiKE theM" Ancestral Sin doesn't really do the problem justice either. No one seems to understand that post-modernity is its own language, one which lives in irony (a trait no sincere Christian can have too much of), nihilism (the real philosophical roots of Christianity, @ me, go ahead), and suspicion of everything (a Christian trait if there ever was one).

Post-moderns live and die off of personal experience. They are rightfully suspicious of all else. So do the Desert Fathers, and therefore Catholic and Orthodox Christians. There's a lot of similarity to mine here. Contrary to the desiccated Christianity that we see nowadays, historical Christianity is entirely based off of personal experience, with the common experiences of others taken into account as well.

Doctrine is common experience codified. Let that sink in a moment.

So here's Original Sin, in Post-Modern terms.

You ever get the feeling you're just fucked? Let's get grave for a moment. Put aside the irony. I know it's a good emotional shield, I use it all the time! But, for one second, drop the shield. It'll be okay.

You ever lie awake at night, look up at the ceiling, and just realize you are stuck, personally? That you keep making the same mistakes, over and over, that no matter how hard you try you never quite stick the landing, that you're somehow always lonely, no matter how things are going, and you just wish this gnawing anxiety that things aren't as they should be would just shut up and go away?

Congratulations. That feeling is called the Original Sin. Something is WRONG. And no one can fix it.

Notice I didn't blame you for this feeling. We all have it. Yes, all of us. It's okay, it's not just you. Every single person throughout all history has experienced this reality. And our history has been a product of trying to fix it. You're not wrong.  We all feel it. The universe is fucked, and we're all a part of this tragedy. No one really gets it right. We all fail. All of us. There's no need to be ironic about it. All of us, no matter what we try and do, are fucked. Somehow.

Even the saints. Especially them. They decided to fail in fucking style. Some of them died shining like the sun itself and still bemoaned that they hadn't escaped the cycle of failure.

Another way to understand the Christian doctrine of Original Sin (NOT depravity, that's for another time) is to turn on the news and ask the damning question "Are those assholes really any different from me?"

I assure you the bad dudes you see have people who love them.

I assure you they have anxieties and cares, just like you.

I definitely assure you they think they're the good guys, and that your real instruments for determining if you're a good guy (dopamine and groupthink) are theirs too. 

That process? Its end result? That's Original Sin. No, it's not your fault.

"But I'm one of the good guys! I am on the right side of history! I'll be vindicated!"

Will you? Do you really think so? Because if you were really, would you be looking up at the ceiling at night and wondering why it all goes to shit?

You think the good guys actually do that?

Notice I didn't say there were any good guys. That's not an irony, that's just a fact. Because everyone, everyone(!) is fucked. You can either accept that, and possibly get somewhere, or not, and stay fucked.

So when you hear a Catholic bitch about "OrignAL SIn" or an Orthodox bemoan "AnCEStral SiN" that's what they mean. It's one of the most obvious experiences we all have. And pretending you don't have it isn't just stupid, but it's (from what I can tell) the root of a lot of mental illness. I know that while I was doing really intensive therapy the one thing that kept tripping me up was the word "should". "I should be able to control my mind against these flashbacks! I should be able to think clearly! I should be able not feel like a six year old trapped in a thirty year old's body!" But none of that's right. Because of course I can't control whether I get flashbacks or not. I can't control whether or not I feel like a six year old in thirty-four year old body. I can't control any of that. Neither can I control that I am thirty-four now and that I will someday die, whether I like it or not. 

All I can do is accept what I am, body and soul and spirit, and bring it before the Almighty. Because He does heal you. No, I'm not fucking with you. It does happen. I've seen it. I've felt it. It's real. It's not pleasant, but the world isn't a pleasant place and the moment you admit that core fact to yourself it gets a hell of a lot easier.

But first you have to accept that you are never going to cut the mustard. It was never the point.

The Game Master Emulator

 

One of the things I’ve noticed since starting the Power Rangers RPG is the total lack of scene building support. There’s a gaping hole in the structure, where whatever you want can be slotted in easily. I’ve spent too long doing story games to railroad. Nope. I’m not stepping into that breach! So I sit back and let the players take the reins, throwing in mechanical challenges when I think it appropriate. I’m deeply fortunate to have great players, who I can trust to do that. But what if they’d had a bad night? And what if I had a bad night too? There’s no safety system in place to help guide things along until people could get their groove back. 

And it’s not just Power Rangers that has this problem. Pathfinder, 5e, all these “trad” games have this glaring hole in their setup. It’s up to the GM to pace and set up scenes. That leaves beginning GMs in a total no-man’s land; the wheel must be reinvented, every time.In fact, I’d argue that one of the similarities between trad games is the utter lack of support for scene construction.

Whether it’s meant to or not the Game Master’s Emulator is a great patch for this common trad mistake. It includes a full set of rules that take best practices in scene construction and world building and gamifies them. The Emulator operates on answering Yes/No questions and making random scenes; all that’s really left is for the GM to interpret the results the Emulator gives. And that is not a bad thing, at all. The notion of GM as story creator needs to die in a fire, with GM as story director taking its place. It’s not only less exhausting for the GM, but it also allow the GM to discover the story, along with his players.

Most of the Emulator is advice on how to use it, with the engine consolidated in the back for ease of use. I do not suggest skipping the advice, as it is crucial to understanding the engine itself. The Emulator’s engine allows for a variety of results beyond simple Yes/No, and its scene generation rules are keyed into the plots and NPCs already made in the game. This lets player choice really matter, as well as being flexible in allowing new plots and NPCs to come in. It’s a cool little engine! There was clearly some thought and playtestimg that went into this.

The Emulator is also meant to facilitate GM-less and Solo play. I like being the dude who interprets the bone tosses, so I doubt I’d go either route, but I could easily see this engine being able to take on much of the role of a GM, provided the players are willing and able to take on those responsibilities. It is viable, provided everyone wants to take on just a bit more work.

The book itself is a floppy softcover, sized as a normal DnD book. I’m kinda worried about how fragile the thing feels in my hands; that may not be fair, as my ability to passively wreck objects I hold is a running joke between my wife and I. Maybe you don’t have that issue and won’t be afraid for the product? That being said, the Emulator is cheap, clocking in around thirteen bucks on Amazon. It’s really hard to quibble with that price given that it’s a universal scene building system.

My greatest critique of the presentation are the relatively tasteless pictures of mostly naked women strewn throughout the book. There doesn’t seem to be much thought put into the art direction beyond “lots of hot girls and weird aliens” which I find… boring. I’d have much rathered no art at all than what we got. Fortunately, what with the engine for the Emulator being in the back, I don’t really have to look at most of it, and the one image that I kinda hafta see isn’t the worse one of the bunch, so there’s that.

The Game Master’s Emulator is a vital product. It recognizes the need for scene building tools and allows a GM to discover the story along with his players. While it can go fully GMless it would take a bit more work from all the players involved. Which isn’t to say people wouldn’t be willing to do it! The Emulator will go there if you will! But the whole product is bogged down a bit by bad art and a relatively flimsy set up. But for the price you’re getting a metric ton of value. I will be using it for all my trad systems, which I’ve avoided using up until now. And for that I am thankful.

Where I Belong

A Vision, by George Kordis.
Egg tempera on handmade paper on board, 100 x 150 cm. 

There is a song that I know I want to die to: Where I Belong, by Switchfoot. It wasn't a conscious decision, just something I knew when I heard the song. Everything I want to think about as I die is in that song. I've a habit of listening to it on New Year's Eve as a reminder as to what the next year is to be used for. 

One night I had a particularly awful flashback. C-PTSD serves up extremely intense flashbacks, things so horrible and direct only a child could conceive of them. They don't come as often as they used to, but man when they do! This was one of those nights. I was hurting all over. I'd had a whole day of my body aching so horribly that I really wished I could lie down and die. Just to have it all stop. Cause God, I wanted it to stop.

So I listened to another of my favorite songs: Sycamore.

Yes, you should get all the way through.

No, really, I know it's thirteen minutes but it's worth it.

One of the things flashbacks do is they keep a horrible moment playing in your body on loop. Your body loses the sense of linear time and experiences this one hellish moment, over and over again. Most advice I've gotten is to find a way to stay in the present moment, to root oneself firmly in the right here, right now. It's some of the least helpful advice I've ever gotten, right up there with bullshit like "Believe in yourself" and "You're enough".  Myself is the problem, thank you very much. If it works for you that's fine, but the myth of adequacy has never done me any good. So no. Same holds true with the present moment. In the present moment my body is dumping poison, the present moment is the problem!!! I could do with a lot less of it, thank you.

This particular time in experiencing Sycamore I could feel my body start to let go. Something about those folks at the drumset, playing, always fills me with hope. My body began to let go of the present moment. And this quiet whisper came to me, deep in my heart, on the wind.

Hello.

I've gotten so used to weird shit happening around flashbacks I didn't even flinch. The voice sounded familiar.

"Hi", I said back, audibly. The rest of my family was asleep, I could act as crazy as I wanted!

It's Time.

I knew what that meant. When I was younger I wanted to die one of two ways: crushed by the corpses of my enemies or surrounded by family. No, really, this is what I would tell people. Either one was fine by me. 

"How is It happening?"

With family. There was pride in that voice, a profound joy. My body trembled at it. And yearned for the moment when it could finally stop doing the insanity we call life.

They're so scared. I'm scared too. Will you sing with me? Help me help them, ease their pain?

"I can't cross with you, beyond The Gate."

That's okay. I won't need you there.

I walked outside, humming the opening bars softly to myself; I didn't want to wake the neighbors. I felt old and tired hands clapping to the beat with a vigor that is only present in the young and the dying. I could feel the stares. There was a momentary anger from some of them. I could feel the indignation, however slight.

And then we roared the opening. Together. And the resentment, the consternation went away. He stopped singing to encourage those around him. "Louder, let's do this like a rabble! A riot!" he called. There was a joy, an abandonment, that I'd not felt in decades. I thought this part of me had died a very long time ago. But inside I could feel the doubts, the fears, the questions this old man had. Life had started off so difficult, so brutal, so cruel. Light had slowly crept in. Was it enough? Truly? I really wanted to write that it wasn't. I really did. The modern in me wants to stamp and scream that nobody could be this peaceful, happy, strong, secure, that life is a great unknown. He caved, at the last! He was a charlatan! It would let me off the hook, let me say "Well, that's just unrealistic. Nothing that good exists, not in this world." And then I could go about my day, isolated and alone and darned happy about it. 

Make no mistake: the modern mindset is built on spite towards anything remotely real.

But that shriveled and evil worldview of our ignoble present will not win today. The old man had been at peace for awhile; failure was no longer something he contemplated. Our voices became stronger. There was a powerful, almost frantic pushing, on our parts. There was a need, an immense desire, to get every last drop of this Light out, into those who surrounded that bed. Out out out. I couldn't see the room, but I could feel the Light coming out in waves, gently enveloping everyone as he tried to give away every last drop of peace he had left. Nothing else could be held in that body. It was a fire sale of life; all had to go.

And then there was that youthful energy again. I felt like I was five years old, before everything had started happening in earnest. The old man's voice became powerful, buoying the voices around him, pushing them farther and farther. My voice broke, choking in sobs. I had to come our back fence and collapsed against it, reveling in being held up. Just a little bit farther! Just a little bit! 

GO!

I still believe we can live forever. You and I can live forever now. We sang, his voice soft and vanishing, mine harsh, broken by sobs, and also vanishing.

GO!

His voice cracked.

GO!

The strength was vanishing.

GO!

The peace grew stronger.

GO!

Hands could be felt. On his hands. On his face, which he nuzzled into. On his slowing heart, which rejoiced all the more because those hands of reassurance had never been truly anticipated. Cruelty had rendered that heart distrustful of expecting goodness, but not at being surprised that good still existed. Power was leaving, and peace was winning. His voice was almost gone. So was mine, as I trembled against the fence, tears streaming from stinging eyes. They were holding him now, supporting him as he filled them with peace.

You can't go much farther, young'un. The Wall's here. So's The Gate.

 

"I... I really want to go! I NEED TO GO WITH YOU! TAKE ME!!!!" I begged in a loud and breaking  voice. At that moment I wanted to be him. To go Home. A great exhaustion and desperation came over me. I just wanted it to be done. Over. The peace he was facing was so intoxicating, so inviting... 

No, no you don't. Trust me. Let it play out. Let me go. Please.

 

I began to hear the noises of the city at night again. He was leaving me. I was letting him go. We were letting go together. "It feels like it's been worth it," I said, suddenly afraid. There was no way this was what I thought it was. Right? This couldn't be how it ended. It had to be a trick. I was crazy. I had to be crazy. This wasn't real. No one else ever talked about anything even remotely like this. I needed it to be true, but that didn't make it so!

It is. And then the voice grew softer, quieter. I'm glad I hoped.

 

And then there was a silence, a serenity, like a child long overdue for a nap had finally settled in, soft and calm breathing conquering all around it with its sheer sincerity and innocence.

I couldn't see through the hot water. My body collapsed into a fetal position, and I rocked myself as best I could. The fence felt good. Firm. Certain. It helped counter the swimming in my head, the shaking of my body as it struggled to accept what had just happened to it.

After a few moments I was completely in the present again, back against the fence. I looked up at my stars, which were probably dead tens of millions of years, with their lights only just reaching me now to say "I was here once". There's a weird element of time distortion to the night sky: what's up there hasn't been there for goodness knows how long. We see echoes and are unappreciative of the marvel. I looked and admired what I could through the light pollution. But, for whatever reason, this is what I felt that night, looking up into the light-choked sky.

There's another song I listen to in moments of pure triumph. I don't listen to it nearly as often as I should. But here, right here, I knew it was appropriate. So I pulled it up on my phone and sat back, drying my eyes. Triumph was witnessed. It needed to be celebrated.

After Schiphol I went inside.

I was fine. My body had been relieved.

And the next day I woke up, happy to be alive.

World Building in Crescendo

 

There is not one fantasy RPG that’s not inspired, at least in part, by Tolkien. Tolkien’s love of language and history created the closest thing to a perfect fantasy I know of. While Crescendo’s mechanics are built for the more psychological fantasy of Wolfe, Le Guin, and Gaiman there is one spot in the design that is unabashedly Tolkien: world building. As good as the authors above are at world building Tolkien’s exhaustive approach, properly handled, is better for RPGs, as it is explicit, while being slowly doled out over time. 

But first, a quick caveat: I know Le Guin and Wolfe have done their own world building for the Earthsea Cycle and the Solar Cycle. I’ve read some of it and it is so good!!! What they have written I’ve greatly enjoyed. But Tolkien is the master here, and I hardly think it a controversial statement to make.

Why do I prefer Tolkien’s world building for RPGs? Why do I think it the gold standard? What makes it stand out? Tolkien saw characters as instances of their culture; part of what makes Fellowship of the Ring work is because the characters and their cultures are so well realized that it becomes a true joy to see all these peoples bump against each other. Everyone is so well explicitly in his culture you just… find yourself at home. Tolkien also used lore as character work: you learn a lot about Aragorn by his recitation of the Lay of Beren and Luthien.  You learn that Aragorn views himself as a part of this story, that he values it, and that he's going to extend it. Aragorn barely says a thing about himself but you just learned everything about him you really need to.

This isn’t to say that Wolfe and Le Guin don’t have a great grasp on their cultures and how they instantiate into the story. On the contrary, I’d argue Wolfe is the master of implied world building. He’s got the stories totally dialed in and you can feel it. It wasn’t until my second read through of Bookof the New Sun that I realized it wasn’t Severian I disliked, but the brutish and frankly nasty culture he’s in. And Severian was trying to fight against not just his culture but the place he had in it, with all his might. Severian was actually a very noble person, dealt the shittiest of hands. That’s an amazing moment to come to.

But you know where that doesn’t work? RPGs.

RPGs are a cooperative venture. you can’t have just one person know the lore in and out, because if that’s the case then no one else is able to just intuitively riff off it. Everyone has to know it. And that means explicitly shared world knowledge. I mean, technically you could just have players be that much on the same page… but I’m not designing for good players to intuit, I’m designing so that if you’ve had a bad day you could play, or if it doesn’t come naturally to you at all you could figure it out. 

So then what? You just give them some lore to read so people know what to do? While Crescendo does this that only goes so far: you can’t have a huge freaking Bible for people to read because they’re not going to read it. People always take the path of least resistance and that’s especially true of world building. You can try and talk them into it, but there’s only so much they’ll be willing to do. So, this is where you have to put in the caveat: actually building lore for a game is going to require greater buy-in than is normally expected. It takes work. You have to care. If someone isn't willing to care then you not only can't make them but you probably shouldn't expect them to, and probably shouldn't play with them. That may sound harsh, but it's not fair to people who do not want to do this intensive type of world building to expect it of them! Crescendo is meant for two to four people, GM included. It's not a casual game. You're meant to intensely play in this one world, for a long time.

There are three forms of world building in Crescendo: solo lore, poetry, and missed session journaling. Solo lore allows all the players (GM included!) to play out short sessions of solo play with heroes of bygone ages. Players will create simplified characters and use their journals as prompts for playing out a single episode in the life of this past hero. Players not only get XP for making these stories and getting them into their journals but other players get XP for copying that story into their journals as well. These little bits of context go a long way, allowing players to get into the groove as time goes on.

Poetry is always a session taken before each scenario of Crescendo. Using the prompts, players will generate a myth about one of the immortals of the setting. There isn't a lot of up-front knowledge about these immortals, so players will learn about these immortals as they are making up stories about them. Poetry can also be done during a session to cure mental conditions; if you weave in the events that gave you the mental condition in the first place into poem it actually heals the condition. So by worldbuilding characters are healed, which feels great!

Missed session journaling allows people who have to miss a session not only explain where their character was, but what they were up to during that time, with some XP given for journaling out their experiences. This gives players some control (as well as a small bit of XP) over the story. The results have been outstanding; people who missed didn't feel like they'd missed out too badly, and everyone else was surprised by an addition to the lore.

These two journaling mechanics also influence the Black Swan and all the dice mechanics. Each Black Swan references your journal, and each Black Swan is then written into all the journals at the table. Opening up more opportunities to put things into your journal increases the scope of the story. It's been my experience that Black Swans generate more and more thematically appropriate prompts for the GM. Without demanding thematic coherency, Crescendo helps you construct it by having certain player actions always be put in the journal. Players usually don't change what they care about in a given character, and so this begins to create a series of callbacks that echoes acrost the campaign, generating new Black Swans and changing the story.

Solo lore, myth building, and missed session journaling allow lore to be made up over time, with the players creating the setting and its context as they go. This lets people build up the world and its feel slowly, adding depth as they wish. But, once they start to get the context, players will organically feel  more a part of the world they have made. You can then start to relax into this different place, to feel ownership without interference or waiting for permission. It takes more work to do, but the rewards are just so awesome that I know I'm happy with the results. Worlds made in Crescendo feel alive in a way I've never really encountered in RPGs before. And that is insanely cool.

Westernism VS Socialism

In the Wizard of Oz book the Emerald City itself isn't actually green. Everyone is expected to wear emerald glasses, and if they don't wear these emerald glasses they're not let into the Emerald City. The emerald isn't the city, it's the glasses, and the important thing isn't the city itself, it's the freaking glasses. We call these glasses culture: everyone chooses to see the same color, and uses that color as a common point, because as it turns out perception is so hard that you have to create a common point. The culture is religious: it provides an interior reference point for everyone to orient their lives by. With this common interior reference point everyone can walk in lockstep. With this interior viewpoint in mind everyone builds a civilization together. But eventually everyone wants to stop seeing the same color, because look at what they built! It should be enough! Look at how cool it is!

So they take the glasses off.

Cause they figure what they built can stand in for seeing the same color.

They're disastrously wrong. Because without the color in common none of the stuff they built together makes sense. It wasn't the objects that were important, it was the common colored glasses. But everyone is tired of seeing the color. They can't bear it anymore. It's not laziness, it's cultural decrepitude. It is cultural age. Blaming people for taking the glasses off is like blaming an old man for not lifting a heavy object if he has arthritis. You shouldn't be blaming him for having arthritis. But you also shouldn't expect him to lift heavy objects anymore.

Spengler calls the common glasses Culture. He calls the taking off of the glasses, relying upon what Culture had previously built as a common reference, and the loss of all common perspective Civilization. Culture is religious. Civilization is atheistic. Culture is alive and will enliven you. Civilization is dead and will kill your soul. Culture relies upon the interior voice lined up with others in a common cause. Civilization uses power, for its own sake, to force compliance. Anything that does not have culture, an objective and interior truth, its heart, is totalitarian, by absolute necessity. Orwell talked about this in depth, even if I disagree with his fixes. 

Socialism has always been, and will always be, the weaponization of the common people by a group of elites against a rival group of elites. Sorry Orwell, history has proved your intuition wrong.

If you find yourself saying "But legislation will fix (insert random cultural problem here)" congrats, that's totalitarian! Get out a mirror and take a good, hard look at it.

Back in my Facebook days I found myself watching as a good number of my college friends “went woke”. Now, this isn’t an indictment on any of them. When enough propaganda, when power, is leveraged on you you will change your mind. Brains aren’t invincible things; anyone who thinks such a silly thought has already been caught.

I repeat: if you do not think brainwashing isn’t going on in your head then it already happened to you, and that’s literally what folks like Merloo would tell you without a second thought.

If you think it hasn’t happened then you’re already grabbed. Period.

Anyways.

As this wokening continued, I noticed a trend. These were people who nominally Christian who, as time went on, continued to talk about the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church (an obvious thing only missed by idiots and kool-aid drinkers), the misdeeds of its priests (a tragedy of the highest degree, but not even in the same ballpark of scale as what happens in public schools and the government), and who slowly gained the opinion that one could apply power to make the world a better and kinder place than it was (a pipe dream if there ever was one). The first two are merely a part of the trend, but I don't think they're the point. I think the last point about power is where the trend was driving at. 

Power fixes things was the claim of my friends. “Just exercise some power!” isn't what they said literally, but by thinking that the government could fix the issue that was what they were saying. And that felt wrong, somehow. Something about the whole thing smelled rotten to me, and so I resisted the downward pull as hard as I could, and got off Facebook when I realized that the system was designed to make one desire power and I began to suspect I was losing this fight. I have an addictive personality; it was only a matter of time before their system took my brain and fried it. 

It is never about the words themselves, but who is saying them and where those words are going. They're always going somewhere! So I looked over at who was saying the words were parroting. What a surprise, the party that kills children were saying them! That, right there, is where I stopped up my ears. You are never going to get me to agree with people who employ the tactics of the eugenic-genocidal abortion movement. Whatever words they say, it comes from the top of a mountain of tens of millions of babies. Whatever they say, it has to be taken with that image in mind. 

"Peace, justice!" they cry.... atop a mound of miniature dismembered arms, legs, torsos, heads, eyeballs, the rest. It's a grizzly thought, but utterly accurate to the hypocritical sludge they push.

Nope.

Never.

If you stand for peace, get off the damn mound of little corpses you made. 

Oh wait, you won't? It's a right to be able to kill someone else, you say? To sell their little organs (and yes it is sell) and profit off of frying them in acid or dismembering them as they die in agonizing pain? You still call that peace?

Fuck yourself if the answer is yes. I have my limits. I don't have many. But that is definitely a limit of mine and I will not pretend that I hold any respect for any person who says yes to that question. So yes. Fuck yourself. Bye.

"But Nathan, it's more complicated than that!" people who will cry out no to the above but still back abortion will inevitably say. "Women shouldn't be trapped. Men should be accountable for what happens."

You did it again.

You hear it?

No?

There's that appeal to power to enforce what should be a common understanding, once again. You can't make interior voices line up, but you can enforce compliance in anything you like. Don't mistake compliance with agreement. Power cannot create culture. Something about that reminds me of something... someone... it's 20th century.... hard to place...

Oh, I know!

Our enemies

Our friends. Who killed many many more than our enemies

Power cannot fake culture.

All well and good you may say, but have you seen the other side? We've been told, over and over again that they're awful! The power, the propaganda used, are of course not suspect, because have you seen these Neanderthals?? They try to say that women who have miscarriages should be locked up. And there's always the people (that I've personally never met, but it's a cliche it's gotta come from somewhere!!!) who say you're killing children if a dude masturbates. That's utterly crazy and is its own form of oppression. Granted, it doesn't involve a mountain of tiny corpses but it's still not acceptable. These supposedly God-fearing Bible thumpers are so backward and don't listen to their own book!

And I agree.

They're morons.

But the thing is that the Right isn't Christian. Oh, sure, it claims to be Christianity. They'll thump those Bibles that were made up in the 17th century loudly and proudly... and ignore the spot where universal feeding of the poor is required. Or the canceling of all debts every fifty years, along with the return of ancestral lands. Two seconds of reading any earlier ascetical texts or medieval texts or talking to people who have experienced "the small still voice" is a good splash of cold water, right to the face. What the Right is nostalgic for isn't Christianity, it's a bunch of fucking Vikings made soft by Christianity. As Western Europe, with Britain at its forefront, expanded it merely mimicked its Viking progenitors on a less extreme level. Instead of killing everyone they just enslaved and took the resources. Yes, that's a step up. What, you thought the Anglo-Saxons were gonna stop being marauding assholes with a little prattling on love and forgiveness? Any examination of primary sources reveals the lie. Any look at someone who lives by the small still voice makes the lie ridiculous and obvious.

But did you notice the trick? Cause there's a trick in there, and it's damned good one. You have two stories, both of which I've more or less shown to be incorrect. And you, the reader, probably thought they were before you started reading this post, however faintly. There's not one person I know of that backs the corporate shills, or who likes the government, or who even really likes what conservative Christians or progressives are doing. It's easy to see that it's all wrong.

So why the hell are you picking a side?

Who told you to do that?

No, really. Stop reading. Sit down. And play out the events in your head.

Who on earth actually told you all these things? Really? 

If either story (conservative or progressive) you were fed involve people you know to be untrustworthy why the hell are you considering either one????

Folks, the trap is that it isn't two paths, but one: the way of power and totalitarianism. Power cannot force culture to come back. I'm sorry, it can't. Power doesn’t corrupt. That’s a damned lie, one in where there is nothing worth using power to protect. Power is useful for many a thing, but it cannot counterfeit the lining up of interior voices. That's gone for the moment, and it's going to be gone for quite some time.

Oh, and just in case it’s not clear enough yet, one of the definitions of totalitarian I found on Google was:

"relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.

"a totalitarian regime""

Or, in other words: a society ruled entirely by power, which has not even a conception of culture. Because all is determined centrally.

Conservatives want a culture that is dead, that is so far gone that even the most basic understanding about the past (the British Empire ran on a deficit pretty much the entirety of its existence, ask yourself why they might do that) doesn’t exist anymore.

Progressives want power, because they know it's the only effective thing against chaos left to us. They don’t know what culture is so they can’t even really miss it. It’s alien to them. It's alien to all of us.

Yes, all.

None of us actually remember what it's like to have our interior voices lined up. Not the conservatives, who think sticking to the old texts will help kickstart a mass memory that's been dead, certainly not the progressive, who yearns for culture but thinks power will get it back. Both ways are lies, both ways are not true, and sticking to them is utter insanity.

So what is there to do?

I don't know yet. 

It's taken me this long just to be able to articulate the problem. Just getting to this point was an exercise in will that I cannot understate. But I do think that is, in fact, the problem.

The trick is always in asking the right question. 

I think the above is on the right track to figure out that question.

We'll see.

Crescendo: Take Your Time

 

This was some of my favorite play I've ever done. Some of my playtesting of Crescendo with David was an argument and a funeral. It was two hours of discussion about ethics and hope and ultimately the sadness of death and life’s meaning. The plot moved at an absolute crawl. We got philosophical. Then we mourned the death of an NPC that Sorin, David’s character, had been forced to kill. And, despite the fact that pretty much nothing got done, it was one of the most meaningful sessions I’ve ever had the pleasure of GMing.

But first, the setup: the world’s soil has become largely infertile, for reasons hitherto unknown. This was principally shown in the widespread death of trees whose fruit gave magical power. With the death of the trees would come the collapse of the social order, and soon after everyone would starve. Sorin, David’s character, was a druid dedicated to the maintenance of the earth itself, guardian of the ways of old. He had resisted the machinations of the cult of Zodie the Fallen, who taught that meteorite dust could restore the earth… if they ripped out the magical trees, which were thought to provide life to the soil. Sorin had advocated for adhering to the old ways, of resisting Zodie and his false promises, and set out to find a way to save everyone.

And then Sorin found his long-lost mentor Yvonne. Half dead. With meteorite dust in her wounds. And the dust was definitely helping heal them. So meteorite dust was, in fact, life giving, to the utter contrary of everything Yvonne had ever taught Sorin.

The soldiers Sorin were with demanded to bring Yvonne in for examination. Sorin was on good terms with these men and begged for the chance to examine his mentor… to no avail. If meteor dust could restore people then no time could be wasted. Sorin asked for just a bit more time. 

His head swam.

Yvonne couldn’t be using meteorite dust. It was anathema to preserving everyone and everything. And yet there she was, alive. And there it was, in her arm.

Why wouldn’t the world stop spinning???

Why wouldn’t everyone shut up? He needed to think.

Yvonne.

Alive.

Hurt.

One of the soldiers reached for Yvonne. Something about taking her.

His head fell to the ground with a THUMP.

Sorin brandished the axe he normally used for firewood at the remaining soldiers. They backed off but promised reinforcements would come for him. Sorin tended to Yvonne’s wounds. They found a cave and Sorin began to bandage his ankle which he had badly sprained earlier.

Sorin found himself in a place of utter darkness, which tried to choke him. A voice in his head mocked his struggle.

And then all of a sudden Sorin found himself in the eternal battle between Facator, the creator of the world, and Leviatan, the sea, A small whisper asked Sorin what he, the defender of "The Old Ways", considered "old". The truly old ways didn't include humans at all, did they? Or the world, for that matter. Sorin responded that he was small... and then he was buffeted by something. Something huge. A dark cloak surrounded Sorin, shielding him. The small voice chuckled, telling Sorin he was apparently favored by someone.

Sorin suddenly came to. Yvonne was in need of care. So was his ankle. He tended to both a bit more. He closed his eyes, for just a moment.

Sorin saw a cave, with a dark light emanating from it. A young man sat beside the fire, one who Sorin felt was familiar, somehow. The man asked Sorin what he hoped to accomplish, given that this was an eternal cycle he was trapped in. Sorin said he knew he was small, but he had to act, he had to do something. 

The man before him became the soldier Sorin had killed.

And asked if Sorin would become a corpse, like the man he had murdered.

There was the flash of a blade and the dead soldier lunged. Sorin tried to sidestep, but he was bowled over by the lunge, even if he didn't get stabbed. The dead soldier, standing over Sorin, asked  if he was really comfortable being as small as he was. 

Hands encircled Sorin's throat.

He was back with Yvonne, in a sweat, suddenly. Somehow he got some sleep.

David and I then took a session to make a poem about one of the immortals, Elepte. We were following the dictates of the mechanics, and this is what we generated from the mechanics:

Sing to me, O Muses!

of Elepte

and her treacherous family.

They are stranded in the sky, halfway along on their journey home.

Elepte mourns her trapped clan, stranded amongst the stars

Their station chases the (her) moon, making them dizzy

Elepte's clan's treachery cannot be forgiven, which prevents her from releasing them.

But she feels their rejection, all the way down in her heart.

Before their voyage, they were free as pelicans

But Elepte looked down from her abode and saw their evil, and how they threatened the mortal races

Tehy are being judged by the other immortals

Elepte could interfere, but she will not, for she prizes her position as the moon

Elestre gave perpetual motion to the stations so they may travel

Elepte knew this action could only be undertaken by one who wished to show the deepest commitment

Elepte and her clan will continue this game until the station stops.

Elepte's regret for her folly is felt but unknown

Elepte's love for her family made her want to keep them close

Love constrains, love binds, love blinds

Elepte is afraid the tables will turn amongst her clan

-From the Recovered Scroll of Adrian the Station-Master

Yes, that's relevant, hang in there.

The next morning Mihail, one of Yvonne’s other students and friend to Sorin, came along. The soldiers had reported the incident and Mihail, who was in the area, managed to talk the local magistrates into letting him attempt to talk sense into Sorin first. But Mihail stopped cold upon seeing Yvonne. He demanded to know why she was alive and what the hell she was doing with meteorite dust in her arm.

Yvonne then dropped the news that the stations above, which dropped a blue mist upon the planet every week, had been fertilizing the planet with the mist. And the stations were running out of said fertilizer. She didn’t know why. She had barely made it up onto the abode of Elepte’s family once before, fleeing after learning the truth. That was all she could ascertain. The nutrients in the blue cloud were concentrated from meteorite dust.

Sorin immediately made ready to find a way to get into the stations in orbit around the planet, but Mihail protested: he had given his word that he would bring Sorin back to the magistrates whose soldier Sorin had killed! If only Sorin explained what he was doing then Mihail was sure he would be let off. Sorin explained that if he played by the artificial rules of society that he’d be waylaid, possibly prevented from accomplishing his task. And then where would those people be? Those people whose laws he’d broken? 

Something changed in Mihail. Sorin noticed but couldn’t quite place it. But Mihail agreed to come along and help, so Sorin shrugged it off.

They heard a commotion and looked out the cave mouth. A group of satyrs were heading north, towards the town of Titular, with weapons and a bag of seeds. Curious, Sorin, Mihail, and Yvonne followed behind at a distance. The satyrs saw them and did not care. They sang lustily about destroying Titular and using its lands to plant more of the dying magical trees, particularly the farmland. Mihail remarked sarcastically they were definitely going to let the satrys do as they wish.

To his surprise Sorin agreed. Titular was well-guarded and the three of them would add little to the town defense. They would go back to get their things and bury the soldier Sorin had killed. He deserved that much.

They laid the soldier in a shallow grave, piling rocks above him. Sorin said how sorry he was that he had killed the soldier. The man was trying to do his duty, a duty that had put the two of them at odds but a duty nonetheless. They both wanted the planet safe; Sorin would see to if that the soldier’s death would not be in vain.

A flower pushed up between the stones. Somehow, some way, Sorin hoped that was some sign of forgiveness.

Now to figure out how to get to the stations in orbit. Sorin hadn’t even known that was possible. But it was.

For all their sakes he had to do it.

***

I wrote that out because it’s one of my favorite RPG stories. Each decision and happenstance was the result of a situation that had no clear cut answer. I didn't plan a single bit of this out beforehand. Not one bit. This was all game mechanics helping to craft situations on the fly. Mechanically, David was handed situations about Sorin’s psychology and he had to pick what he thought was the least worst option. The honest option. And each time he made a character choice neither bad or good. He was just a person, trying to figure things out as he went. Did he do wrong? Oh yes. Did he do right? Definitely yes too.

I want to make RPGs that touch something real. I want moments of humanity to be front and center, where all there is is the reality of the situation and the inability to really judge what’s going on. For there to be moments of helplessness and vulnerability, where people can just be people.

I say all this because I’ve not met David. 

He’s not even in the same country.

We met up online, via Discord, and he graciously agreed to playtest. What has resulted is a friendship between us that I didn’t expect. So this game doesn't require you to have met your players, so long as you're willing to be open! We've both been really happy with how things are progressing.

Some of the friends I’ve met before and gamed with have agreed to playtest too, and I’ve found the experience enlightening with them as well. Each session of play has let them play characters in such a way that honesty is required. And it’s revealed a lot of good, a lot of empathy in new ways I figured I wouldn’t be finding new sides of.

But why write this now? If the game is as good as I claim wouldn’t I have tons of stories like the above? Actually I do. This is the first of the thirty or so sessions of Crescendo I’ve tested where I didn’t think it could have been a fluke. I’ve spent the last year writing and revising Crescendo absolutely refusing to let myself believe it was working. I was able to do this because I was constantly patching mechanics in play, so it was possible it was just the players being good at what they did. The last few sessions with David I haven’t felt that way at all. Oh sure I need to write a much better draft and whatnot but the mechanics themselves?

We used them unaltered for the above. That was us playing the game. That story above had a mechanical prompt for every line written. And it was simple without being dumb, and soulful without breaking boundaries. David and I played a game and got a story about the fragility of life and the pain of that fact. No, we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t say “Hey, let’s do something about mortality!”

Nope.

We played a game. A slow game where in five session barely four days have passed. Hell, in the other playtest game thirteen of the fourteen sessions that were the first arc happened in the space of less than a day! And yeah, that was a lot to do. Most “storygames” play out in one to eight sessions, for the whole story.

One arc of this game can take more than eighteen sessions.

Yeah.

That’s just one act. 

But it’s been incredible. Every session has felt different, even when the broad range of mechanics in Crescendo repeat themselves. There’s something deeply engrossing about the range of deeply personal and mythological themes Crescendo has you explore, from having to explain why an otherwise calm and detached man would snap and decapitate a soldier to exploring the messed up dynamics of a goddess and her crazy family. And realizing the stories are not just related, but about to collide.

For you see, man cannot be understood without his cosmos, his inner and outer stories must be known to make any sense of him.

I can say that Crescendo makes finding out about both fun. Provided you’re willing to put in the time. I can finally say that, after a year of writing and play testing.

And damn that feels good!

If you wanna hop onto the Discord and see the myriad drafts of this game, as well just hang out, click here!