Teenager From Inner Space

Daddy Tired.

I'm in Gradjulate Skuwl so I don't have as much time/energy/focus for this blog as I did when I had an office job and posted during lulls in work.  Heck, I barely have time to make the eight espressos a day I swill down just to keep the pace brisk.  Plus we have a new cat we're trying to teach not to shred the flesh off of everyone who comes near.  

Of course when a Man/Child gets this much responsibility, he starts to remember more innocent times.  Times when he took games like Teenagers from Outer Space really seriously.

When I was in high school, this game (abbreviated TFOS) seemed to offer a way to reframe the whole experience, make it less frustrating and more fun.  A few years later I discovered anime, and yet I didn't make the connection between Rumiko Takahashi, a manga artist whose work Teenagers From Outer Space openly cannibalized, and TFOS itself, even though I was obsessed with Rumiko Takahashi's work (because it seemed to offer a way to reframe my whole post-college experience, make it less etc.)  Only now, as I take a fresh look at TFOS, do I see that I was playing in Rumiko's world before I ever fell in love with Rumiko's work.

What's more, I have two supplements to the game, one from R. Talsorian, the company that released the game, and another from a third-party startup.  

The first is called Field Trip.  It's a module (for non-dorks: a role-playing module is essentially a ready-made story for gamers to use, absolving the referee of the responsibility of creating the story, instead socking the ref with the responsibility to learn the story) that I haven't really read.  The plot hinges on a School Vice Principal organizing a booby-trapped field trip.  The idea of an utterly hostile Vice Principal doesn't square with even my most persecution-complexy school memories, and strikes me as a nonclever variation on what I wanted from TFOS: a recasting of school experience to make it more fun.  Yeah, I liked satirizing the faculty in these games, but I knew they didn't HATE us.  They just hated the cruddier things we did.  Early in the module the Vice Principal hijacks the school bus and reveals himself to be a terrorist sleeper agent, at which point I ran out of patience, not due to post-9/11 sensitivity, but out of exasperation.  These dumb jokes don't resonate with my school experience.

Then there's a more recent thing called The Landing.  It's devoted to describing a shopping mall for the TFOS characters to enjoy.  The writing is a mess.  The original TFOS writing style has a competent-standup-comic verve; the jokes may be hit or miss, but there's a sense of humor and an offer to enjoy yourself.  The Landing's style isn't reminiscent of standup; it's reminiscent of a science project report, droned aloud by a dull, serious student.  It's full of poorly thought out ideas for jazzing up your fantasy mall, but the most irksome element is the new races.

TFOS has 4 races your characters can be: human, near human, not-very-near-human and Real Weirdie.  Not so much races as categories, right?  It's a terrific way to encourage the right loosy-goosy spirit, because you can play pretty much anything under these rules.

So why do you need new races?

The new races turn out to be various categories of Furry.  One humanoid fox race, TWO humanoid cat races (one anthropomorphic cat, the other human-with-cat-ears-and-tail, an oddly popular image in Japanese cartoons) and grumpy-old-man goldfish.  Okay, the goldfish are cool.

(Sidenote: In my view there's a substantial difference between traditional funny animals (Uncle Scrooge etc.) and the whole furry thing.  Uncle Scrooge is really a human disguised as a duck for a practical cartooning reason: cartooning is in part about abstraction, and by giving Scrooge a duck bill and a ducklike stance he's abstracted far away from any human appearance.  So you can't judge him by his looks.  You have to evaluate his deeds and words.  So it is with most funny animals; they're just people whom we must judge by their behavior, since their appearances don't reveal much about them.

With furry art, though, the duck bill or the squirrel tail is the whole point.  These characteristics are fetishistic, not always in a sexual sense, but certainly in a broader meaning of the word "fetish."  And people have a right to their fetishes, even if they ick me out (and furry icks me out to an illogical extent). but I love cartoon animals while disliking anything forthrightly furverted. )

I don't mind a'tall that some people take their TFOS with a side of Furry.  To thine own self be true; I always used this kind of game to address my heart's yearnings, so why shouldn't furries?  But I'm a little irked by the way furry stuff permeates The Landing, not because I don't like furry stuff, but because I don't like the attempt to encroach on the freedom of the original game's premises.  The nature of TFOS is to allow for any kind of character, but the nature of The Landing is to mandate specific kinds of character: the kinds The Landing's creators enjoy.  In this sense TFOS is small-l liberal and/or libertarian, while The Landing is small-c conservative.  The former gives unfettered permission to Do Your Thing, while the latter wants you to Do The Author's Thing; it tries to corral you into a rigidly defined set of values and fetishes (and fetishes are usually rigorous in their rigid definition.)

Anyway, I'm going to grad school as part of my ongoing (in part successful) efforts to have good life experience directly instead of mediating life through entertainment.

Needs to Happen

Due to the overwhelming response to my post about Dungeons and Dragons movies, I'm doing another one. The next two Dungeons and Dragons movies will both deal with The Planes.

Dungeons and Dragons (at least back in my day) had a gonzo OCD cosmology full of Planes of Existence. Some were devoted to different elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and others to various Afterlives. I tried to find the original complicated charts online, but came up empty, which amazes me. No one wants to scan the old D&D charts of the Inner and Outer Planes? What's wrong with nerds these days?

Anyway, suffice it to say that The Planes represent all the different worlds, zones, dimensions etc. that exist in E. Gary Gygax's philosophy, and from time to time various folks who wanted to sell more D&D product tried to crank out expansions on this idea.

There should be two counterbalancing films about this. Just to keep me happy.

The first should be loosely adapted from The Manual of the Planes by Jeff Grubb, who for a time was the hardest working man in Dungeons and Dragons. I remember the book being an imaginative, or at least imagination-firing, book that told you what it might be like to visit, say, a place where everything is made of water, or where Chaotic-Neutral people go when they die (The morality and afterlife thing is highly structured in Dungeons and Dragons). The film should be written and directed by the people responsible for this,

this,

this right here

and of course this

ad. It should be produced by the employee of Birmingham Alabama's long-lost comic/game shop Lion and Unicorn who tried to sell a copy of the by-then out of print Manual of the Planes for $100. Anyone named Manuel Planes should be hired to work on this film. The movie should consist of a guided tour of each plane, undertaken by two cute teens in 80's garb with a sunglassed nonthreatening version of Ric Okasek for a guide. Pleasant synth-pop throughout, as in the ads. Really, just give me 90 minutes of Eighties-style Bubble Yum ads and I'll be happy. Normally I scorn folks who rhapsodize about favorite commercials, but I was young and vulnerable when I saw these, and I honestly love this post-You Might Think stuff. (BTW I now understand, as I didn't in the 80's, exactly why my Mom found this video so disturbing. Unstoppable stalkers are exciting to little boys but not to their Moms.)

The other film should be adapted from the groovy old D&D themed computer game Planescape:Torment, a glum and complicated adventure in which an amnesiac hero awakens in a run-down fantasy city, assembles a ragtag band, explores strange places... all the usual fantasy computer game stuff, really, but there's lots of bull-session philosophy, exotic atmosphere, and ... well, that was enough for me. Maybe if I played more of these games I wouldn't have found this one so immersive, but now I want to reexperience it without actually playing it, which means someone has to make the movie version. Make it long and dense. Make it pretty, in a smoky, spikey way. For crying out loud make it immersive. Strike a balance between talky stuff in superficially creepy yet oddly cozy settings, and fantastical action set pieces. Script should be improvised on set by M. John Harrison, under duress if need be. Directed by Jason Keener.

Somewhere between these films there needs to be a short-lived cable TV series based on D&D lamebrainstorm Spelljammer , a D&D variant that focused on magical boats flying from planet to planet. The pilot episode should be directed by whoever made this. After a promising first episode it should start to stink pretty bad. Cast a few hot guys and gals in it so Fanfic Nation will get all excited about it and get enough petition signatures to keep it on the air for an even worse second season.

It's ideas like this that have driven my blog hits into the single digits.

In The Realm

As you probably know, there's a Dungeons and Dragons movie. And it's a stinker. My D&D-playing friends and I had a good time heckling it, but that's about all it's good for. How then should a proper D&D movie be made?

I shall tell you, for the answer lies within me.

Firstly, when I think back on the old Dungeons and Dragon books I used to pour over, I can't help thinking about the shops and streets and overpasses of Chattanooga, Tn. and the hiking trails of Signal Mountain. That's where I lived and engaged D&D. So to capture the sensation of Dungeons and Dragons as I experienced it, my D&D film would be shot Alphaville-style in Chattanooga.

Alphaville was a science-fiction movie by arthouse legend Jean-Luc Godard. He shot it in 60s Paris, and made no effort to disguise the fact, even though the story took place on exotic alien planets. The conceit of the film is that no elaborate sci-fi set or camera trick could possibly create a setting more alien and peculiar than a hotel lobby or office building, so why not film in a hotel lobby or office building and pass it off as an alien planet? I propose taking the same approach to Chattanooga, which is more fantastic than any Frazetta painting if approached with photographic imagination.

The film's narrative should be loosely adapted from the B series of Dungeons and Dragon modules. The central characters should be the main characters from the old D&D Saturday Morning cartoon. They should be played by game-shop nerds with no particular acting ability or resemblance to the cartoon characters. The script should be written by a few Infocom game designers and should focus more on the red herrings, dead ends and pointless whimsies that characterize old D&D modules than on any sense of narrative momentum. The monsters should be designed by Erol Otus and realized with stop-motion animation overseen by Rick Trembles. It should be directed by a drunken Tobe Hooper, whose blend of weird dry humor, grotesquerie, uneven craft and occasional shamanism make him the ideal stand-in for the game's traditional Dungeon Master. Closing credits music by Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe.

Obviously this movie will make cash by the tankerful, so the sequel should be an absurdly faithful adaptation of Ravenloft. The main vampire should be played by the Chattanooga community theatre hambone who played every role with the same exaggeratedly effeminate elocutionary style regardless of the part. Castle Ravenloft should be portrayed by Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church, one of the key locations in my life for good and ill. The film should be scripted and directed by Raul Ruiz. The protagonists should be the characters from Snarfquest. Production design by Larry "Snarfquest" Elmore and Damien Hirst. Music by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Closing credit song by The Egyptian Lover.

The Silm-Oh Really?-on

Warning: the title of this post is a laboured joke that only unreconstructable fantasy nerds will get. I'm not even a Tolkien fan... Mervyn Peake, please.

Anyhow, I just wanted to say in my defense that I didn't buy the DND Cartoon DVD box set about which I posted yesterday in the naive belief that I would enjoy these cartoons in the way I did as a child. This wasn't about reliving childhood pleasures, but trying to figure out how those childhood pleasures shaped me. I think the distinction is crucial, but Gygax don't care; the check cashes the same either way.

Another, vaguely related point: the stuff I post about on the blog isn't usually what's foremost on my mind, and I suspect that's pretty common. Vanity websites like this seem to be more like backyard playgrounds than bully pulpits for some of us. Today I'm not thinking about DND cartoons; I'm thinking about the Virginia Sister. But I'm posting about the DND Cartoon. Go figure.

A few years back our college Dungeon Master (that's a Dungeons and Dragons referee, not a dominatrix) became a father, and almost immediately he was busily constructing an exaustive website about the history of our old games. Character sheets, everything. I can dig it.

I don't have time to delve deep, but over Thanksgiving I read the Polaris rulebook. The scenario is so comically reactionary that you'd have to crossbreed Justice Robert Bork with a cave cricket to find anyone to take it seriously, but the formal aspects of the game design are intriguing and clever. I was hoping for something like Peter Greenaway, but it's more like Jean Rollin. I like Rollin too. I'll be buying more indy RPGs, including ones by Ben Lehman. I've been harsh on his work, but Gygax and Arneson, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, commited a truckload of embarrasing mistakes too. Pioneers aren't expected to dot every I; they're expected to blaze new trails. Indy RPGs are doing that, and I'll take them with all their flaws.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am sick so I'll be staying home this Thanksgiving, but I still plan to eat well. But instead of spending time with beloved family members, I'll be staying in bed. At least I'll have time to catch up on my reading. I'm sniffing at Polaris, another one of those indy RPGS. This one is apparently at the vanguard of the indy games thing. Before you get to the game part you've got to get through the extensive backstory, though. It's slow going. Imagine Dan Clowes mocking an E. R. Eddison wannabe and you'll have the right idea. A sample from memory: "These few examples will have to suffice you." If that "you," which is representative of the grammatical carelessness plaguing game designer Ben Lehman's attempted elevated prose, didn't make you wince or cackle then you may enjoy his turgid high fantasy prose more than I do, but it's more inflated than elevated. I suspect that Lehman's real artistry as a game designer will do much to compensate; I certainly hope so! There's a creative artist in there somewhere, although centering a high fantasy adventure around the notion that the Sun is BAD is pretty counterintuitive to me. It's like saying apples or hugs are bad.

(and yes, my own prose is riddled with faults, but I'm not attempting anything more complex than a blog. Pulling off what John Gardner called "The High Style" takes a degree of linguistic virtuosity that neither Lehman nor I possess. But hey, God bless him for trying, and I really do want to be able to report back with a positive take on his game as a game.)

Christmas Carol is taking shape, but it's slow going; wrassling such a huge production into a stageworthy show is no mean feat, and we are all having trouble remembering how all our bits and pieces fit together. Offstage, I know all my lines, lyrics, notes and choreography. Onstage everything falls apart. The gap between knowing stuff in one's head and actually being able to do the stuff is something I rediscover with every show.

Primetime Adventures

There are plenty of topics I could address in this, my first post in a while, but I'd rather talk about a game I've bought, Primetime Adventures. It's one of these here indy role-playing games, with a TV show premise. It's an awful lot like an improv format, so its appeal to an occasional improvist is obvious, but it turns out there's no one I can actually play this game with. Most role-playing games are about pretending to be, say, Agents Mulder and Scully. This game is more about playing Chris Carter. You don't play the game by using your character as an alter ego, but as a storytelling subject, the same way a TV show writer/producer would. Well, most of my friends can be roughly divided into 2 groups: the ones who'd rather play Mulder and Scully, or the one's who'd rather actually BE Chris Carter (or at least actually produce a play or film that others can watch).

More on Arsonists

A few more thoughts on those arsonists. As I said, I was a BSC theatre major, so maybe I've got a little insight into the motivations of these kids. Just scanning the blogs I've seen a lot of speculation; some folks home in on the UAB guy's profession of Satanism. A surprising number have speculated that it was some kind of Methodists Vs. Baptists thing. The latter set of theories reminds me that however much fun armchair conspiracy theorizing is as a parlor game, it's also a good way to look silly to folks who have inside knowledge.

When I was a student I did a lot of dumb things to test the boundaries of appropriate behavior/what I could get away with. In part it's about asserting one's own power; in part it's about seeing "God still loves me" by seeing what one can get away with. I recall one time a buddy and I were on a late night grocery run. A cute gal was in line in front of us. We saw her driving away and we decided to follow her. We didn't mean any harm; we just thought it would be a hoot to play at stalking. We followed her to her house, idled across the street as she went inside, sat there for a minute, just reveling in our naughtiness, and then drove off. Maybe we scared her, though she didn't show it. I'm not at all proud of this; we should have considered that we might really upset the poor woman. But I suspect it flowed from the same source as the arsonists' "joking" escapades.

The difference, I think, is that we didn't cross that final line; we didn't get out of the car and do anything to the woman or the property. We were Dungeons and Dragons nerds-we knew how to live out our evil fantasies in imaginary, harmless ways. Perhaps respect for other people was the missing ingredient in these boys-not a "yes sir yes ma'am" respect, but an awareness that however important the assertion of your identity is, it's not more important than a respect for other peoples' needs. In other words I'd suggest that the problem wasn't that they wanted to be "bad," but that they didn't understand that there's good bad and bad bad. Good bad is more decorative than functional. It's good to sing the song of yourself, even if it's a song that not everyone likes; it's just not good to try to drown out other people singing their songs.

Intelligent Design

You know what Intelligent Design is like? Back when computers had cassette tape drives instead of disk drives, my Dad put Michael Jackson's Thriller in the TI 99 4A Cassette Drive to see what the TI would make of it. Of course the answer was: nothing. As far as the TI was concerned there was no readable data on the tape. Not because there was nothing on the tape: the tape contained some of Quincy Jones's most commercially succesful music (and that Jackson guy.) Not because the computer was useless: it was great for spreadsheets, Zork, etc. The computrer could do nothing with the music because the computer could only function within a specific set of parameters, and no amount of naivete or wishful thinking could make it dance to Quincy's beat.

Science is that TI 99 4A, and God is that cassette of Thriller. Sorry, not God; the Intelligent Designer. Those Heritage Foundation drones have adopted denying Him three times before the cock crows as a key legal strategy.

And another thing that leaps to my mind when I think of ID: the first edition AD&D Deities and Demigods sourcebook. AD&D rules statistically quantified the strength, intelligence, heath etc. of all the characters and monsters in the game, and so the Deities and Demigods sourcebook, devoted to mythological figures whom one might wish to incorporate into the game, tried to quantify mythological figures in a comically procrustian fashion.

Science is all about the measurable, the quantifiable, the testable. I was raised to believe God can't be measured or quantified, and that He Himself declared "Do not put The Lord Your God to the test." Trying to shoehorn God into science per se is like the D&D sourcebook declaring that Zeus has 400 hit points. It's a heretical reductionism, a confusion of catagories, that may be well intentioned but belittles God and coarsens science.

But wait, they say. "Teach the controversy." What controversy? The philosophical controversy about whether or not God made the universe is perfectly legit for a philosophy class; the subject of the controversy is fine for a social studies class. But there's no real scientific controversy here. Just because the IDs have duped one or two tenured activist professors into siding with them doesn't mean that the scientific community is really split over ID, any more than the existence of a few tenured history teachin' holocaust deniers means that there's any legit controversy over the reality of the Holocaust. "Teach the controversy." Harumph. Any controversy that was whipped up in a right-wing think tank isn't a controversy; it's a distraction.

Raving, Lost

Remember Ravenloft? If you are or ever were a role-playing game nerd my age or older, you do. It was a Dungeons and Dragons module (A module being a prefabricated story setup on which to base a DND session) in which the premise was simple: Dracula-in-all-but-name has set up shop in a big old castle and you have to break, enter and dispatch. Most DND modules have similarly basic premises, but this module was different, and made a big splash at the time.

A few years back my old college role-playing group started a new campaign which alternated our DM's original adventures with old modules; it seemed like the perfect balance of fresh material (and our DM was very good) with nostalgic favorites. Only it turned out those old modules sucked; early role-playing was a real cottage industry, and the writers of those old modules were pretty much coasting on enthusiasm. A module should provide the basis for a really satisfying, unified experience of semi-improvised group storytelling but the early module designers basically knew nothing about storytelling, legend and lore, or medeval architecture, and it showed. All they knew was that they really dug hack fantasy. So we didn't really play these modules; we deconstructed them.

Not Ravenloft, though. It seemed to work on its own terms really well, and we played it on those terms. Perhaps Ravenloft was the first module designed by people who really knew how to make these things work as vehicles for truly satisfying role-playing sessions; if so, Ravenloft may be role-playing's D. W. Griffith moment; the moment someone fulfilled the form's implicit potential. Someone should, if someone hasn't, examine this in a scholarly way; what have been the key works in the development of role-playing games as a genuine artistic form?

It just recently occured to me that the tragedy of role-playing games is that from the beginning they were shackled to pedestrian, hack genre material. If Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had been as wide-ranging in their scope as Viola Spolin, RPGs may be a lot further down the road than they are. Or did RPGs need that genre connection as a selling point? Who can say. Something like Gurps, which allows for any genre but requires none, might have been a better way to start the RPG phenomenon.

Moderate Update

It looks like I'm finally gonna be doing a Sidewalk Scramble! My friend and improv associate Debbie S---- told me her group needs more actors, and I've been lusting after a chance to do a Scramble for years now. Now the group just has to accept me on Debbie's say-so. I also got an Email from another friend and improv associate, Chris D----, insisting that the Feminist Debutante Guild get back together for a show or three. The Guild was just on the cusp of becoming something really special when various factors led to our taking a year-long hiatus, so I'd love to see if we can try to start anew. Granted, I've sworn off doing theatre for the rest of the year in an apparently futile effort to focus on work and exercise, but obviously I haven't gone Straight Edge if I'm diving into Scramble and improv activity. I'm pretty rusty on the improv, but it's always good for me to get back into it.

A big shout out to Jennifer W., production design guru for many local film things, who's evidently so freakishly obsessed with me that she's found my blog. Here's hoping she won't set me on fire if I've said something snarky about one of her productions.

Check this out: Time magazine's list of the hundred best english-language novels since 1923. I've only glanced at it in passing, and have no immediate objections.

A cool blog here. Kenneth Hite writes role-playing supplements and stuff; I haven't played a role-playing game in years (not since I started improv) but I buy his stuff because he's like the Alan Moore of role-playing games. Check out his Suppressed Transmission books to see what I'm talking about. Anyway please note that a footnote to his latest post is the only review of Donnie Darko you'll ever need.