NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Between The Cracks

I'd like to preface this blog with a content warning; below, I am going to be discussing depression and suicide. If you would rather not read that, no harm no foul - I have other blogs on more wholesome topics. This one, for example, is about good music covers.

My National Novel Writing Month attempt opens with the words, Jimmy Drift Killed Himself.

I take a hop, skip and a jump over the initial arc. This is the inciting event. There isn't a day-as-normal beforehand. It is literally the first thing that the reader learns about the world: that a man whose name we are meant to know took his own life.

It opens this way because while this is new and unusual to the characters involved - the main character in particular, Alya K, a childhood friend of Jimmy Drift - this isn't new or unusual to the world the book is set in.

In a corporatocracy - the definition of which can be found here - the workers and citizens being ruled are essentially a resource.

Anyone who has worked in a business that requires a large amount of raw aggregate or materials for processing will know that there are margins of acceptable loss. That not every nut and bolt that comes into the workshop will be considered worthy or acceptable, and that if you find a screw that is damaged, you don't use it. You need a bucket of fine sand but this one got damp? Got to go get another one.

Stepping into a more modern setting, who hasn't been into a store with an automated check-out machine? Who hasn't found that out of the four machines available, one of them seems to be perpetually broken? All they are waiting for is a part, right? But there is a line of problems that leads to that part not being fitted. It has to be done by the company that put in the machines, and they have to clear everything, all of which is a very tidy earner for the company that makes those machines. Why sell someone a single unit, when you could sell them years upon years of continued service?

If the store could repair it themselves, though - no doubt they would just yank the unit open, put in the replacement part and throw the old one away immediately. Got to keep the store running, after all.

Under a corporatocracy, human beings who aren't shareholders or otherwise considered of primary importance to the company are either the consumers of the goods the company provides or part of the construction and delivery process. They are the nuts, bolts and screws. They are the aggregate. They are the bits in the self-service machine.

If they don't work according to the user or manufacturer's specifics, they get thrown out.

I've blogged before about Blade Runner - about how the treatment of the Replicants should be a warning to us, how it is a parable for an underclass considered too low or base to see as people. You know who I am talking about, what I am talking about. The Replicants - specifically the more advanced Replicants presented in the original movie - are built in with a limited lifespan because it is easier than giving them freedom or happiness.

So what do the people who made them and who used them care? What does anyone care? The usefulness of a person becomes the standard by which they are judged, and that isn't even something new. A great many societies have sought to minimise and marginalise those that they don't see as being useful in a societal sense. Can't work? No help for you. Can't do something we value? No help for you. Get into this camp. Get into this asylum.

When your only value or worth is tied to the work you do - when your life revolves around how your cogs turn as part of that great machine - then is it surprising that those who don't turn the same as anyone else would find themselves at a loss? Lacking in purpose? Would find the things that make life worthwhile harder and harder to achieve?

Especially knowing that, if anything happened to make an individual not useful - the individual would be replaced without a thought.

Businesses can't be trusted to look after people. It's like asking sharks to look after seal pups, bears to look after salmon. We are food. We are a resource. We are the grains of sand used to file down the imperfections of a surface. If we can't be used, we can be discarded. They don't really have to care very much about what happens if we discard ourselves, after the very environment they created opens the fissures into which we fall. Those fissures sell products - they are a thing held up as a place you will end up if you don't spend, don't save, don't do the things you are being told to.

Things we can't afford to do. So we fall down anyway.

And there's always another consumer, and always another worker.

Let's just remember that when those statistics come out - the amount of people that commit suicide every year - those are lives destroyed. Real lives. Not resources, as the shareholders would see them. Lives.

Just letting it happen is a monstrous but very everyday sin.

The Good Old Days

The Goonies was a formative movie of my childhood.

I mean, why wouldn't it be? Adventure! Mystery! Kids having fun! A fat kid that still gets to join in despite everyone treating him like shit! (Okay it hasn't necessarily aged well.) It's my Sean Astin movie - Lord Of The Rings just borrowed him.

What it leaves, though - the thing it left with me, that it has always left with me, ever since I first saw it - was this sense of nostalgia that it immediately provoked in me. A yearning for specific elements of a childhood that also included a bunch of really shitty elements - to just be running through the woods, chatting nonsense with people I know and trust, or going off and doing whatever for a whole day and having nothing to care about in the intervening hours.

What movies like The Goonies and its peers really do is sell us a childhood we really wish we had, by framing itself in terms and tropes that we actually experienced.

That's not a criticism. It's the nature of fantasy/adventure films of a certain age aimed at kids. Because they were shot when we were kids, they were made back then, so everything is redolent of the era. Using bikes to get everywhere and needing to come up with creative ways to stay in touch because, hey, we didn't have mobile phones.

It calls back to the time when that was the concern. When the biggest worry of any kind was managing to get the crew together to do some stupid stuff, like ride around on bikes for hours arguing about if Tommy from Power Rangers was rubbish or brilliant.

It was before we went through the awkward phases of partial knowledge of world events, where we sought for simple answers as to why things were hard for certain people but not for others. Before we started realising how things really work.

Wanting to be back in that space, wanting to be in a position wherein the primary concerns are small ones, is hardly a sin. It says more about the world as it stands right now than it does about us as people and what we want out of life. That there are so many things today - anxiety-inducing things which are made difficult for no reason other than to change them would be just slightly more difficult and would disadvantage those more important than us - which we accept as just being normal, and never seem to question.

"That's just the way it is," is the answer you get given. Which is dangerously close to "That's just the way it has always been," which echoes the warning from the (fictional) five monkeys experiment. I'm sure you know of that one: five monkeys in a cage with a ladder leading up to food, and whenever one monkey goes up the ladder all the rest got soaked in cold water, so they start beating up any monkey that goes for the ladder. Then when they substitute out one of the monkeys for a new one, the new one immediately goes for the ladder, and gets beaten up for it, and without even knowing the original reason why, is encouraged to not go up the ladder by societal pressure.

(As an aside, the actual experiment is kind of more interesting. Monkeys, when manipulating an object that had previously appealed to them, were punished with several blasts of pressurised air - enough to alarm but not harm. After a while they stopped manipulating the object when by themselves, but upon mixing with other monkeys who did manipulate the object, they themselves did it too. Thus, the actual experiment proves the complete opposite of what the ladder bullshit tries to tell us: that we can be encouraged by others in positive ways rather than just negative.)

I don't think it is a contentious statement to say that there is a lot of nostalgia media around right now. Old video games becoming fashionable again, the iconography of an entire decade becoming people's standard aesthetic, neon and grid lines and synthwave and fake VHS lines. Stranger Things and stuff like it. Awesome musical acts like Robots With Rayguns literally evoking the era with their imagery, their samples and their songwriting. Tim Capello - the sexy sax man from Lost Boys, Tina Turner's tour saxophonist, the man that taught me I was bisexual - has an album out, and is recording synthwave music with other bands. This guy.

The people who grew up with The Goonies are now the people consuming most of the media - and the people making a lot of it, too. There's still a lot of influence from the older folks, because hey, there's money in the industry and they want it. The nostalgia train is loaded with cash. We just hanker for that time - that time back when things were simpler, and not necessarily for good reasons. Like, things still sucked back then for a lot of people - living standards by several metrics were objectively worse.

On a personal scale - that is where things were better. Less existential dread. Less worry. Less fear of the future. Life wasn't better because the world was better, life was better because we were kids and we didn't know any better.

We must take care to pay attention to that - and it is perhaps something we might mention to those who talk about the past as a mythical better place. Like everything back in the seventies, sixties, fifties, forties, thirties, was better than things are today.

Our childhood wasn't better because it was the past. It was better because we were children.

Be kind to yourself. Life is hard enough.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Who We Are

The future that my NaNo project is set in is pretty grim.

Like, the human race is in the pits. It's at war with [REDACTED] and also has a serious internal discipline problem. 97% of the planets within Central's jurisdiction are owned by one of the 17 Corporate Entities that exist - and I mean literally owned, each potentially habitable or exploitable resource is put to tender and is the sole responsibility and possession of that Corporate Entity.

Human rights are pretty much just a thing of the past. They were left behind with the memory of Earth. Who knows where we came from? Who cares? Who has enough time or energy to worry about it? Most of the human race is too busy.

Which means a big crackdown on our personal freedoms, right?

Well, some of them.

What we have a case of, though, is an unshackling of neoliberal business practice from traditional hard-right "family values" bullshit. Religion doesn't really happen any more, the notion of a nuclear family joins the concept of anti-monopolisation laws as a pre-Spread relic, and society has become a machine for purchasing goods and supporting the war effort.

So as long as you buy the corporation's products and make its weaponry, what do they care who you love or who you sleep with?

I mean, in part I know it is just me wanting to increase visibility and representation in my own work. That's a thing I am into. People exist in a lot of flavours that aren't cishet white male vanilla, and that fact not only deserves to be represented in my work, it OUGHT to be, as a matter of reason and realism.

I've talked about representation before - about movies and such in this one, and in video games and such in this one. There's a lot of stories that need telling that don't have a random straight white dude in the driver's seat.

I'm not really qualified to tell a story about being trans, about being gender fluid, about being asexual or aromantic - they aren't experiences I have lived, and there's voices a lot more qualified than mine that can talk about them. What I CAN do is include those people and those voices and experiences, and indeed I feel I have a duty to, to correct the swerve toward invisibility and marginalisation that most mainstream media tends to undergo.

"I just don't want people to think it is normal to be like that," are words I have heard someone actually say, recently, relating to gay people. I'm not sure where that attitude started from, but I can guarantee that it only gets reinforced by almost every major movie and TV series cramming your standard cishet relationship mush down your throat, and that anything that deviates from that norm has to come with a warning label to avoid sending Daily Mail readers into an apoplectic fury.

This comparison is going to be an awkward one, but once I did a blog about how watching Watership Down when I was young prepared me for the death of a pet. We can roll our eyes as much as we want at the notion of the media shaping how we think, but it CAN, in our formative years. Maybe, just maybe, if these people who see anyone that doesn't fit their standard cast as "not normal" had seen them proliferate in the media they'd absorbed without even thinking since early childhood - maybe this would have been their new normal.

I mean, we somehow managed to normalise people in suits earning a hundred times what their actual employees earn. We managed to normalise the Cold War, we managed to demonise words like Socialist and Feminist.

Surely we can normalise not treating people like shit any more.

NaNoWriMo Thoughts - Where Monopolies End

Yep, it's that time of year again - I am doing National Novel Writing Month once more, and this time, we're going cyberpunk, baby.

This will form part of a series of blogs about my NaNo project and about writing in general, each looking at themes I am exploring or generally find neat or awful respectively.

Now, with cyberpunk, we find ourselves in the corporate future.

Take this shot from the set of the original Blade Runner:

See how well-lit everything is? And can you see any actual streetlights? It's all shining down from logos and neons.

This is a theme that gets heavily picked up in cyberpunk and scifi. Neal Stephenson, in 1992's Snow Crash, labels the effect Loglo. Here it is demonstrated in the TV series of Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon:

Pretty but also a bit troubling, right?

For comparison, here is what I believe to be Tokyo, circa 90s:

I have gone on record before as saying that I believe the cyberpunk future to be the future we are heading into.

Picture this though. Picture the far future. Not the relative near, wherein we are still Earth-centric and our values are pretty similar to what they are today. Wherein the things that trouble us are also relevant to what they would be today.

Instead let us turn our eyes hundreds, if not thousands, of years into the future - a future based on the notion that, today, now, the corporations win. Massive business entities made out of hundreds of different individual corporations handling the exploration, colonisation and habitation of spheres beyond Earth. I hope that doesn't sound too out there, given that SpaceX exists. How big a jump is it, really, to go from SpaceX to something like...

So if one single company colonises a planetoid, builds all the homes there, makes it breathable, makes it habitable - is there still going to be a monopolies commission to make them let other corporate interests take root in the soil that they themselves made fertile?

Given how the world is going, I daresay that the law against monopolies will be left on Earth.

So this business ends up basically owning this entire planetoid, be it a moon, a large asteroid, an actual planet, whatever. And it can either let other businesses in, or it can just...do it its damn self.

Lets say that the company that ends up owning Titan is Nestle. I'm sure you have all seen this rather scary image.

Now this is just food and drink items, but it shows what a spread of products each of these individual large businesses has under their purview.

So lets say Titan needs places to live. Good news, one of the subdivided companies actually has a wing that deals entirely with housing. The people that live there need places to eat and shop, which is good, because another subdivision has both a chain of stores and a chain of bars and fast food restaurants.

These people need to work, though - and only so many of them are needed to actually "service" everyone else. Which is great, because Titan has plenty of natural resources to exploit, and there's plenty of business opportunities! ... for the processing and manufacture divisions of the company.

Who gets to tell them no? Who goes out into the solar system and rocks up to every single settled planetoid and demands that the company that literally built everything on it needs to let in competition?

The company gets to be the law, here. Gets to be the judge and jury. And one might assume that the way a business gets to be the one to settle, say, Titan is by a bidding system. That the colonisation rights would be put out to tender, and whoever can afford / make the best case for the rights, gets them.

So you, the normal person, some fifty generations after settling - you have grown up knowing nothing but the company. You've only ever lived, eaten, breathed, worked around company territory. You pay them rent out of the pay they give you for the work you put in. And whatever central government exists doesn't have to care about you, because you are the sole responsibility of the company that bought Titan.

Or Analog Incorporated, the company that bought the civic rights to Corpus VIII's second moon. Auroch, a moon with an atmosphere that is breathable and survivable but that has no magnetosphere and can't shield you from very rapid death from solar radiation. You can't go out by day - which is okay because a significant amount of time is spent in eclipse behind Corpus VIII, a gas giant.

The company doesn't have to pay for street lights. It has its own logos to light your way.

Welcome to the setting of my NaNo, 2018.

The Work Of Being A Wallflower

Those eagle-eyed amongst you may realise that I am an introvert, as outright stated in this blog here about privatising and monetising the capacity for solitude.

I didn't know that about myself for a long time - or maybe I didn't have the language to articulate it, or maybe I wasn't aware of it as a simple personality trait as opposed to actual mental illness.

The thing about being an introvert - about not necessarily always enjoying being around other people, needing time away to recharge, valuing privacy - is that whenever we show up in a TV show or a movie, we're very rarely the protagonist.

This is all personal experience, obviously - the sample size is one, just me, and all the media I enjoyed as a kid. But then this is a personal blog, so I guess we can deal with that, right?

So I will perhaps reach out to my reader at this point. Cast your mind back (some further back than others) to when you were a mere youth, think about the cartoons, TV series, movies, books, and comics that you enjoyed, and think about how many of them featured - as a main character - someone who you now on reflection recognise as an introvert.

I mean - I can see why, right? Because a show or story is about the character interacting with people, and if you have the character dislike doing that or find it draining then it is hard to make them come across as sympathetic, so someone like Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory doesn't come across as an introvert. He comes across as an asshole - which in and of itself is part of the problem.

Not wanting to attend a social function or go out with your friends or be around people or entertain company was, twenty years ago, not considered an okay thing.

Standard child development includes the monitoring of their social skills. This isn't a bad thing, necessarily - I have interacted with enough people who aren't just awkward but lack significant social skills, skills which the rest of the world assume everyone has. What it does do, however, is normalise a specific way of approaching the world around you, and if you don't do it that way - well, you get labelled as one of the weird ones.

The thing is I don't think everyone is either an introvert or an extrovert all the time. I think sometimes people become more extroverted under certain circumstances - mostly needing time by themselves but having weekends filled with partying for example.

In my head, everyone sits on a scale.

You can probably work out what the I and the E mean.

Now, tests like the ridiculous Myers-Briggs - which is some kind of ludicrous scam based on the work of a racial supremacist - will tell you what personality type you are, and insist that it is literally what you are. You will never change. Not daily, not weekly, not once in your life. In fact, Myers-Briggs (I have to fight the urge to spit whenever I type this) states that if you ever take the test twice and get a different answer, it's your fault, not the test. Because nobody ever changes, ever.

Whereas I think that most people sit in a region like this:

Straddling the middle ground, sometimes enjoying being around other people, sometimes needing not to. After all, we feel differently toward company depending on if we're in a Monday morning meeting at work or on the way to our local on an early Friday afternoon off, right?

Whereas this is kind of where I see my own personal little scale:

It's very easy for me to run out of social spoons. The likelihood of that happening increases depending on how well I know the people around me, how drunk or altered they are, topics of conversation, so on.

Now, working in customer satisfaction and workplace performance as I do, there's a certain set of behavioural standards that a lot of companies wish their employees to uphold. Some of these are pretty basic - acknowledge that your customer exists, don't be sexist or racist at them, charge them the right price for the service requested.

Some of it, however, is the kind of thing that would weird me out in a social setting.

Eye contact, for example. Maybe this is the social anxiety speaking but it can be a very awkward and intimidating thing for it to be maintained constantly. We at work have had debates as to how much eye contact is too much.

Another thing - conversation, making small talk. I am hilariously bad at small talk. The idea of someone working somewhere being encouraged, if not slightly forced, to make small talk with me is not something I particularly relish. Now, sure, some people enjoy a good chat - but not me. I'm just here to get my stuff and get out, like a gremlin scurrying around an abandoned diner.

The thing is - I am far more likely to be put off by someone being way too full on and trying too hard, than I am by someone being quiet and socially awkward. I get the impression that it isn't really a thing companies see as a problem. Salesperson patter is such a common trope that I remember my dad describing people who were too overtly friendly as being like used car salesmen.

The world isn't built for us. The world is built for those comfortable with demanding room in it, and we... aren't, really. We want to lurk around the corners, hang out in the kitchen with the cat, sit outside and get some air, head home before anything gets too crazy.

But now, at least, we know that is just who we are. We're not broken, we're not faulty. We're just... us. We just need a breather sometimes, and that's okay. We like being alone, and when we spend time with others, it's time we want to spend. It's valuable. If your significant other is an introvert, I hope you feel a little bit lucky - it's like a cat picking a human.

You never know. Maybe one day, it'll feel like a level playing field.

Upon A Fearful Summons

I talk about insecurity an awful lot; how central it is to our basic psychology and our lives in general is a hill I would die on daily. It isn't the whole story, obviously - and today I'm going to talk about another one of those needling driving forces.

Guilt.

Now, guilt means two things. The first meaning is that someone is culpable for an act, that they committed an offence. That's not the guilt that we are talking about.

Guilt is a feeling.

No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt. - E. M. Forster

Who hasn't felt guilty over something? Something they have done that they think they shouldn't have, something they haven't done that they should have? It's almost unthinkable that someone could go through life and not feel it at least once, right?

Do we feel it for the right reasons?

That's an entirely different kettle of fish, right there.

See, it's good that if we do something that is actually wrong, that we should - afterwards - realise it was wrong. If we literally hurt someone or inconvenience someone, for no good reason, then we should feel bad about that. It's how we know we are good people. In fact, even if we have done the bad thing for a good reason, we should feel it. It keeps us grounded. It reminds us of the consequences, and that even though - for a very basic comparison - we have saved one hundred lives, we shouldn't diminish the severity of sacrificing one life to do so.

The problem is, we aren't rational beings at heart - and we aren't necessarily good at sorting and filing the emotions we feel.

Hands up if you feel guilty for wronging someone that has forgiven you.

Should the forgiveness of the other party absolve you from guilt? You might think so - but we all have different levels of acceptance, for actions that we feel can be forgivable. It varies from person to person, too. I would forgive in a heartbeat accidental attacks against my person from people I know and trust, far faster than I would forgive even more minor infractions from people in the street.

What it comes down to, though - guilt is only slightly assuaged by the forgiveness of the second party.

Guilt is only assuaged truly by forgiveness of ourselves.

That deed which in our guilt we today call weakness, will appear tomorrow as an essential link in the complete chain of Man. - Khalil Gibran

In my eyes, how willing we are to forgive ourselves isn't connected to the actual severity of the action in question, because we are awful at being objective in terms of judging ourselves.

This is going to get deeply personal right now, so fair warning.

I feel guilty about not being as healthy as everyone around me.

Not just the fat thing (which I talked about in a previous blog). The constant pain and the lack of lung capacity from my other badness makes me something of a broken toy soldier at the best of times, so I just can't necessarily take part in things that I used to take for granted.

This means that people often have to take me into consideration when we do things as a group, and that not only tweaks my anxiety off the scale, it also makes me feel guilty for inconveniencing them - even if I can't actually magically cure my rheumatoid arthritis and pulmonary fibrosis, and even if they assure me (and trust me, I believe them!) when they say it isn't actually a problem.

I nonetheless feel guilty over this thing I have done wrong, this hardship I have inflicted on others. Which is, yes, logically speaking absolutely ridiculous.

The thing is that logic has nothing to do with it, obviously; it's just the way that we are wired, which begins at an early age, continues throughout our lives, and has little bearing on reality. We don't live in a society which fully accepts the weaknesses and frailties of others - not yet, anyway. We still have this very British, very ridiculous Stiff Upper Lip mentality, which was primarily set up as a way to - funnily enough - assuage guilt.

The Stoics loved this - loved the idea that if you just tell yourself you aren't affected by the thing, that if you bear with it and just put up with it, then everything will be fine. And let's just say that, in British society, at various points in our history - there's been times when it was quite, quite useful for the social status quo to be against grumbling or discontent.

It is still a huge part of our society. Workplaces treat their employees like shit because the workers are of a culture and a mindset wherein they just, you know, put up with it. Our politics has been rife with austerity measures and literally punishing people who are sick or poor because everyone is expected to just, you know, put up with it.

And the moment that we "cause a fuss", the moment that we stick our heads over the parapet and say, actually, that ISN'T legal, that ISN'T in my job contract, that ISN'T a thing you should be doing - we feel guilty. Because we're bucking expectation, we're rubbing against the conditioning of the society we have lived in since we were born and the social pressures of everyone we know. Or almost everyone.

Which is, I think, the only reason why the current status quo continues today.

The soul must accept guilt in order to destroy existing evil, lest it incur the greater guilt of idyllic withdrawal, of seeming to be good by putting up with wrong. - Ernst Bloch

See, it's a big motivator - nobody likes feeling guilty. It's a significant drain on our mental health and our well-being, and contributes to stress in a big way. So of course, it gets used as a manipulative tool.

Unfortunately, one of the first places we come across it is in childhood - usually directed at us from a parent or guardian, to try and make us behave. It sticks with you. It's why it is effective even later in life, long after it was necessary to cajole us into behaving in a "civil" fashion. Manipulators will use guilt to try and make us do what they want us to do, regardless of how it makes us feel or if its the right thing to do. Both on a personal scale, and on a national one.

Our insecurity leads us by the nose, and that isn't a good thing. Our guilt leads us, too - perhaps not as often but just as surely. We feel guilt for action and inaction, and we let it guide us without questioning it, without fighting it. How can we stop it from leading us into misery?

Put simply, as I said earlier, we have to forgive ourselves.

We need to show ourselves the same kind of love and understanding that we show those we love and care about the most. We need to be capable of empathising with ourselves. We need to take a look at ourselves and express understanding - we know why we did the thing we did, we know that it upsets us, we shouldn't push ourselves too hard. We made the wrong decision, so we should fix it, but punishing ourselves for it won't help. We were put on the spot and went one way when we should have gone another. We should try and soften the impact, but we shouldn't simply languish in how bad we feel about what we did.

Guilt warns us, reminds us that we're still moralistic creatures. It's the doing, though - it's the fixing, the understanding, the refusing to do evil - that really matters.

And as much as guilt may cut us, there is a certain warmth, a certain comfort, in the words:

At Least I Tried.

Adventures In Albums

So you know that I like my music and I like my tabletop roleplaying games, right?

Well I got asked a very interesting question by my buddy the other day:

(Pardon the rubbish screenshot.)

And my response, at first, was just one word:

Yes.

But then I really got thinking about it.

See, concept albums are cheating, sort of. Like Dream Theater's "The Astonishing" and Nine Inch Nails' "Year Zero" (the latter is only vaguely a concept album, but concept enough). They already have a story, a shared world, a contiguous thematic running through every song. They already proceed at pace through a narrative. Likewise Dream Theater's "Metropolis Pt2: Scenes From A Memory," itself a sequel to a song on a previous album - and likewise a large swathe of Coheed & Cambria's output, Rush's "2112", Daft Punk's "Discovery", Fear Factory's "Demanufacture". All of these albums tell a story, and putting together a roleplaying campaign from an existing story isn't all that challenging.

Of course, you do come across the difficulties in terms of wanting the campaign to be accepting of player choice - you don't want to railroad them too hard, because that gets pretty tedious. Take it from a player who has been railroaded a fair amount. You end up either slumping into inactivity just to let the game play out its course, or you fight desperately against the rails - neither of which are ideal.

So maybe it is easier to take an album that doesn't already have a story, and tie the disparate songs there into a singular narrative befitting a campaign.

Now, you'd have to pick a game based on the album, too. If you primarily play Dungeons & Dragons, then putting together an album based on the bleak audio soundscape of Burial is going to be difficult. Likewise, playing a gritty game of Cyberpunk 2020 to the wizard-based brilliance of Uriah Heep is going to be tonally awkward.

You also want an album that has sufficient breadth for a variety of scenarios to occur. I mentioned Burial? Well if you want your campaign to have a victory parade or any kind of fanfare or ceremony, then you are not going to find it in Burial's back catalogue. That's not a criticism. I love a bit of Burial. I just know the sounds he creates.

So I mean, there's a way to put this theory to test - it's actually doing it.

Let's hammer it down. Let's pick an album.

And I pick an absolute stomper, that I have loved since the first time I heard a single track from it. The record that brought Metallica into the limelight, that taught James Hetfield how to sing and reminded the world that metal existed. The eponymous album, Metallica, also known as The Black Album.

What game goes with this particular epic?

Well with songs like Of Wolf And Man, The God That Failed and Holier Than Thou, some kind of setting with monsters and religion is necessary, but beyond that - we have an open playing field. So let's go with D&D or Pathfinder. (My folks tend to play Pathfinder but I know D&D has a big PR campaign right now.)

We start with, not a setup of the locale or anything, but dreams - and every single one of the player characters is having an awful nightmare. Truly awful. None of this "you're naked in class" bullshit. No. Truly awful. (Enter Sandman)

The characters wake up. It's been the third straight week of awful nightmares in this city, and things are getting desperate. Some people are doing terrible things just for relief, just to get some sleep - things that the local Theocracy simply can't abide, so the adventurers are tasked with putting an end to a particularly troubling incident wherein a man claims the nightmares are possessing him. (Sad But True)

Then a traveller comes into the town. They approach the priesthood of the Theocracy at the same time as the party are being debriefed about the man's reported possession. The wanderer claims that she knows why everyone is having nightmares, and that there is an evil that needs to be dealt with. The Theocracy, of course, throws this out as nonsense - though they clearly know something. (Holier Than Thou)

The party is dismissed. So is the stranger. That night, the stranger visits them and tells them to leave. The people in this town won't survive the predation of the creatures feasting on their nightmares. They are too tied up in their hollow Theocracy and their little lives. They all retire for the night, probably after some philosophical or moralistic banter - and in the morning, the stranger is dead in their bed. And the party are arrested for the crime of his murder. Cast out of the town in banishment. (The Unforgiven)

So they leave. They have to travel a long way, because the town is way out in the desert - it's a long way to the nearest settlement that they haven't been banished from. In this time they run into some evil creatures that attack them - though these creatures are wide-eyed and painfully slender, obviously having not rested or fed properly in a while. (Wherever I May Roam)

The adventurers reach the next settlement - which is militarising. Mercenaries roll in every day, following the crusaders that arrived last week. After some potential initial aggression, the party becomes aware that the crusaders are here to purge whatever evil is giving the entire continent nightmares - an evil located in the town they just left. If they give away where they just came from, they get asked a lot of questions, but it becomes obvious - soon, the crusaders are marching to war. (Don't Tread On Me)

The adventurers are offered... well, a fairly exorbitant sum to march with the crusaders - and if that doesn't entice them, then maybe there can be other ways to convince them to go along. They are about to depart when the town is attacked - by demons, led by a half-demonic werewolf whose bearing and manner is strangely familiar. It is during the battle that the party are made to face their own worst nightmares, brought back from the very beginning session. They have to fight their deepest fears made flesh. (Through The Never)

When the dust clears, many of the crusaders - and mercenaries, and innocent townsfolk - are dead. It is time to lick wounds, count cost, and really look one's selves in the eye. Decide what they want to do. Decide if they can let this evil continue. Hopefully - they cannot. So they saddle up with the remaining crusaders to go put an end to this nightmare menace. (Nothing Else Matters)

It is partway to the quiescent town that the campaign started in that they are ambushed, yet again, by the werewolf - and during the ensuing fight, in which he singles out the party, he brags that his master cannot be stopped. The prophecy is nigh at hand and the entirety of (insert name of region here) will drown in their own nightmares, and his lord will come forth and feast on them! It was so easy for him to conceal himself in this town! To adopt the mantle of a pious priest, to turn the other priests to his way of thinking! So easy for such an alpha predator! ...the party kill him, obviously. (Of Wolf And Man)

Upon reaching the town again, they find it closed for business. Significant numbers of the townsfolk are missing, or malnourished and lethargic. The priests of the Theocracy wander the streets, wailing in despair and yelling snatched fragments of their holy texts. They speak of the thing that lurks in the darkness of their chapel now, of how they cannot sleep because they know it feeds from their nightmares. Some are crazed enough to attack the party - they have lost their faith, they have seen the promises of their god (delivered through the high priest of the Theocracy, now a dead werewolf) come to nothing, they have lost everything. (The God That Failed)

There it is - the temple. The party has the chance to rest up before they make entry. Upon kicking in the doors they find themselves facing down some minor demons, but their real enemy is the crushing waves of negative feeling flooding the chapel. Anguish, hopelessness, hatred, fury, despair, misery. That's the worst thing - crushing misery. It makes what should be an easy fight that much harder, as they fight their way into the catacombs. (My Friend Of Misery)

The final battle looms. The party enter the catacombs - and find a shadow. Nothing but a shadow, that welcomes them with waves of nausea, self-loathing, more misery. As they reel against this assault they notice the shadow split into multiple shapes, with glowing red eyes, forming - yes, it's the trope - copies of the party themselves. The DM should have, by this point, worked out their standard tactics. Turn their own tactics against them and see if they can work out how to defeat themselves! (The Struggle Within)

If they lose, then the shadow absorbs them... and moves on to absorbing all of (insert name of region here). But if they succeed - then a true evil has been defeated. A dark force responsible for nothing but misery and anguish. And as the town and the crusaders alike herald the party as heroes, everyone knows they are going to get some sleep soon.

And there you have it. A campaign from an album.

That was kinda fun, actually.

So, in reply, Pat: yes, yes you absolutely could.