City of Masks storygame at Nerdly Beach Party

If you're in the neighborhood of San Simeon State Park on Friday 19 September, my storygame based in the same setting as the City of Masks novel is set to be playtested at Nerdly Beach Party.

Thanks to Nancy (Faerieloch) for facilitating this.

Playing myself after all

Big blogging day. Basically I'm at a difficult point in my Unfolding Form application and can't be bothered wrestling with it.

Over in another post (Playing the role you don't want to live), I banged on about how Garan, my character in Vaxalon's Amber game, was a way for me to break type and basically play a barbarian.

It doesn't seem to have worked. In this particular game, characters can grant other characters "traits" based on their actions, which they can then use later in the game. The two traits Garan's received so far are "Intuitive Insight" and "Wisest Choice".

Looks like I'm a cleric at heart after all. Sigh.

(Though I did ask the other players specifically to help me put some ropes on this loose cannon. Perhaps this is their way of doing so.)

Ideas as beings

Tony Dowler recently let me critique his work-in-progress Mathematica as part of a critique exchange over at Story-Games.

Capsule summary: it's a well-done alternate-history Renaissance game, built on Clinton Nixon's Solar System. His main addition to that system is the "war of ideas". Without giving away too much, questions like "Can the Pope be infallible?" can be invoked during play for mechanical advantage, and eventually get "resolved", the answer becoming part of the game world.

That triggered off an idea in me for an alternate treatment. What if the ideas (let's call them Theses, like Luther's) become like very cut-down characters, which "advance" as they are invoked and involved in conflicts until they "transcend" and become orthodoxies or truisms accepted by at least some people as just part of the way things are?

This makes them rather like gods, of course. And, in fact, the ideas of the Renaissance and afterwards did start to be treated, in many ways, like the gods of polytheism.

Those same gods were given a revival in intellectual and artistic discourse in the Renaissance, their symbolism and attributes used in discussion and symbolic art about ideas. Probably this had something to do with the age's desire to disentangle itself from the medieval Church, which did a similar thing with the symbols and attributes of the saints.

Interestingly, like me in City of Masks, Tony has made the continuation of Roman paganism part of the background to his setting. I suspect his reasons may be similar to mine (I seem to remember him saying somewhere that he's a fairly conservative Catholic): Doing this enables you to play with ideas about the role and influence and corruption of the Church in those times, without the emotional complication of its historical continuity with the Church of which you are a current faithful member.

So anyway, there's an idea for my file of "may have legs" ideas. Theses, and, naturally, antitheses, which act like characters in at least some ways.

More in my next post.

Playing the role you don't want to live

My father was, in many ways, the inspiration for the character of the Innocent Man. Yet he loved to play villains on the operatic stage. As a bass-baritone, he often got the opportunity, though sadly he never fulfilled his ambition to play Mephistopheles in Faust, the ultimate villain.
Neighbours of ours once took their young sons to a production of The Mikado in which Dad was playing the title role, and Dad was highly amused by the question one of the boys (about 8 or 9 at the time, I think) asked his parents afterwards: "Now the play is over, can Mr McMillan go back to being a nice man?"

All of which as introduction to why I'm really enjoying playing Garan in Vaxalon's Amber wiki game.

Garan, I've come to realize, is like a stereotypical D&D character, only HARDCORE! (to use Jess Hammer's technical terminology). Not only does he want to kill Corwin and take his stuff, he wants to chop the corpse into small pieces and create a zombie Corwin army (which I suppose would make him Chaotic Evil, in D&D terms). He's also suggested killing Brand: "If the blood of Amber is so great, I'd like to see some."

The format of the game helps with being able to do stuff like this. Because it's a wiki, we can retcon and revise, and I can indicate either in the wiki or on the out-of-character email list we are using to coordinate in the background that I'm not seriously suggesting this (besides which, the scene is set within the existing Amber canon, so I know going in that the suggestion isn't going to be taken up). We're creating a shared fiction in which Garan is a particular kind of extreme character, who pushes things in a particular direction but isn't going to get his way most of the time. I'm loving that; I get to propose mayhem, with the knowledge that it won't get acted on.

In other words, it's a safe way to indulge my desire to be a complete loose cannon and sow mayhem and destruction - not something I actually want to do in real life, because unlike Garan I'm aware of consequences.

I remember years ago reading a Philip K. Dick story (the one with Lincoln in it, I think) and being struck by the term Maschenfreiheit, which means "maskfreedom". This is the freedom you have to act in what would normally be unacceptable ways, by virtue of wearing a mask. Garan is an instance of maskfreedom for me, just as the Mikado or Dick Deadeye were for my father.

EDIT: See my follow-up post.