The Gaming Outpost

I woke in a vacant lot that seemed familiar, and yet I was sure I had never been here before. Overhead the Big Dipper was obscured by the glitter of multiplied hordes of space stations.



Gathering my stuff, I suddenly became aware of two figures close by me.



“I have no time. The soothsayer told me that you would be the solution to all my problems, worldwalker. This is the spot in the worldwalls that is weak enough to let your kind through. Now you will pledge your allegiance to me, or I will torture you to death.” A too familiar voice said, a voice that I had heard in nightmares, but never had I heard it sound desperate in those dreams.



I grinned as I picked up my stuff on my hands and knees. Gavin the Vampire could not see my face which was just as well since he had ordered me killed, and succeeded, the last time I was here. That had been in the year 2007; this looked like at least a century later what with all the space stations. The alley I had arrived in had changed to a vacant lot in the last hundred years, interesting…



Somewhere, in the lost spots in my memory, I recall a fellow with massive muscles and a friendly relationship with a dozen or more angels who told me he had killed my actual murderer, Arnie the Ghoul.



Standing up, I towered over Gavin, and was still shorter than his pet thug, Jackson. A quick flicker of my fingers had hidden my face in the shadows of the night. It was a simple magic that I cannot remember from where I learned it.



“Really?” I paused as Jackson lurched toward me.

“I can stop my own heart with a thought. I doubt you will get much torture out of me. What seems to be the problem?”



Gavin waved Jackson to a halt.



“It started a while back. My church was going well as I was busily exterminating the last of True Faith in the world, and I had the favor of the Elder Ones.



Then these beings such as you, worldwalkers came, and mocked me, broke my base of power, I fell into disfavor with the Elder Ones, and I called in all my markers to destroy the walkers, I suceeded, but the host I called was almost utterly destroyed, and I who had been fleeing from assasins made of spirit the second one had set on me, and had joined this host was gravely injured in the Descent of the Light. Now no vampire even dares enter the county where the Descent occurred, and only the bravest will enter the state for fear of something happening.



Then the prayers of True Faith kept rising, and the knowledge of our kind spread through the secret ways, and the shadows. Most of our kind fled into sleep to while away the centuries. As punishment, the Elder Ones forbad this safety to me.



Now, even the unfaithful, have weapons that can hurt us. They carry lasers, and infrared detectors, and the street lamps shine like sunlight, and for some reason, we are unable to escape into space. I feel that a great working of power prevents us that are condemned to remain, those that survive that condemnation, that is.



The unfaithful choose these weapons for their police at the urging of the Believers who pray against us daily.



Justice and compassion and prosperity and peace rule the day and the night.

It is horrible.”



“Hmm, so what you are saying is that you are the bad guy?”



“NO. What I am saying is that I have discovered much about worldwalkers, and I have learned new power from others of them. Your ability to stop your heart means nothing to me. I can command your very mind.” He laughed. “No, the recitation of my diminished state is to assure you of just how desperate I am, and how inventively horrible in my torture I will be, unless you give me what I seek.”



“I will give you what you have sought. You sought death and power. Here let me give it to you.”



With that, I reached out with my left hand and with the strength of Samson to grasp the Volkswagen tossing arm of Jackson. My prayers were answered. His forearm bones ground together, and he shrieked until the bones snapped. Then he whimpered.



Gavin plucked a diamond from his pocket, and held it in front of his eye.



“Surrender to me.” His voice boomed out, and waves of compulsion swept around me. I snickered.



“I’ve learned the secrets of dozens of worlds. You have probably learned the secrets of one other world.”



“Dozens?” He said and he paled as I could see with my Lekostian cybernetic IR vision. The hot blood slid from his under his facial skin.



Throwing Jackson down, and slipping my plasma cannon from my backpack took a moment. Gavin used that time to run. I flicked the intensity selector to Max which setting was used in the cannon’s native world for destroying armoured vehicles.



“Go to &*().” Jackson told me in his thick Elizabethan accent.



“Not me, I die, I go to another world, and when it finally ends, I go to Heaven. You vampire are another matter.”



I burn Jackson to ash which takes several seconds. And it fuses the soil under him into glass.



Gavin was out of sight. That was okay. I called for the winds to bear me into the sky, and within minutes I had him spotted. He was trying to convince several officers of the law to protect him. They were listening, but they seemed more inclined to take him into custody as a madman.



I reached out, and set them into slumber. Then I landed beside the panicked Gavin.



“How many innocents have you murdered?” I ask him as I work the spell that will let him and me know. The ghosts of the dead begin to rise about us. They do not look amused. Fact is they look downright vengeful.



I laugh at him.

“Remember, I told you that you were doomed to die. I saw this coming.” I lie to him with cruel humor.



He screams, and abandons his dignity, and charges me. His fingers dig into my chest muscles, and my blood leaks out of my skin.



Enough was enough. I focus my will, and his hands fly free of my chest dripping blood. Then he floats upward, and the ghosts swirl about him as he screams.



They let him fall, and they look satisfied. Then he shivers in an odd sort of way. A flicker of light inside him shines, and then there is nothing left of him but dust.



I am not a cursing or profane man, because I believe it is wrong, and weak, but I yelled and hollered in that moment. Gavin must have had a crack in his skin on his hands, and when my verser blood tainted with scriff mingled with his, he became a verser as well. I apologized to my God for my words and my arrogance, and considered the evil I had done.



Somewhere out there in the Multiverse, Gavin was learning new tricks to slowly rip my head off, and hunting new victims.



The ghosts looked at me, and they were not happy. I had promised them the death of their tormentor. I had lied. Never lie to a horde of revenants, even by mistake.



Tadeusz

  Although we are now months past Halloween, it was with that holiday that this idea came to mind.  I began to think about the nature of fear.  Horror gaming is not one of my major pastimes; but I have been genuinely afraid in a game, and I believe I have inspired similar sensations in others.  With a copy of a frightening game sitting on my shelf unused, my mind turns to why we fear, and why we do not fear.  I find that understanding this may be the key to doing it well in play.

  I once read a book of stories by H. P. Lovecraft.  For some, he is the ultimate in horror.  I did not find any of his stories at all frightening–save one, one completely uncharacteristic tale about seemingly primitive aliens on their own planet, human invaders trying to claim the territory, and a completely invisible maze.  What frightened me is the thing that particularly frightens me about things.  I am afraid of things I can’t understand–not of things I don’t understand, in the sense that I do not have an explanation for them, but of things for which my understanding is inadequate.

  A better example of this, perhaps, relates to technology.  Decades ago I read an article about UIM’s, that is, Ultra Intelligent Machines.  Computers and artificial intelligence were even then bounding forward at incredible rates.  There was (and as far as I know still is) every reason to expect that eventually a machine would be built that was functionally as intelligent as (even if differently intelligent than) a man.  It might be a small step from there (the article seemed to think it was, although on reflection it might be an insurmountable step) to creating a machine that was ever so slightly more intelligent than man.  But once that was done, there would be an accelerating effect, as this machine would design a machine more intelligent than itself, which could similarly outstrip its abilities, and so on, until there were machines which were more intelligent than we could imagine being.  That didn’t frighten me.  I figure that if mankind is foolish enough to surrender its power to its own creation, it deserves whatever it gets.  But having just read that article, I walked out of a grocery store the doors of which were opened by those now common detectors which were then new.  As I looked at that detector, I had no idea how it worked; but I mused that were someone to explain it to me, I had no doubt that I would understand it.  But if the future contained these ultra intelligent machines, one day there would be devices in operation which I could not understand, even if someone explained them to me.  That frightened me.  That, and the completely invisible walls of Lovecraft’s maze.

  As my musings came back to that which frightens us, I realized that the universal factor behind fear is lack of control.  Fear exists within us to the degree that we perceive a lack of control.  As long as we believe everything is under control, we are calm and unafraid.  If we can no longer control what is happening, fear overtakes us.

  There is a second aspect to this which I had to recognize before I fully understood it.  That second aspect is that there must be something at stake, something which matters or has value to us.  There are many things which are completely beyond our control which don’t impact us at all, because we have nothing at stake.

  Thus having grasped these essential elements of fear, I was able to recognize very real responses to it which eliminates it.  (It was more complex than that; there was a certain interaction between the elements and the responses through which each refined the other.  But the elements in general led the responses.)  It may be the case that these responses should be included within good role playing; it may be in some cases that the referee needs to consider how to prevent these responses from being options in his scenario if he wishes to maintain any level of fear.

  Action is such a response.  People who are afraid often attempt to “do something about” whatever it is that causes them fear.  It does not even have to be rationally related to the threat.  It does not have to offer protection against the danger, nor to counter the attack.  All that is required is that some kind of action is taken which we can pretend will matter.  The counter to this is to demonstrate that such action is futile; the fear returns as the hope of countering the danger fades.

  Resignation is a good name for another response.  It may appear that the person has accepted his fate, has determined that there is no reason to fear because the loss is inevitable and they must merely endure it.  There is in this an element of surrender.  I suspect that a significant part of it involves surrendering the valuation of that which is threatened.  My life doesn’t matter, as long as the others get to safety is exactly this sort of resignation response.  It’s not worth fighting, because we can’t win means at some level that whatever we’re going to lose no longer has sufficient value to us to make it worth defending.  It is a bit more difficult to counter this; once the value has been sacrificed, it cannot easily be revived.  But the fear may be returned if the threat is seen to extend to some other valued object.  After that, I will go after your family; you don’t really think I would let them get away, did you?

  Faith is the term I used to label the third.  This is the conviction that things actually are not out of control, but rather controlled by someone or something else.  Obviously, the one who believes God is in control of all things will rise above fear by virtue of the belief on the one hand that He would not allow the valued thing to be destroyed or, on the other, that if He would allow it to be destroyed it does not have the value we supposed.  But this does not have to mean God.  A soldier may well believe that the general knows what he’s doing.  A patron on an amusement park ride tacitly accepts the notion that the management has taken all precautions to keep the rides safe.  If we believe that the appearance of threat to that which matters is illusory, is based on our perception of things we do not comprehend, we escape fear through that belief.  This may be the most difficult to crack; you must find ways to undermine that faith and make it appear ill-founded, and then the fear can start to seep back in through the doubt.

  Shortly after outlining these thoughts, I was reading in the book of the Prophet Daniel about three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, who were arrested for refusing to worship a statue erected by Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar.  The declared penalty for such disobedience was to be thrown into a furnace.  As I read their words this time, I saw that they were not afraid; and they expressed two of my three responses.  They showed that they had faith, stating that their God was quite able to protect them from the flames if He chose to do so; but they also displayed resignation, declaring that they were not afraid to die if that was what would happen.  The king could not scare them.

  Lovecraft’s work did not scare me for many reasons.  He wrote of horrific beings of great power secretly ruling the universe.  Perhaps it was that aspect of faith which dulled that for me.  I’m quite confident I know who runs the universe, and even if I accepted all of Lovecraft’s monstrosities as real they would be insignificant beside Him.  But perhaps also they did not threaten anything of real value to me; perhaps the very unreality of them prevented me from connecting to the threat.

  To scare your players, you must first cause them to care about something in the game; then you must threaten it, and threaten it in a way that is so overwhelming that they cannot ignore the threat.  But you must also take from them these three defenses.  There must not be any illusion that they can do anything about it (or at the least, they must have grave doubts of the efficacy of their actions).  They should not be able to abandon the object threatened, to write it off as just something they had that they lost.  And you may not let them suppose that it’s all being controlled to favor them.  Accomplish this, and whatever happens they will be scared.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

My trip by slow boat to China via way of some of the South Pacific islands gave me plentiful time to study up on my body skills, and to catch up on reading, and to get phenomenally bored.



The Captain keeps a close watch on us because while his crew is composed of good men; they have been known to start a knife fight out of sheer boredom.



The first mate begins to teach me how to handle a kris which is a wavy sword in his eyes, and he tells me of the legends that it can be used to do magic. I test out those theories, and find there is a small amount of magic floating in this world.



A remarkably muscled sailor begins challenging his mates to feats of skill such as races up the cable, and races from one end of the ship to the other on your hands. Soon, I am his chief competition.

In exchange for the remainder of the silver coins held in a magic bag that Lady Winterblest gave me in reward for the slaying of the Frost Dragon(worlds spin in my mind from the time hidden by amnesia, and I remember a remarkably decent and eerily inhuman elven people who lived in comfort in a permanent winter aided by their ancient magics while they rode with spell and sword against the monstrous enemies that rose in the Wildlands. The commander of the paladin patrol that found me had been Lady Winterblest.) he taught me his secrets. Still, by the time I got to my destination, I could only beat him occasionally.



We caught us a giant lizard, and a baby giant eagle(after the mom slew several of our party, and we shot her with several machine guns), and we found a diary.



Copernicus’s Lost Diary was deciphered by me and another man because of a lack of trust. All in this world had heard of the vast treasure the King of France had bestowed on the renowned astronomer right before he died. The French King had wanted a new planet named after himself. Nobody found the treasure, or the last of the astronomer’s diaries.



We found that a servant of his had fled East with the diary(or so the other writer, this servant claimed in the diary).



In the diary, we saw that if an observation was taken at a certain night through the great man’s telescope, well let me repeat the diary …



Inne the Twenty-second year, and everie onne that followes thus, on the day of the Great King’s birthday, as on the day of the Greater King’s birthday, if the Eye of Pompeii be placed in my prized Telescope designed for the Searching out of the Hidden Secrets of the Heavens, then will the locatione of the Treasuree be made known to thee, and thee may do with it as seems fit to thee, only now I beg thee give some thought to the wonders of Astronomie. Give a double thought, indeed.



The Great King would seem to be the French King we agreed, and the Greater King’s birthday would have to be Jesus of Nazareth or Charlemagne.

The Eye of Pompeii baffled me until the others laughed at my ignorance.

“It is a great ruby dug out of some heathen temple in that lost city over a millenia ago. None knows where it is now.”

“I do.” A sinister man said from the back of our crowd. We faced him with ernest questions, and he raised his hand to silence us.

“Fu Manchu has it for his headpiece. But none dare cross the dreaded crime lord of the Orient.” He sneered at us. Either gold fever, or that sneer, or simply the disdain of the good for the evil ran through our veins that night, and we shouted that we feared no man. The shouts echoed off the cliffs. Our informant grinned.

“Good, I have a score or two to settle with him myself.”



We went by boat to Hong Kong, and we paid the Captain and crew well to throw on extra coal, and to stress the boilers because we had little time to cross the world by the King of France’s birthday. And such an opportunity would not come again for twenty-one years.



I shall not go into great detail, but our informant, who had a truly fearsome grudge, led us through dangerous streets and winding alleys to a door. Still, we were a tough looking crew. I walked with a kris in my left hand, and a tommy gun in my right, and woven about me and the crew were such spells as I could manage.



We broke in, and commenced to fight. The thugs and assasins that we met in his hallways were not a match for us. They preferred to beat up on helpless merchants. We cut through them like a hurricane through a pirate fleet.



Finally we face the crime lord himself. We took the gem from his head, and tried to take his head as well, but he fell through a rigged trapdoor before we could manage that good deed. Fu Manchu had decided we were too dangerous, so he let us steal what we wanted. And since we had so little time, and were sorely wounded, we could not pursue him as he suspected. We freed his slaves on the way out, and gave them a half share of a gold chest full of coins we found. And we told them to flee the city, and go back to the villages they came from. Several of the more stout, and footloose joined us.



We raced the boat so hard that it had to stop in Port Said for repairs. From there we caught the attention of a bored Englishman who was gambling away his fortune for lack of anything better to do. We convinced him to gamble his life and his car by racing across the dessert coast roads, and up Europe at insane speeds dodging sandstorms, bandits, and landslides. He loved it.



We made it just in time, and we slipped inside the museum observatory by passing the guard an Abraham Lincoln to get him to emancipate the door for us. We put the ruby into the telescope after gingerly removing the eye piece.



Through the red filter we could see an asteroid that you could not see with a clear glass. We charted what longitude it indicated.



Here I revealed my secret for I had not entirely trusted my fellows.



“It’s suggested, ” I told their baffled and resentful faces “That the Star of Bethleham only told, say, the latitude, because the longitude was already known.”

“But then what’s the latitude here.”

“I think it has to be the observatory.” I said.



We computed using my theory, and the destination was this circular museum. We laughed that the wily astronomer might have hidden his treasure in his own house, and tricked everybody else into going on a wild goose chase.



Still where in this house was it? We thought of that last phrase, “Give a double thought.” First we went to the center of the house, and found nothing. The guard came to bother us, and we reassured him with a Franklin.(It was an alternate world; they went off the gold standard earlier than we did.)



There was nothing, and then we considered that we should not be thinking of the center, but astronomically. We used the house as if it was the Earth, and followed the latitude and longitude a second time. It led us to a statue of stone of the astronomer with a large metal telescope in hand.



I unwound the eyepiece, and gems and rings spilled onto the floor in profuse abundance. There were too many to fit in the ‘scope. Part of the statue was hollow as well.



Some of the others were in favor of breaking up the statue, but we were all very well compensated, and I felt we owed the man some courtesy. We left with our pockets bulging and went out separate ways into the night rejoicing.



Myself, I financed a chair of astronomy at a local university, and headed back to America. I never made it. One of Fu Manchu’s assasins shoved me over the side of the boat.



Tadeusz

  Back in an age when women were predominantly housewives and mothers, unless they were forced to work as nurses or teachers or secretaries (and often even so), there was a young girl who could not cook.  Her mother had tried to teach her, but she could not seem to learn this difficult art.  For lack of a better solution, her parents sent her to finishing school, where they hoped she would learn enough to make someone a suitable bride.

  Finishing school was not much better than home.  She still could not grasp the finer aspects of this difficult art.  To make a cake, you start with some flour; and although her question was not so inappropriate as the queen to Alice (Where do you pick the flower?), to the minds of the chefs and bakers of the age it was completely beyond the scope of the lesson.  She asked how much flour.  The only answer they had was, as much as you need.

  This, to her, was completely inadequate an answer.  Looking around the kitchen, she started to find things she could use to provide real answers to this question.  Get a teacup, and scoop the flour with that, and count how many cups you used.  Take a tablespoon out of the drawer to measure the salt, a teaspoon for the baking soda.  And with these simple and available implements, Fanny Farmer was able to learn to cook, and ultimately to write cookbooks which enabled others to do the same.

  That’s right:  Fanny Farmer invented modern cooking, because she was a terrible cook.

  Necessity is the mother of invention.  That is the lesson Fanny teaches us.  If you can’t do something which you must do, the solution lies somewhere in creating a different way to do it.  For Fanny Farmer, a method of measuring ingredients by eye and experience was no method at all.  Creating a system which adequately provided controlled quantities gave her and uncounted others the ability to do that which previously had required years of practice.

  This will take us to several places.

  Many times in my gaming I’ve come to a point in play where a game system let me down; that is, I needed to resolve the outcome of some point that was not covered directly under the rules, and I did not see anything which stretched to cover it indirectly.  In such situations I generally wrote my own rules, creating systems and tables and other mechanics to meet a need.  This tended to increase the complexity of the games.  Ultimately with Multiverser I managed to get around this by devising a very limited number of mechanics which between them could cover all things conceptually.  But the practice of creating mechanics to meet needs is again an example of how invention springs from necessity.  Perhaps in a sense all good game design (and perhaps all bad game design) comes from such situations, as we attempt to solve the problems we have with our game systems by building better solutions.

  But the player needs to have this in mind as well.  In a well designed game, no character can do everything superbly.  There are the Great Leslies of the worlds of fiction, but even these have their limitations.  There is a style of play which attempts to address this by building stronger and stronger characters, trying to design the protagonist who is the best at everything.  To me, at least, this is dull.  If I create a character who cannot lose in any situation, then where is the excitement of winning?  There is a better way, at least in terms of maintaining the excitement, to meet the challenges.  In the broadest possible sense of the term, that way is invention.

  A character who is likely to face dangers and difficulties should at some point in his life and career assess his own abilities, and attempt to do so honestly.  Conan would never imagine himself able to cast a spell.  We rarely see Merlin draw a sword (and usually shudder when we do).  Part of that self-assessment should lead our characters to recognize their strengths and play to them; but part of it should also lead them to discover their weaknesses, and find ways to patch them.

  Those patches can take many forms.  One character might determine to learn an entirely new and perhaps foreign set of skills, such as a medic or technician learning to fire a gun to defend himself or a fighter picking up first aid to keep himself and his companions alive against the odds.  A character might buy or acquire devices which fill the void, such as an invisibility cloak or personal cloaking device for those who lack the ability to move stealthily.  If no such device exists, one might be made.  Similarly, a character might consider ways to achieve the same goals by different means–a warrior who can’t pick a lock might have a crowbar with which to pry open the door.

  The most obvious patch, and the one on which many games rely for party cohesion, is that a character may choose to associate with others who have abilities that fill his needs and needs that are filled by his abilities.  The aforementioned Conan was willing to get help from people who had such skills, to travel with a wizard and a thief so he would not be unprepared in those areas.  That is a way of covering a weakness quickly and effectively.  But it is not the only way, neither is it always the best way.  One of my adventuring parties was put in a very difficult situation when the medic was the one who was fatally wounded.  None of us could save him, and without him none of our medical equipment was worth anything.  Finding alternatives became a necessity; and once it was a necessity, we made a point of finding them.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.