Coming Out Of Left Field

Some of the best times you can have while playing RPGs is the really wild stuff that you can't plan for.

You know what I mean. That totally screwball idea, that thing that blindsides your GM from nowhere.

See we love it when everything goes to plan, right? We GMs love setting up a moment that goes off without a hitch, seeing the thing develop from point to point until the party are where you want them and the story point pops off. Sure, it's been a little bit hairy here and there - maybe there's been a couple of times where a little handholding was necessary, and perhaps some clues were missed...

...but you got to the bit you needed to get to, and you get to deliver the blow that you had up your sleeve the entire time. And hopefully the party enjoy - or at least appreciate - it.

The stuff of legend, though, is when you go so far off the beaten path that at least one person is helpless through laughter and half of the campaign notes suddenly seem bone-crushingly inadequate for what you are dealing with.

Two examples I will quote include when myself (a sickly but heavily-armoured cleric of Pelor) and my travelling companion (a dashing spellsword) got to the castle of the evil lich in a D&D 3.5 campaign, took one look at the front gates, and flew up onto the roof to go in through the top of the tower - getting the drop on the final boss of what was effectively a dungeon, and having to clean it out after he was dead...

...and the GM of that game pulling exactly the same trick in a Pathfinder game, going into an overrun guard bastion in the first campaign book through the roof. Dropping in, murdering the big bad, getting mythic power, and then liquidising the rest of the fell creatures present like a BlendTec commercial.

Most recently, this happened to me. I was the GM in the driving seat. I've been running a game of Eclipse Phase for a few months - you've probably seen a couple of my blog posts about it, but if not, look here and here, that will clue you in - and I have been typing up each session as a read-along that you can read here. Take a look - it's called Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.

This particular thing is some kind of murder mystery. The party are putting together some clues as to why someone was killed, and they discover that there's a lot more to it than random acts of violence - in fact they have a short list of other potential targets, and one of them correctly guessed the inciting agents within minutes of seeing the original crime scene (much to my combined joy and nervousness).

So they find out the identity of one of the other potential victims, and go to talk to her. One of the characters is highly social, and is also a genuine psychic. So I get ready to provide some snippets of information before the inevitable happens...

...and then the way it gets played out - the interview turns into a confession, which turns into the party smuggling the potential victim (who isn't so innocent herself) off of the habitat in a body bag assisted by octopoid gangsters, stealing her identity, and using it to accidentally incite a couple of stampedes before finally turning the murderer against a mob of gangsters, resulting in mutual destruction.

What started out as being some kind of Maltese Falcon sleuthing ended up like using a laser pointer to direct a cat into a pile of action figures.

And I had genuinely not really planned for that, at all.

But it did the job!

(Meme not technically accurate cos people totally got killed but:)

Fellow Game Masters - I know it's scary when the party go off the rails. I know. But sometimes it will actually add to the world you are making. For me, it produced another long-term NPC that I can use, and some long-term problems that I can bring back down the line. And even if it doesn't add anything - who cares? Sometimes, we're here to laugh like idiots at the dumb things we just did.

That's what the hobby is about, right?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

December Again

So November draws to an end for another year, and with it, National Novel Writing Month 2019.

There's a feeling I talk about, which is that hollowness when you finish reading a really good book. It's this slight ache, a moment wherein you feel two things very keenly.

The first is: This came to an end, and the rest of the world just moved on, how can that be?

The second is: The space that this occupied was so great, and so full; how can I possibly fill it again?

It's not just reading a book that leaves you like this, though.

For a month, half a million of us - or pretty close, anyway, I don't have the official stats for this year yet - lived in the worlds we'd made.

It occupied space in our brains. We were distracted, not quite fully with it, because our thoughts kept drifting back to that thing that we were creating. Characters and scenes and dialogue and themes and literary tricks and a thousand other little aspects of the work we were undertaking, constantly ticking over - for some of us set solid in stone, for others, roiling like a cloud of plasma. Either way - always present, always taking up space.

I can tell you how my characters smile.

Like, I can see it in my head. I can put each of them right in front of me, bid them smile - even imagine the thing that makes them smile - and see how they do it.

I can tell you the thing that each of them is worried about. I can tell you the person they are thinking about, right now, and in what context. I can describe to you how they would deal with a hundred different problems and situations...

...and then I stopped typing, and put the novel down, and there it is.

Sure, it can do with a second draft. That's the work of it. Taking the first draft and sweeping it into something better; but the skeleton is there, the shape, the clay of the object. It exists, and it was brought into existence out of my brain.

Now my brain sits there with a hole in it that is novel-shaped.

You may wonder why I am telling you all this.

I am telling you because, despite how generally draining it can all be - how disheartening it is to not make word count for a day, or to realise that you may not make it to 50,000 by the end of the month, or how frustrating it is to encounter writer's block...

Each ache, each moment's lost sleep, each frustration, is a piece of stone that you chip away. And you chip all of those away, until you are left with sculpture. With art. Beautiful, and yours.

Every hour you spend typing (punching the keys, for those that recognised the first image) is an hour's worth of work that you have put into something that is yours. A thing you created. A story. A novel. And it probably isn't the best thing ever written, because very few things are - but you made it. You made a thing, that you probably didn't think you'd ever make.

Sure, you told yourself you would, one day. After this. After that. One day. When you had that idea. One day. But until then it is time to obsess over detail, over whether or not you are a good enough writer to carry it off, if you have time, if you are creative enough, and so, and so, and so, until we manage to mentally talk ourselves out of it - again.

So why do I talk about it so much? Why do I post about it on my social media, blog about it, tell other people about it?

Because, folks, I want to share this with you.

I want you to join in, to feel the way I feel, to write the story that you have in your skull. I want you to get to the end of December and have stories you can tell people about that novel you just wrote. I want you to be able to talk to other writers and understand how it feels to make a thing and let it stand. To be able to read your own work, and even if you spend 99% of the time finding flaws in it, seeing at least one or two lines that you think...

...wow, that's actually really good.

And then thinking:

I wrote that.

It's a good kind of mental tired.

My NaNoWriMo project this year was called Phase Shift, also styalised as [PHaSe/SHiFT] because I am that kind of dickhead. It's a transhuman scifi coming of age slash thriller. It's set in the Eclipse Phase RPG setting because I love it.

I set myself the challenge of having every chapter title be a song lyric, and have it be relevant to that chapter. Here's a playlist of all those songs in order - it's not a bad list if I do say so myself.

If you want to read it, just get in touch. I even made two cuts - one of them with all the smut cut out, in case it isn't your thing.

And when it comes around to the end of next year? Will you maybe consider joining me on this most novel of months?

I hope so.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Always Check Your Boots

I'm going to begin with one of the stories my dad told me, one of my favourite ones.

Once upon a time he was driving through a godless bit of desert - he didn't tell me which one - when it started getting to the hot bit of the day, so he hauled the jeep over, put up some shade, took off his boots and got some shut-eye. He didn't want to cook the engine or himself.

Anyway. He sleeps for slightly longer than he intended. So when he wakes up, he's all a-flutter, as anyone is when they sleep for too long and they have somewhere to be.

So he does what everyone that lives in that kind of environment does - before he puts the boot back on, he checks it.

Finding himself eyeball-to-pinchers with one of the biggest scorpions he's ever seen.

So he says some choice words, probably something like "oh bother me that is quite a large example of Androctonus Crassicauda, I had best be careful," and grabs the heel of the boot and upends it over the side of the jeep. He hears a bump, feels the boot get lighter, looks inside once more just to make sure, then puts the boot on - minus its visitor.

He's still shaking his head and tutting over the encounter, so he only just notices in time that - as he picks up his other boot - it is even heavier. And it makes an angry sound.

He takes a look.

Your average Arabian Fat-Tailed Scorpion gets to about four inches. The one dad dumped out of his other boot was perhaps just a little bigger than that. The one in this boot? The one in this boot was about the size of a wharf rat, which is as big as necessary to fuck with you, plus a couple of inches.

He looks at this thing. Its tail is pointed at him, the claws and business end down in the heel of the boot.

He holds the boot over the edge of the jeep and shakes it.

The boot makes an angry noise. It doesn't get any lighter. There's no bump.

He shakes it again. The noise is angrier.

So he has to explain to his mother and siblings why he drove all the way home with only one boot, and a scorpion suddenly got a foot on the property ladder.

We only ever see a slice of someone. We don't know them completely - we can't. We only see the side of them they want to show us, or know how to show us, or think they should show us. My dad was the best dad he knew how to be, which - well, honestly, wasn't great at times. I suspect this is because his own father was totally alien to him, an old man even when my father was born, and not a kind or giving one according to anecdotal evidence.

I was lucky, insofar as when he got sick - not sick like a bad back, he had that since before I was born, but sick like cancer - we had a lot of time together to put things back together again, and there's nothing that takes the ego and sting out of a male-male relationship like terminal illness.

For a couple of years we repaired bridges and became friends again. I wasn't his alpha-male competition and he wasn't some loud angry tyrant. We talked about the world, he passed on a lot of good lessons, and we actually enjoyed each other's company.

Then at the end, when the palliative care involved painkillers and medication that truly started to mess with his perception of the world, things got odd again. His memory started lapsing. He'd forget that he asked me to do things, then get angry about it. He'd be three-quarters asleep most of the time. The last time I saw him I am not sure he recognised me.

I knew the alternative was pain that was basically unbearable, because my father was the kind of man that would only take painkillers under intense duress. Morphine stopped being strong enough. It was the ketamine that really started to cloud him.

I had the time to say goodbye, and I had time to say it before it became a rush. Which is good, because when I said it the last time, I honestly don't think he heard me.

He had no funeral. He despised religion. He was cremated in a private non-ceremony and my mum scattered his ashes.

I see a lot of him in myself. Not always things I like. My dad had a hell of a temper, and at times, so do I. The joy of knowing things. Pride in knowing you've done a good job, frustration when you can't or when some presumably unreasonable thing prevents you. Distrust of political and corporate organisations.

The mother of one of my favourite youtubers, Danny Avidan, once described his father in a very specific way: "He could turn lemonade into lemons." There's some of that in me, there was a lot of that in my dad. Like him, I'm not good at whimsy - and, like him I suspect, I suffer from depression.

He didn't like father's day much. For obvious reasons.

I talk a lot about lessons he taught me. Some of them deliberate, some of them by good or bad example. I think the one that I have found the most useful is to always pick your battles - but I think the one with the funniest story behind it is to always check your boots.

I still do. Every time I put them on.