Recommend Me A Roleplaying Game?
I fell out of love with D&D when I realized that the game was tilting towards explaining everything.
I couldn’t blame them; the vast majority of players want firm stats, new feats, monsters with clearly-defined powers and a set number of hit points. So they buy supplements that give them those hard figures… and when Wizards of the Coast figured that out, they made D&D 4th Edition, which is essentially nothing but a dry set of rules to accommodate combat. “Why should we accentuate the roleplaying?” Wizards asked. “The people who want to do that will just break the rules anyway. So let’s give the players a strict framework of guidelines to run combat in, and the rest will take care of itself.”
Me? I want mysteries.
This is why I adored Planescape, which was a world defined largely by belief, and had many things that could not be beaten by mortals. (You weren’t taking down a God, you weren’t settling the Blood War, and there were no stats for the Lady of Pain.) I love Delta Green, with its methodical attention to detail and its grim meathook way of dragging you into the abyss. I love Unknown Armies, the way that there’s always some new and crazy obsession-related magic around the corner. I love Deadlands, with its crazy Wild West History and stock archetype characters carving their way through a fragmented United States.
What I really like, as it turns out, is a detailed look into another world. These aren’t necessarily roleplaying games for me; they’re a travelogue into a new land, with different magic systems and strange challenges. I’m a writer, I don’t need stats; what I need are mysteries to spark ideas that I can then run with in my own campaign. I love reading someone who’s clearly gone to great lengths to devise a land that’s both meticulously thought-out and yet still full of unanswered questions.
(…Which is why I never liked White Wolf’s supplements all that much. They always struck me as well thought-out, but I never felt there were serious mysteries in them; rather, there were these intense political campaigns with no room for the players to squeeze themselves into. I kind of wished they’d just write novels and stop pretending like they wanted players to interact with them.)
And I know such things exist these days; I just don’t work in a game shop any more, so I’m unaware of them. So I’ll ask you experts: What roleplaying games do you think I’ll enjoy reading?
(Not playing, sadly. Just reading. I really want to run an Unknown Armies campaign now, but that’s a very acting-heavy system, and I’d need at least four people willing to throw themselves deeply into character. I just don’t have the critical mass of local peeps to make for a satisfying UA campaign, which wouldn’t involve victory over the odds but rather people trying to come to terms with the deeply weird world they’ve accidentally opened the door to.)
I’ve given you my top four: Planescape, Delta Green, Unknown Armies, Deadlands. If you can recommend any new RPG worlds (preferably created in the past seven years), I’d be grateful. I’d like to get up to speed, and see what folks have done lately.
Today's Pretty Pretty Princessing
This weekend was Kinko de Mayo, Cleveland’s big kinky convention. So naturally, I couldn’t show up with last week’s nails!
These may be my favorite nails of all time; they’re masculine, and yet unmistakably pretty. The trick on this one is that the nails have little magnetic filings in them, and they’re aligned by judicious use of a magnet before being cured with the ultraviolet light.
And holy God, I wish I’d gotten pictures of these babies in the blacklight. They glow like jellyfish in ocean water. It’s glorious.
(If you’re curious about what Kinko De Mayo is like, I have a con report up over on FetLife.)
Funeral For A Queen
We broke into the hive of our friendly bees the other day, only to find it was the Overlook Hotel.
Which is not to say it was empty. But it was hive full of dwindling ghosts, bees working on autopilot on tasks that no longer mattered. They were fetching pollen, getting honey, keeping the comb clean….
…and none of it mattered, because the queen was dead. There would be no new bees. There could be no new bees, without a queen. The combs were completely free of eggs. All of their bustle was devoted to furthering a future that could not exist. Left to their own devices, the poor things would have worked literally to death, the population dropping until eventually every last bee was dead.
“But wait,” you ask. “How do bees reproduce, if they all die when the queen dies?” Well, if the queen dies during the spring or summer or early fall, then she’s already laid a bunch of eggs. The bees pick one egg for reasons that nobody quite knows, feed it royal jelly, and what would have been a worker is suddenly upgraded to an egg-laying queen. The hive will be struggling to catch up, as bees have short lives and a lot of them will die during the transition period, but the queen will eventually hatch and start up the great bee Circle of Life.
If the queen dies during the winter, though, there are no eggs to upgrade. The bees open up shop, same as always, emerging from their winter downtime, but there are no raw materials to work with. All they have is food and comb, and they tend to those like nothing has gone wrong. But it has gone wrong. Everything around them is dying. They are a sterile hive.
The only solution in this case is manual: Gini is driving down this afternoon to fetch a queen bee, as it’s a race against time. We’re going to put this new queen bee in the hive, give it a week to let her pheromones saturate it so the remaining bees don’t sting her to death upon release, and hope that she can lay enough eggs while the survivors of the last generation are around to tend to them that she can kickstart this hive.
Yet it’s still a loss. The queen we knew, the one who laid all of those nice bees, is dead. Perhaps killed by the cold, or maybe by old age – she wasn’t that old, but into her third year she was getting on. The queen is the personality of the hive, and these bees have been the sweetest, most docile bees a beekeeper could ask for. Her death is a serious loss to us, as even if this new queen manages to rebuild the population, it won’t be our hive. It will be a hive, with some overlap for a few weeks, but by the end of June the last traces of the old queen will be gone and New Queen will be firmly in effect.
It’s a terrible loss. It is an odd thing, to be so sad over a single insect, but this insect was in a very real sense a colony – and a colony we loved. So we’ll carry on in her memory, and hope this emergency patch works, but…
…it won’t be her. We’ll miss her. Her and all her kind.
Goodbye, queen.
What Writing This Novel Has Taught Me
It’s official as of last night: the first draft of my novel The Flex and the Flux is complete. 102k words of drug-dealing magicians.
So let’s talk about what I discovered this time around.
I have written a lot of novels: eight of them, if I bothered to count. Six were before I restarted my writing career at the Clarion Sci-Fi and Fantasy Workshop, so I don’t count them. I’ve written two as what I’d tentatively call a “mature” writer – as in, “Ferrett is now aware of his flaws, knows his writing process well enough to squeeze the best work possibly out of himself, and has accepted that he requires heavy revisions to function.” (There are people impressed by the mere fact of finishing a novel, but remember: my strength as a writer is tenacity. I could spew out words at will, and regularly did. For me, the trick was learning how to spew out the correct words.)
So. Two novels.
…I don’t want to talk about the failed novel in between, but alas, I must.
If you followed me over the summer of 2012, you’d see me discussing my novel Sorry I Killed Your Boyfriend, which was pitched as “Pre-powers Buffy discovers her best friend is dating Edward.” I spent about eight months wrestling with that idea, because it was such an insanely great idea to me – not from a marketing perspective, but from the clash of emotions that’d result when two best friends were separated by what was, in many ways, an attempted murder. And I did my research: I read Twilight, re-watched some Buffy, found the town in Oregon this was set in, checked some medical tomes on ophthalmologic disasters (since one character was missing an eye). There was a lot that went into that novel.
And yet no matter how I approached this rich trove of emotion, I couldn’t find its soul.
I probably should have been tipped off by Cat Valente’s reaction to the fact that I wasn’t keen on Labyrinth, when she expressed astonishment and I replied, “The husk of a dead thirteen-year-old girl rests inside my withered heart.” Am I well-positioned to write about the travails of two adolescent teenaged girls, especially modern ones (for I hate books that act like AIM and texts and Facebook never existed, simply because the author wasn’t around when those were part and parcel of high school), one going through a flighty, Twilighty romance?
I wasn’t. But it wasn’t because they were girls that I was repelled: it was the Twilight, inextricably wrapped around the core idea.
I coined the term Philosophical Allergy to discuss how I felt, reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. In many ways, Lev’s book is a gorgeously written adult take on Harry Potter, meticulously characterized, with many sharp and imaginative twists. But the central core of The Magicians is alienation – the characters are all genius outcasts who, rather than band together in the face of loneliness, devise better excuses to create class divisions and emotional distance. They’re all very real people, acting in very realistic ways; having grown up in rich Connecticut, I’ve known these people intimately, sometimes literally so.
I just loathed all of them.
And so, while reading it, I found myself rejecting some of the core tenets, and finishing the book became kind of a hair shirt for me. It was a very good book on some levels, but on another, I’d found someone chronicling the precise opposite of what I hoped one day to write. I could read it, but I could not ingest it. I vomited out what it was attempting to do, even as I admired its technique.
So it was with Twilight. (Which, if you’ll recall, I think is a very effective book at what it does.) They say that much good writing is a dialogue, where one short story inspires another, and I believe that’s true. A lot of my tales are me reading someone’s story and going, “Oh, that’s not how people react in a situation, let me show you how it goes.” And for me, trying to hew close to the idea that one of the characters was having a Twilight romance with a vampire, I found myself ridiculing the idea. Vampires are killers. This adolescent love of Edward she has is compelling, even universal, but if you’re smart you get over that and walk away… and if you don’t, you find yourself constantly chasing new relationship energy, trying to build a love out of that first transitory rush. The more I thought about the question, “Why would a century-old vampire find any seventeen-year-old girl appealing?” the creepier the answer became.
And I’m very clever, and very tenacious, so I spent a lot of time devising ideas why this could all hold together. The problem is, those reasons weren’t convincing to me. I was writing by the numbers, not invested in the characters to the depth I had to be to follow them through four hundred pages of adventures – and when I realized that I couldn’t justify the very things that needed to exist to make this novel tick, I immediately ragequit.
That was eight months of my life gone. And so I was a little terrified to start a new novel. I had all that tentative fear that a man gets on his first date after the divorce: am I really fit for this? Especially since this new novel was inspired, once again, by another television show: what if Breaking Bad dealt with not drugs, but magic?
Yet this novel is successful. Very successful, I think. So what’s the difference?
In a way, the collapse of Sorry I Killed Your Boyfriend made me sensitive to what I needed to learn for this novel. After all, if I wasn’t a big fan of The Magicians, then a novel based on Breaking Bad is probably not going to be warm and fuzzy. Breaking Bad is about a chemistry-teacher-turned-drug-dealer – and it’s blacky funny in the beginning, when Walter is still learning his trade, but with each season Walter gets more efficient and less lovable. The stated goal of the show is to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface, and though the show isn’t quite done yet, they’ve very much succeeded.
So considering that I like to write about love and friendship, how do I reconcile that with the source material?
What I wrote was indeed about drug dealers, and a violent lifestyle, and a ‘mancy system that only springs from functionally-incapable, crazed-cat-lady-level obsessions. But even drug dealers feel affection towards each other, and drug usage has that lovely romance period where you’re both taking this drug, it’s awesome, the world is full of possibilities. And this time, I treated the core of the idea that gestated this work as a mere suggestion, not a rail. Whenever any of it conflicted with what I loved, what I loved thoroughly won.
In other words, I didn’t let someone else’s philosophy drive me. I let mine. And so, what in the hands of someone else would have been, well, Breaking Bad, instead turns into an extended musing on fatherhood (for the Walter-analogue here has a young daughter, who unlike in Breaking Bad features prominently), and how you deal with life-destroying trauma. It’s a surprisingly warm and fuzzy book about outcasts who wreck the world with their reality-warping psychoses.
If I’d been smarter, dealing with my collapsed book, I would have realized soon on that the Edward-Bella love thing is really a philosophical allergy, and I would have not simply tried to adapt it, but I would have transformed it. I wouldn’t have asked, “So why are they in love?” I would have asked, “So what would I fear about that love? What would I have been attracted to?” And rather than constantly trying to wedge them into the plot that I’d devised, I would have found my own voice to respond to Stephenie Meyer’s take on NRE, treating it not as this thing to be transplanted into my novel, but rather my own relationships reflected in fiction.
My error was treating the idea as if I could respond to it by copying it. You can’t do that. You respond to another work of fiction by breathing it all in, then breathing it out as something so completely you that it’s no one else. There are adolescent romances that I could write about – for, as has been noted, in many ways I move in constant tides of crushes, falling in love with strangers at the drop of a hat – but I’d have to write about the kind of vampire that I’d fall for, and not Stephenie Meyers and all her kin would. And would that idea survive the first contact with my other concept of a Buffy-analogue wanting to kill the Edward?
I don’t know. But now I’d be wise enough to understand that if it wouldn’t fit, then that darling should be the first to go.
Anyway, I’m rambling. The point is that what I learned this time around is the most obvious point, which is really what writers do: we find the obvious advice everyone bandies about, and find the way to internalize it. The point here is that novels – that fiction – is about your fears, your deepest desires, your internal kinks that pull you along… and anything that leads you away from that is blunting the strongest thing in your fiction, which is to say your passion and voice.
I lost mine. I got it back. And now I’ll spend the next several months re-passing this novel, deepening the themes and tuning the characters and making those emotional beats resonate. Which I’m able to do because at some point, I went beyond just filing off the serial numbers and actually adopted it as all my own.
The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Writer
I’ve been thinking a lot about Cassie Alexander. And my career in writing. And a lot of social isolation.
Cassie, if you don’t know, is the author of the Edie Spence series, an urban fantasy featuring a nurse tending to supernatural patients. (It’s good, trust me – go check it out.) And she’s also crazily obsessed with getting her novels out in a properly urban fantasy-style schedule, which is to say every six months or so. People like regular reads. They don’t like waiting. It’s best for your career if you can do that Seanan McGuire trick and churn out a quality novel every four months or so.
And she has written blog entries on “How To Write A Novel In Six Months.” Basically: lock yourself inside. Cut off social contacts, except for your most absolute. Focus. (Because, you know, you’re not going to be a full-time novelist, you need that day job for at least the insurance – so you need to write a full novel in six months in your spare time.)
Which is a little terrifying, because I’m feeling the pressure of writing as it is. I take the craft seriously; I write every day, usually for around ninety minutes, sometimes for as long as three hours. Which I do at the end of a long work day, so my reward for finishing the fine programming tasks of StarCityGames.com is to vanish downstairs and abandon my family.
That focus warps my social life. I can’t really wander too far away to visit friends on the other side of town, because if it takes forty minutes to make it to the East Side, then we visit for a few hours, I won’t have any time to write unless I get up at 6:00 a.m. (Which is more difficult on beta blockers.) When I do visit, it’s going to be later in the evening or end early, because skipping my writing? Not an option. I’m simply not good enough to not skip.
And with all of that, assuming all goes according to schedule, I will have taken six months to write the first draft of the novel I’m on now. (Do not congratulate me until I actually finish this fucking thing.) And that’s a draft as messy as a dropped pitcher of Kool-Aid; it’s like a graveyard, full of dead ideas that need to be weeded, and future concepts that need to be seeded. (The final villain in this story actually changed not once, but twice, before I figured out who my protagonist’s opponent was. A strong plotter, I am not.) That six months is more likely going to be fourteen by the time all the drafts are said and done – though part of that length is just giving my beta readers the time to read an actual novel.
That’s with the luxury of no deadlines, though. I have no agent, no publisher tugging my leash; I’m just sort of doot-doot-dooting through this process, making it as good as I can, not reliant on anyone.
But if I do sell this – and they want a sequel, which is entirely possible – then I’d have a fire under the old ass. I guess I’d want to get this new novel boiled down, and so I would amp my usual writing time from ninety minutes to three hours, and possibly as long as five. I’d lose my social life entirely until I finished this – maybe not in six months, but to try to pare the process down to under a year, certainly.
I dunno. It’s not like this is any real concern, not yet, and I know that in the end publishers want quality product over shoveled-out shit. But I’m already feeling a social pinch because I’m treating this crazy hobby of mine like a career. What happens when it becomes a career, albeit a side one? Can I be the Cassie and wall all that out to make this happen? Am I that devoted?
And is that being a writer? I don’t know whether other writers in my rough area of evolution experience this kind of crunch. Maybe Kat Howard does it all in half an hour, maybe. Maybe they all get by with part-time jobs. Maybe I just need more time to write, which would make sense, because it certainly takes me more time to learn how to write than it does for other writers. (Which is not to say I’m a slouch, but I know a ton of people who put in less effort and write far better stories than I do. My main strength as a writer is not natural talent, it’s tenacity.) Do other pros and semi-pros like myself feel that drain on their friendships, that vague feeling like all the kids are outside playing baseball and you’re stuck inside practicing the violin?
This post has been brought to you by the Ferrett Overthinks Every Aspect of His Life Foundation.