Whisky, cigars and game inspirations

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Fantasy, Role Playing, Role playing games, RPG, Storium, story telling, Writing

Greg and I recently started a Storium game in a Dark Age low magic setting. Chuckle. Greg GM’d a Harn game for a very long time and I accuse him of being obsessed with the Dark Age motif instead of… well, anything. Having said that, the Dark Age feeling does easily give way to the dark and disturbing ideas of the supernatural and occult, areas that tempt me.

In any case, we started using the Storium engine because our life journeys have made face to face gaming much more difficult now, and any story telling is better than none. Storium is, for want of a better word, a website that allows you to set up and play asynchronous role playing games. Or, put another way, an updated version of the play by mail games of long ago taking advantage of potentially very fast communications but still essentially a written interactions. They recently ran a successful Kickstarter effort.

This game, that we have called The nights are getting longer, the winters colder, was based on a key idea from the Hellfrost game setting. The important thing is that this fantasy world/land is moving in to an ice age. This may have been a result of some catastrophe involving frost giants, or it may be some natural celestial happening. However, from the character’s point of view, things are getting worse, season by season. This is fine Viking/Saxon/Celt story telling stuff and so we had our overarching thread. But he actual starting was a new problem. Where does a story begin?

Cue in an element from real life. 

Last year at my birthday party my very dearest and oldest friend turned up with a bottle of Laphroaig single malt scotch whisky. The Quarter Cask, I believe. Now I had no basis upon which to judge this and, being an Islay flavour full of peat smoke and iodine, I consequently failed to appreciate it as well as I should have. Never one to shirk a challenge I spent the next few months educating my palette so that now I can tell the difference between a Lagavulin and an Ardbeg. I now have a literal ‘top shelf’ of single malts to enjoy, much to the horror of my wife who shudders when I make her smell them.

To start the game I randomly generated the starting conditions using the Big List of RPG Plots by S John Ross of Risus fame I found Got Escort Service and as a sub plot I found Score one for the Team. With whisky on my mind I conceived of a story that required the characters to carry some whisky as a tribute to a distant town. And on top of this there were many other bright young lads trying to do the same, so it was a race.

This story is still young, and as I sip on a glass of Starward I am now trying to imagine how good cigars can be woven into the next chapter. The moral of the story: our fantasy stories come from real places, from our real experiences, with perhaps the volume turned up to 11.

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Space Opera – from the Dictionary of TV Tropes

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28mm, flash gordon, planetary romance, Space Opera, Star Wars, story telling, wargames, Wargaming, Writing

It’s an epic saga of rebellion and romance.
— Trailer for Star Wars: A New Hope

A space opera is a work set in a far future space faring civilisation, where the technology is ubiquitous and entirely secondary to the story. It has an epic character to it: The universe is big, there are lots of sprawling civilizations and empires, there are political conflicts and intrigues galore. Frequently it takes place in the Standard Sci Fi Setting. In perspective, it is a development of the Planetary Romance that looks beyond the exotic locations that were imagined for the local solar system in early science fiction (which the hard light of science revealed to be barren and lifeless) out into an infinite universe of imagined exotic locations.

Space opera has a lot of romantic elements: big love stories, epic space battles, oversized heroes and villains, spectacular places.

Note that this is quite different from the original definition of space opera, which was a derogatory term. It was a variant in a long line of terms for substandard genre fiction: ‘horse opera’ was bad Western fiction, whereas a ‘soap opera’ (so named because they began as hour-long ads for soap) was a hackneyed drama. The phrase was coined in 1941 by Wilson Tucker to describe what he called “the hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn space-ship yarn”. Weirdly, this means that today many works which were originally touted as examples of ‘serious’ science fiction, such as the Lensman series, are today held up as prime examples of Space Opera. As more authors and writers came to embrace the space opera style, the term has largely lost its negative connotations. Assisted by writers who regarded all tales of action and adventure in space as bad, and so tried to label it all “space opera” in pejorative sense; they succeeded with the label, but not with keeping it pejorative.

Star Wars is probably the most famous modern example of space opera. In Star Wars, technology is either magic (the Force) or slightly faster versions of today’s gadgets (blaster rifles, hovercars, space ships) and the characters would be right at home in a fantasy novel (evil emperor, farmboy, princess).

The opposite of Space Opera is Hard Science Fiction.

Bath

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Writing

I must add to my list of things that truly make life worth living, the activity of lying in a steaming bath reading aloud to oneself some Edgar Rice-Burroughs. I was half cut on Vodka, as usual, had just finished shaving, and was reading some ERB from the Barsoom series. There was no one around, so I started to read it aloud to myself, adding the necessary dramatic tones of voice as if it were a 1930’s radio presentation.

Try it: get rid of the trouble-and-strife, keep a bottle of hard spirits on hand and read to yourself. Read something old fashioned and naive and dramatic, not something modern ad cynical and cruel. Trust me, young man, you will discover an unlikely source of pleasure.

Non-linear narrative

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time, Writing

What is time, really? How do we describe time, and time travel, and the experiences of a person who is somehow liberated from the arrow of time in a coherent and believable way?

If one’s normal material body is trapped in time: remembering the past, experiencing the fleeting present, and anticipating the future, what is necessary to lift the mind out of time? Is there a Cartesian duality: a super-mind that is liberated from the arrow of time that somehow is associated with the time-trapped body?

Such a mind would experience time not as a flow, but as an equally accessible flat field, where it could pick and choose what to ‘experience’ in whatever ‘order’ it pleased. What would this feel like to the time-trapped ordinary body (the one we have right now)? Is this deja vu: the literal touching of future events? What does this do for determinism and free will?

There is nothing new in any of this. It is undergraduate stuff.

However, what is new is this if we take this model: since one’s super-mind is in contact with one’s entire life and can pick and choose to experience it in any order (where the material body is forced to slog on through life the linear way), it will apprehend life rather differently from the material component. It will see cause and effect in a different light. Cause and effect occur in the order that the mind encounters the elements, not as a consequence of the passage of time (from which the super-mind is liberated).

Let’s take this further. Let’s imagine that the super-mind is active in this life rather than just a voyeur with a seemingly random access pattern. Let’s imagine that the super-mind is genuinely making decisions and evoking (or influencing) material behaviour, but doing so in this more complex time-free environment. What this means is that literally the ordinary material self can experience the effect of an action chronologically before the cause – because the super-mind was the active agent and experienced them in the “correct” order. What this means is that one can do something without materially, consciously, knowing why, only to discover the reasons much later. What it means is that the super-mind can lay clues for the material self to follow. We might call this “following a hunch”.

And is this a model that can be used in a novel? I think it is. But I don’t know how yet.