A Dark And Quiet Room

Eero Tuovinen (of Zombie Cinema fame) gives A Flower for Mara a thoughtful review. Here’s a sample quote:

The positive surprise in A Flower for Mara was quite profound, and it was that I could enjoy the thought of playing through it if I took its theatrical affectation seriously (and not as an empty analogue, like the theater-rpg thing is usually presented); I have some history in amateur theater myself, and I like doing it, but it has almost nothing to do with roleplaying games - an actor is trying to project a work of art, which is a pretty different thing from playing a game. A Flower for Mara seems like a really fun piece of theater: it has solid rituals, pacing, symbology and a chunky topic (dealing with sorrow) that everybody has an opinion on. I’m tempted to put together a troupe and put this on in front of an audience, actually.

Thanks, Eero!

So, at dinner, Samuel tells me, “Today, Isaac and I went over to the Lansberrys’ house! But we had to play in the basement.” Okay, I think. Not unusual. The play area is in the basement.

Samuel goes on. “They found their copy of Faery’s Tale! So we played that.” And he went on to tell me about it.

In other words, my sons went over to a friend’s house and played a roleplaying game in the basement.

I think I’m proud.

Having recently playing Mist-Robed Gate, I remembered that there were a number of wuxia films that had come out recently that I hadn’t seen. So, last night I finally got around to watching House of Flying Daggers.

I liked it. I liked it a lot. The martial arts wasn’t quite as over-the-top as it was in Hero or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it still had the poetic cinematography, expository combat choreography, and raw emotional intensity that I’ve come to appreciate from my small forays into the genre.

And, because I was watching the movie partly for roleplaying purposes, I realized that the story slotted perfectly into face-stabby narrativism. Shreyas defines face-stabby as “…having to do with that cluster of emotionally violent things like inescapably compressing situations, ethical dilemmas, etc.” which seems like a good definition to me. And there’s a certain vibe that goes with this style of play. Characters tend to be a bit larger than life, while simultaneously being very human in their emotional bonds and confusions. There is this ongoing escalation during the story, where the stakes just seem to keep increasing, forcing increasingly desperate actions by the characters. Finally, there’s some incredible confrontation, where all the pent-up energy of the conflicting agendas explodes in a violent confrontation of some kind. Then, the audience picks up the pieces and goes home.

In recent days, it seems like face-stabby play has been getting short shrift in the world of roleplaying. We want to make “serious” stories and the like. Now, sure, I think that there’s plenty of room for experimentation and expansion in roleplaying. And, when I was setting up A Flower for Mara at GenCon, I stressed that it was not intended for face-stabby play.

At the same time, I also stressed that I really like face-stabby play. And, honestly, I think that a chunk of our literature would essentially be considered “face-stabby”. I’m thinking here of certain of Shakespeare’s plays, like Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. I’m also thinking about Silver Age superheros.

I think that the sort of play/story that we class under “face-stabby” is appealing because it is universal. Its strength rests in issues that are common to all people of all times. Love, hate, revenge, conflicting loyalties: we all understand these things. The travails of the drug war or the Iraq war just simply don’t have the same broad appeal.

So, this is a simple request from a simple guy. In our desire to expand the reach of roleplaying, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. There’s still plenty of strength in face-stabby stories; let’s not discard them prematurely.

And now, I have to figure out where to put Curse of the Golden Flower in my Netflix queue.

Emily wrote up this Actual Play report of A Flower for Mara from GenCon. That means that I don’t have to! Hooray!

Plus, it was a really good game. Very emotionally intense, especially since the group decided that Mara had killed herself. Yeah, that was pretty hard. But still, good.

Because I didn’t stick around for Sunday, I didn’t have a chance to contribute to One Cool Thing I Saw at GenCon 2008. But it’s okay, because Josh Roby covered it for me: Zombie Cinema.

This was the first thing that I saw at the con that actually blew me away. Essentially, Eero Tuovinen took a simplified version of Tim Kleinert’s The Mountain Witch resolution rules and crossed them with the corruption track rules from Reiner Knizia’s The Lord of the Rings cooperative game to create a snappy zombie story boardgame. The mechanics are simple enough to be taught quickly, making it a natural gateway game into These Games Of Ours; however, there seems to be enough depth to be a lot of fun for veterans as well. Even better, the rules are delivered with boardgame-style rigor, leaving nothing to handwaving.

And the kicker. Eero is planning on releasing additional board overlays, allowing the same basic mechanic to be used in other genres as well. Then he said, “Heist game” and I was sold.

I have yet to play, and so it’s possible that the luster might be rubbed off after stepping through a story with these rules. And yet, I don’t think so. In terms of overall coolness, this has my vote for Best New Hotness from GenCon 2008.

Okay, I just went through the last month of violent crime reports from the Peoria Journal-Star and put them on Google Maps.

Peoria Violent Crimes 2008

And, as mentioned before, here are the murders for the year:

Peoria murders 2008

And, as a bonus, here are those two maps overlaid!

Peoria Crimes 2008

If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I may do the non-violent thefts on a separate map. If you’re interested in helping put in the older stories, let me know, and I’ll get you set up.

No, I’m not doing drug crimes (e.g. possession and dealing). First, I’m opposed to drug prohibition, so I don’t really feel like putting the effort into reporting it. Second, it’s hard to tie a drug crime to a particular place, at least from the sorts of reports that I currently have access to. Third, the point of these maps is to try to chart some sense of the danger that crime presents to people in various areas of the city. Possession and dealing simply don’t present a threat of bodily harm to those nearby.

Actually, that leads into a good point about these crimes. “Random crime” often isn’t. If you look into the news stories, you’ll see that many of these crimes were perpetrated on victims known to the perpetrator. Even in crime, it seems that it’s all about who you know.

I’ve been reading The Great Neighborhood Book recently. One of the points it made is that “rough” areas of town aren’t necessarily less safe than “nice” areas of town. Instead, it is often a matter of reputation, not reality.

With that in mind, I’d like to offer this map: Peoria Murders 2008

Notice that two of the three reported murders occurred north of War Memorial Drive. You know, in the “nice” areas of town. Also, notice that none of the three reported murders on the South Side.

(Why am I emphasizing the reported murders? Well, there is that little place on the north end of town, where nearly 800 citizens were murdered this year. But no one really wants to talk about that.)

Yes, there’s more to safety than just the murder rate. I’ve taken to watching the papers, and I know that there’s a lot of violence reported on the South Side.

Yes, this is just for 2008. If I’m so moved, I might try to root around in the Journal-Star’s site and see if I can find the locations of the 2007 murders.

Nonetheless, I think that this is somewhat significant for the core neighborhoods to note, especially in the Heart of Peoria and on the South Side, as we try to address the city’s perception of where we live.

Murder #3 for the year.

Well, except for these murders, of course, which are kept off the stat sheets.

Maybe we weren’t doing as well as I thought.

So, yeah, I wrote Dirty Secrets, a detective noir game. And that meant that I read a lot of the source material. So, trust me when I say that this sounds like something that I would have expected to find in the pages of a Ross MacDonald novel:

Rolling Acres woman’s death remains mystery

Police are releasing few details regarding the homicide investigation of a Rolling Acres woman found dead in her home Friday morning, to the dismay of worried neighbors….”She was a quiet woman,” Lowe said Saturday afternoon. “But she was the most wonderful person you would ever meet.”

Lowe met her neighbor when she moved in five years ago and said Finnegan would always check up on her and see if she needed help around the house.

Lowe returned the favor, recently watering the woman’s flowers while she was out of town. She said she’d planned to have dinner with Finnegan the night she was found dead.

“When I found out she was killed, I was so confused,” she said. “I can’t understand, why would someone kill her?”

Son arrested in Rolling Acres death

Police have arrested the son of a woman who was found strangled to death in her Rolling Acres home Friday morning.

Stark County deputies found John W. Finnegan, 20, sleeping in his mother’s car at a rest stop in Toulon early Sunday. He was detained in Stark County until Peoria police picked him up for questioning.

He was later booked into the Peoria County Jail on a charge of first-degree murder in the death of his mother, Mary T. Finnegan, 43, with whom he lived at 5513 Merrimac Ave.

Bond set for Peoria man accused of killing his mother

Bond was set at $2.5 million Monday for a Peoria man accused of strangling his mother last week.

The death occurred sometime Thursday, when John Finnegan, 20, entered his mother’s room, found her sleeping and “swiftly killed her emotionlessly,” Peoria County State’s Attorney Kevin Lyons said in court, repeating what Finnegan reportedly told detectives.

Mary Finnegan, 43, was found dead around noon Friday, when her other son, 23, stopped by her house and found her naked and wrapped in bedding.

During a five-minute bond hearing in Peoria County Circuit Court, Lyons said the situation had “peculiar” overtones. He cited a “consensual but inappropriate” sexual relationship that had existed between John and Mary Finnegan for about four years. John Finnegan said he and his mother had sex the day before he allegedly killed her.

Finnegan initially denied killing his mother but later told police he felt like he was “bottled up with rage.” He also told detectives he sexually assaulted his mother’s body and then tried to kill himself.

Lyons said Finnegan first tried to drown himself in the bathtub before trying to overdose on various household medications and pills. When that didn’t work, he grabbed some money and left the house in his mother’s car.

He was arrested about 1 a.m. Sunday by Stark County sheriff’s deputies, who found him sleeping in the car. He was then brought back to Peoria.

I’m posting this in various places, and I’m too lazy to edit. So this post might not make a whole lot of sense in the context of this blog. I’d apologize, but I’m not really sorry.

So, the new game that I’m releasing at GenCon is called A Flower for Mara.In this game, you take on the role of various relatives of Mara, a woman who died suddenly, and play through the first year after her death. I have various design notes here. In addition, this is a rough trailer that I’ve put together, and this is a sample of play from a test run back in January.

This game is in the tradition of Jeepform LARPing, which means that there’s lots of walking around and very little mechanical interaction within a scene. (Almost all the mechanics are dedicated to scene structuring.) It also has a Grief mechanic, which basically says that the only way for your character to overcome his grief is for you to share one of your own Griefs with the rest of the group. It’s all very powerful in play, and it works wonderfully…

…

…and I have no idea how to sell this thing at GenCon. I’m at the Forge booth, which is demo-focused, which is very cool and all. However, I’m not persuaded that a 15-minute demo would actually capture what is nifty about this game. Even worse, I’d be afraid that it would make the game look silly. “So, it’s time for a scene. Um, talk to each other for a while. Yeah, that’s good.”

The one idea that I have right now is to focus on a Family Gathering (as seen here and here). Essentially, the family gathers for a holiday of some sort, and the game cuts back and forth from the meal to soliloquies delivered by the characters to express their inner thoughts at the time. Working this inner/outer action could make for a workable demo….

So, anyways, I’m turning to the Internet for help and assistance. Thoughts?

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Scott Dunphy recorded one of his games of Dirty Secrets and then went through the time-consuming process of editing it down to a manageable length. Well, relatively manageable.

Anyways, here are the links to the three parts of the recording:

Story Shtick: “Dirty Secrets” Part 1
Story Shtick: “Dirty Secrets” Part 2
Story Shtick: “Dirty Secrets” Part 3

The third part has Scott’s thoughts on Dirty Secrets. I’ll let you listen to them, but I’ll give you a hint: he likes it.

In which Brennan Taylor calls Dirty Secrets his pick of 2007.

The Voice of the Revolution, Episode 20

This is rough; both transitions and sound need work. But I thought I’d put this trailer for A Flower for Mara up for comment. Any thoughts?

I had been planning on posting those Gamism/Narrativism definitions for about a week now. Seemed funny at the time, and I thought that I’d share.

But then, last night I had a small realization. Essentially, my mini-RPG Showdown is all about making the transition from “two people fighting” to “two brothers fighting” in play.

Interesting….

A couple of RPG theory definitions.

Gamism: two people fighting.

Narrativism: two brothers fighting.