The Gaming Outpost

When it Rains





The blue neon sign soaked in a languid bath of late summer rain. Every so often it would flicker and dance, a mockery of life that mirrored the faces of the crowds that passed by on the sidewalk below.



The doorway of the club was visible in between pedestrian masses and it was a sure bet that the call I had made earlier would send Carnegie out on the street. He wouldn’t be able to resist the possibility of getting his hands on the man that had taken away his best chance for getting out of this place. Only, it hadn’t been a man.



Grayson had been the stoolie, the squealer, the loose lips that sank Carnegie’s crime syndicate. Amanda Grayson was the closest thing I had to a friend in this steel and concrete hell they call The Purge. Saving her from Carnegie’s thugs had been easy enough, but I couldn’t save her from the genetic coding.



Every sorry soul that’s sent here has an expiration date force coded into their genetic structure. The powers that be refer to it as the ‘End of Sentencing Date’. Supposedly, if you’ve been a good enough little boy or girl before your date comes up the genetic coding will be repealed and you get a jump-ship ride off of The Purge. It would make a nice bedtime story to tell the kids, if the inmates weren’t all sterilized. No one in the history of The Purge has ever had a date repealed.



What Carnegie didn’t know is that Grayson’s time had expired two days ago. He also didn’t know that I had found his oh-so-secret black market doctor and had put enough weight down to make him snap. All Carnegie’s secrets became my secrets. Our secrets.



Carnegie was a vicious bastard, even more so now since he was sure they had cranked his date forward when he was taken in for questioning and punishment. It didn’t matter much to me. I was going to hurt him, and not because that’s what my employer wanted. This became personal a long time ago. I was going to hurt him for Amanda.



Her voice, that deep whiskey voice, resides behind my eyes like some mnemonic phantom. She whispered my name. Twice she whispered it. Then simply “It’s my time.”, and she was gone. I held her for a long time, trying to keep her warm beneath the sheets that covered us. Didn’t matter, I knew it didn’t but I held on anyway.



Knowing what Carnegie knew, that there is a way off this rock and a way to get the clamp on my lifespan removed, didn’t make me feel any better. I was cold. Cold, empty, and the sight of Carnegie as he came out of the club with a couple of his half-ass bodyguards in tow just pissed me off.



The only sound I made as I followed them came from the low hum of my sonic disruptor as it charged up to full capacity. It was only a safety precaution though. I moved with the unnatural ease that only comes from having enhanced reflexes. I was going to follow them to the place I had set up for our little party. Even if Carnegie got antsy and changed his mind it wouldn’t matter. They were out on the streets now, where I do my best hunting. It was still raining, it almost never stopped in The Purge, and I was a shadow between raindrops. The blue neon flickered in a mocking salute as I slid away into the wet gray city.



Amanda always used to ask me, “So, do you think about me much?” Then she would watch me from the corner of her eye and her lip would come up in a half smile the way it always did when she already knew what I was going to say. I can still feel the words on my lips, “Only when it rains baby, only when it rains.”

I stood atop a black granite flattened pyramid surrounded by a magical forcefield, and ten thousands screaming fans who rooted for my opponent in the Kill-Or-Be-Killed Unlimited Class Aztecan sacrifice fight.

“Twlya, Twlya!” The crowd shouted which encouraged the magically enraged lady commando who could bench press me with her offhand. Problem was, I wanted her to win too. My definition of victory meant her boyfriend down the pyramid on a rack got together with her, and whatever horrible thing had been done to them that prevented them from being able to see each other was undone. No place in the plan for letting Twlya pull my heart from my chest to offer to the Lord of the Sun.



She did not get the memo. And no time remained to cast a spell with her rushing me.



I dove forward, and tried to spring over her by placing a leapfrogging hand on her low head. Halfway through the jump, she turned her head, and tore a chunk out of my left hand with her teeth. I spun to the rock gasping.



She flipped backward, and tried to stomp-stomp me into the rock while I rolled backward desperately. No question about it, Twlya was trying to kill me. She stopped when I got into a corner, and backed off sagging a bit as the spell controllers left her a little free. A look of horror filled her face as she took in my wound.



“Don’t hurt her, Taduesz.” The plea from her pacifist boyfriend floated up to me faint and sad.

“Not a problem, buddy.” I grunted as madness took her again.



I advanced so as to have room to retreat, and we stood trading blocks and giving no quarter for nearly two minutes. Then time was called again, and she backed off.



Despite my rigorous lifestyle, and my training from Master Wau Lei, I panted lightly. She did not pant at all.



“You cannot subdue me, Taduesz. You have to go for a killing strike, and hold nothing back. Nothing. They have forced me to kill innocents. It has to stop here.”

“They force you with magic, I can use magic.”

“This pyramid is soaked with thousands of acts of dark magic, and layered with defenses against people like us. I doubt you could even manage the simplest fire-starting spell against the counterspells built into this pyramid.”



Suddenly she leapt at me with a flying kick from fifteen feet away. I caught her ankle, and slung her to the ground, and followed up with the knee to her ribs,and my knifehand strike was plunging toward her adam’s apple before I saw the clear eyes, and knew her plan. Rolling away from Twyla, I wanted to wretch, but she came at me with true madness reinforced by her real fury at me.

I fended off what I could and soaked up her rage until that was gone, and only a magic impelled her. That was bad enough, and bleeding from a dozen slices from her hands, I turned to run, and fell to the granite.



She leaped down on my chest, and wrapped her hands around my throat as I hoped for. Twlya knew far more efficient means to kill, but either she fought back from inside, or the controllers wanted something more dramatic than a lightning fast punch too quick for the eye to see.



Twlya dragged me to my feet, and for a moment, I wished my Lekostian cyberware worked here because then I might be almost as strong as she was, but I had a plan. She lifted me skyward, and as I dangled from her encircling hands her voice cried out blasphemies while her boyfriend wept in horror, and I took my first free moment to reach out with my mind, and search inside hers.



Accelerating my mental sense of timeflow, I hoped any watchers would be focusing on my imminent demise, and not on any detection methods.



Twlya’s mind was held in a savage grip of fire maintained by a half-dozen priests, and they got to take breaks while her will to survive, to conquer, to dominate fought ceaselessly for freedom.



I slipped quietly past the gate of fire, and deeper down a passageway into her mind while my admiration grew. She had little innate psi talent, but what she had, she used skillfully, and without stinting. My quiet kept the priests from noticing me, and her as well which might be equally fatal.



Seeking a quieter path other than corridors filled with the storming legions, and Revolutionary War minutemen, and paratroopers summoned from her imagination that launched themselves up the corridors of her brain to tear at the fire that held her prisoner, I turned into a small and cool hallway filled with incense for the dead, stacks of plastic newsfax covering the news of the latest raids on the Outer Planets, and a blonde-haired little girl playing with two dolls.

A man walked through and kindly said before stepping into the gravtube to upstairs.

“Five minutes, and then you need to go out for rifle practise. Two hundred rounds.”

She looked at me.

“I’m very good at rifle practise. Me and the others like me have the promise of beating the aliens in a way they can respect. They respect commandos, and we Ubers might get them to stop the War.”

“I’m sure you are very good.” I said sincerely. “That is a good thing you are trying to do.”

“Yes, yes, it was. However, I just wanted to play with my dolls.” Her voice was suddenly older, and her eye color changed to her natural brown.

“Let’s see your dolls.” I said trying for something hoping that I had not caugth the attention of the conscious mind.

She presented them to me. One looked exactly like her current boyfriend, and the other was a blonde.

I tapped the guy.

“Who’s he?”

She took my hand, and led me down the hall to a doorway. It opened.

We stepped in, and I saw a park with people playing, and suddenly a woman, Twlya appeared standing up, ready for action with her gun out braced on her hip. I never really learned to do that very well since my amnesia. I almost always verse in unconscious.

She looked wild, terrified, ready to kill at a moment’s notice. Wherever she had just been to must have been truly unpleasant.

The game in the park stopped, and then it continued.

A man walked up along side her, and stuck a flower in her gun barrel.

She knocked him down, and drew her knife.

“What are you doing? Do you need medical attention for that epilepsy?” He asked in a perfectly bewildered voice. The non sequitor, and the utter calm in his voice saved his life. She put up the knife and stood back looking around for something to kill.

“Oh, is that the way people do dating now in the population centers. Me, I’m old-fashioned. I like to be introduced first before I kiss.” He smiled at her, and she stared at him like seeing an insect just start singing “Yellow Submarine.”

“Um, my names Milos. And yours is?”

“Twlya, uh, Twyla, Sergeant Commando 45892022-B, Special Modification Type 14Delta.”

“I think we’ll just go with Twlya if you don’t mind. It’s a beautiful name, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”



The little girl and I watched them walk off across the park, and she turned to me.

“He’d never heard of a lot of things before. War, killing, all the good stuff. Especially torture. They are torturing him, Taduesz.”

“I know. I owe you blood-debt, remember.” I said and her adult personality subsided.

“What happened next?”

“We fell in love. I was exotic, and beautiful, and he let me play with dolls, and he was the sweetest man I had ever met. And he had no clue what he was getting into. I tried to tell him, but he could not understand. They were not saints, they bickered sometimes enought to drive me to tears, but no one killed ever. Not even after I took him out to show him how my gun worked did he understand.”



Twlya stood, a bit thin, in a loose dress with the now incongruous rifle on her hip. An adoring Milos stood next to her in an empty field. She adjusted the gun to its lowest setting, and shot a branch off a tree at the edge of the field.

Milos ran and got it for her.

“See?” She said. “Violence and destruction if you come with me. Other places aren’t like here.”

“Yes, how neat. You know you could use that ‘gun’ to knock apples down from trees as well as to trim the trees. Very clever, Twlya.”

She growled, and he just smiled at her.

“Look, say I pointed it at someone.”

He looked doubtful.

“Say, I pointed it at you.” And she did. He waited.

“Say I shot you.”

He thought for a while.

“That would hurt.” He said sadly. “But you wouldn’t do it.” He brightened.

“But that’s the point, I might. I-I’m a monster, Milos.” And she turned to run away, and fell.

He caught her, and held her.

“What you are is the only woman in all the worlds for me. It is true, we are different. I will never love another; I cannot as you seem to assume I can. I stood lonely and forlorn for years until I met my black-haired beauty.”

“Oh, all right then.” She said, and kissed him.



I looked at the little girl.

“Sounds nice. I can identify with Milos. I have a lady lost in time and space I will get back to.”

“Yeah, sounds nice. He should have fallen for some blonde haired girl, and had an easy life never knowing more pain than an arguement over what’s for dinner.”

“What color was the hair of the genemods?”

“What difference does that make?” She said fingering her blond curls.

“Answer the question, Twyla.” And I hit her with pure command.

“Sir, the hair color in question, sir, was deemed to be black due to camoflage concerns on the Outer Planets. White skin, and black hair confused the alien visual perceptors most effectively, sir.”

I grunted wondering whether the nitpicker who had chosen that genemod understood the larger picture.

“Thank-you Sergeant. Continue your report.”



Twyla changed to a black and white neophrene-like suited soldier with cold eyes, and a sergeant’s stripes.



We stood in an alley watching two people very much in love bargain with a street vendor for food in the shade of a cloud-piercing skyscraper.



“I died in the world where I met the indigene Milos due to lack of essential vitamins in the planetary ecosystem. Milos came with me. We landed in a future roughly the same year as my home world, sir, but here no aliens or ramscoop sub-light spaceships, or domes on the planets. Instead, the megacorporations ruled the world, and seemingly chose to let their population die off. I assume, sir, because they thought robots would provide the workers, and so they did not need a working class anymore to provide luxuries for the rich. Sir, it was a morally appalling world. If you gave me one division of ShadowKnights we could conquer this world.”



“Go on.” I said even as I agreed with her assessment. Tyrants were appalling, and a good force of freedom-lovers could really mess their day up despite their pretensions to glory.



Jacked up cyberpunks leapt off buildings, and came out of sewers, and filled the both with tranq darts. The man fell the last by a good minute with a puzzled look on his face replaced by enlightenment.



The scene went black…



She and him woke in confined chairs, and were subjected to rough interrogation and threats of harm to each other. Soon, Alexander MegaCorp “Looking for new worlds to conquer” knew all about versers, and genetically modified super-soldiers, and they heard about true love.



They experimented. They thought. And then they brought in some new test subjects. Psi-capable operatives.



The operatives built barriers in Twyla’s and Milos’ mind so that only at the whim of the operator could each one see the other. And they taught her how to send a message psionically to different worlds which they had just learned to do themselves. And they gave her the terms, she could go out into other worlds, and send back data, and they would let her see her love, or not.



And just to keep them from finding a world where such psi barriers did not work, they conditioned them in the old-fashioned way to kill themselves if they landed in such a world.



It involved a lot of pain.



Worlds spun past with her and him spending time searching for technologies that AMC could use, and relaying the data back, and occasionally spending an hour together at the whim of the operators.



It had been a long time since they had found something interesting or so the operators claimed. She had lied in her last message to me; she was trying to keep up her spirits. It seemed like they were less important now, and the operators took it out on them.



More than six months had passed since she had seen him. She wondered if he still cared.



I sent her my image of him begging her not to hurt her. She grabbed the thought, and saw what I hid. His body fastened to a rack of pain. She turned away weeping.



“I should have left him. I am just pain, the Princess of Pain, the aliens called me before the ambush got my patrol.”



Flashes of strange, low-gravity combat against metamorphic, nitrogen-blooded aliens on the surface of Pluto dazzled me. Good thing, she had lost her combat armour somewhere, or we versers would all be calling her “ma’am” most respectfully, I noted with a nibble of humor.



“Some people have called me a few rough names as well.” I said trying for comforting words. She brought her head up in a surprising smile.

“Yeah, I’ve heard. Starbane. Is it true you blew up a star?”

I grimaced at the fangirl-like attitude.

“I was scared of you, Taduesz, when I first met you. I heard what a terror you were before meeting you at Menlo Park.”

“Me?” I squeaked thinking of all the time I had been worried about crossing her.

She nodded with a rueful grin.

“Guess we are not so tough after all. I just want to play with dolls, and you…?”

“Want to sit down and drink a Coke.” I said with a rueful grin of my own.

“Now, let’s say we go about feeding our reputations.”

“How? Outside, I’m strangling you.”

“True, but I’ve accelerated my thinking, and I have a plan or two. Tell your operator you have a data download to make.”

She did as I asked. It was a very complicated piece of psi to reach across dimensions, and she did it without understanding. Condititioning kept the process out of her conscious awareness.



I reached out to the data stream, and with a prayer and crossed fingers followed it. The light web took me to a room in a sunny building with two moons visible even in the daylight. This was not Alexander MegaCorps homeworld. But I could see, the AMC flag snapping in the breeze through the long windows at the front of the broader than tall building. It looked like a pleasant corporate hq of the eighties, the nineteen-eighties.



I looked about, and saw a screen which showed Twyla and me as I turned purple, and the crowd cheered. I came closer, and suddenly the screen flickered.



A young man leaped up from a console below the screen, and screamed to the large room full of people.

“He’s here. Get him.”

Suddenly, dozens of people in the room cast about with psionic skills, and I fled into the Earth shocked. Many things had changed at AMC. What was going on?



Taduesz

In Romanian, Mark brings up the topic of those unimportant skills that appear in our games from time to time. I’ve always felt that creative use of the seemingly useless skill can make for some of the best gaming experiences. But how do you bring a skill into play if there’s no obvious call for it? I mean, if no one around your PC speaks Romanian, how the heck does he get to use that skill?



As GMs we do our best to help PCs pull out their skills at the right time, providing them a moment in the spotlight, but we can only do so much. Even with a small group of 2 or 3 PCs there are a lot of skills to try and work with. Some skills provide much more obvious hooks for the GM than others. What’s a GM to do? Well, it’s time to call on the players for help.



Players have a duty to help a GM out by asking to use their skills whenever they think they may come into play. The GM can’t be expected to remember all the skills every PC has – No matter how good your GM’s notes are. Thus the players should help him out from time to time. Helpful players are much more fun to game with than those who complain they don’t get to use their reptile anatomy skill enough.



If the players find some notes in a hidden bunker while investigating an occult disturbance in Europe, they can help the GM remember the skills they have. Instead of asking “What language is it written in?” or waiting for the GM to ask “What languages do you speak?” the players should take the initiative. Saying something like “I examine the papers, I speak Romanian, German, Greek and English – Can I read them or at least tell what language they are in?” will garner better results than just giving the GM your list of languages.



While the GM may have already determined that the language is something different, say Italian in this case, by the player taking the initiative you give the GM a reminder that you invested a lot of skill points in languages, and it’s something that you want to play out in the game. It never hurts to remind a GM what your PC is all about. Be it languages, guns, occult, cryptography, whatever. A good GM will appreciate a chance to help you enjoy your character.



One thing to remember is to do your best to bring about your reminders in game. My example above wouldn’t work as well if you complained to the GM out of game that your PC never has a chance to use all the cool language skills you bought during chargen. Complaining or pointing out what you see as a failings are not good ways to help a GM provide you with the situations to play to your PC strengths.



The other key is to remember that skills can be used in a lot of different ways so get creative with them. If your PC has firearms skills, chances are he knows how to clean a gun, what certain calibers sound like when fired out of a 18 inch carbine as opposed to a 26 inch rifle. You can use these small side-bar knowledge items from your “useless” skills as well to help you get even more mileage out of them.



In my example the payer asks “…Can I read them or at least tell what language they are in?” If he can’t read them, the player is telling the GM that he has a lot of language skills and while he isn’t fluent in all languages, he hopes he can tell some basic info on a written or spoken language. While the info the PC gains may not be 100% accurate, he had a chance to use a skill that may have appeared useless in a situation.



Even if you don’t have a specific skill that you can use side-bar knowledge from, you can use your character type as a stepping off point. Almost all PCs are based on a certain type, theory, idea, etc. You may be a mechanic with a penchant for Spinosa’s philosophy, or a wise mage who loves collecting teddy bears. No matter what your PC is, he’s got some character type skills he can use.



If you’re playing a fighter who is a veteran warrior from many a campaign across the land, and has extensive weapon skills, you’ve got a bunch of character type knowledge to use. Upon finding a strange arrow imbedded in a dead goblin you can ask the GM what your character might be able to know about the who fired the arrow. “Is this arrow commonly found in the area we’re in? There are elves in the area, could it be one of theirs?”



The main thing to remember is to try and use your PC’s skills the way you use your real life skills every day. Get into the character and try to think like he would. Practice using those useless skills, get some extra mileage out of the character type knowledge and soon you’ll be able to slip into character like your favorite T shirt.

  This happens to be the one hundredth column in this series.  You might think that a milestone; but in fact, I’ll be talking about milestones in four weeks, when we wrap up two years.  This week, I’m reminded of something else:  the century.  A few years ago as a century ended, I wrote a piece in which I was decrying the over-hyped use of the claim that a particular event or individual was the outstanding example of something in the century.  I mentioned the Simpson trial, touted by the media as The Trial of the Century, when obviously it was no such thing.  Already it is mostly forgotten (except by the tabloids), while Nuremberg, Brown v. Board of Education, Scopes, Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Lindberg kidnapping, Miranda, and the Chicago Seven–just to name a few–are preserved in the history books as significant moments in justice and jurisprudence.  But then, it was characteristic of that decade to claim that whatever was important at that moment was the most important thing of its kind in a hundred years.  I think perhaps the passing of the century has put that particular fallacy behind us, at least for the next ninety years.

  Obviously, the idea of the century is that a hundred years have passed; and if you pay attention to our language and our literature, you will realize that we speak of centuries, at least of recent ones, as if they were each very different from all those which preceded them.  We speak of the twentieth century as modern (that will probably fall away as the twenty-first takes over).  Yet we also recognize characteristics that are the nineteenth century (the Industrial Revolution), the eighteenth century (the rise of democracy), the seventeenth century (the ascendancy of reason and science), and back through time.

  It is true that today we do this same sort of discriminating between generations and decades and even years (that is SO last year).  It is just as true that those points we recognize as characteristic of a particular century are frequently isolated to small areas geographically and more characteristic of part of the century than of the whole.  Yet with these caveats in place, it is clear that centuries do have characteristics that distinguish them.  These characteristics are in part the events that comprise their histories, but they are in even greater part the thoughts and mindsets that dominate the age.  To miss this is to miss a vital aspect of setting, even to be trapped into creating worlds that are all really here and now with different technology and funny looking people.

  C. S. Lewis (yeah, him again) expressed this idea in an essay entitled On the Reading of Old Books, originally as the preface to a translation of an ancient Latin work but which can be found reprinted in God in the Dock.  In it he makes the observation that as we read books from a particular period of the past, we can see mistakes that the writers all share, points of agreement which they have accepted as givens, even while they rage against each other in arguments in which, from their perspective, they share no common ground.  What is as interesting as the fact that these debaters fail to see their points of agreement, Lewis observes, is that it is often the case that we would not agree with those points.  It isn’t that as time has advanced we have gotten smarter and recognized those assumptions and corrected them.  It is clear that the mistakes of one century were not made in the previous century or the subsequent century–they were unique peccadilloes of the time, the fashion of the moment.  This should clue us to the fact that we, too, are caught up in the errors of our time, in complete agreement on some ideas which both our ancestors and our descendants would or will find completely insensible.

  In creating another time, it is important–perhaps vital–to attempt to capture the intellectual climate of the period.  Understanding the ideas that were controlling at that moment is, for us, more than just a brilliant illumination of a moment in history; it is the creation of a different world.  How much more important this is when creating an alien civilization, or a fantasy universe.  To truly capture the feel of a world, you need to understand what dominates its thought, and reproduce that in its very fiber.  You need to find its truths and its fallacies, the mistakes everyone shares that we see through so quickly and the truths they grasp that somehow seem to elude us.  You need to characterize the age, the place, the state of thought in the world, to truly make it somewhere different.

  So I give the same advice Lewis gave, for a different reason.  He said that to escape the errors of our age, we must immerse ourselves in the writings of all those who preceded us, seeing the mistakes they made but also recognizing that where they disagree with us it might be we who are mistaken.  I cannot say this is not a good reason for such reading; but for those of you who create game worlds I offer another.  To understand the world as it was, it is not enough to read modern historical analyses of those times.  You must read the books of the day–the fiction that reached the masses, the theological and philosophical tomes that challenged the intellectual elite, the science and technology as it was understood in its time, the debates that raged and the agreements that were reached.  You must discover how another moment in time truly differs from our own.  You must do this even if you have no wish to create historic (let alone historically accurate) settings, because you must come to understand how such worlds can be different in order to make yours different in the most essential ways.  Get out of your own corner of the universe, and explore the rest.  By truly seeing these other worlds, you will far better understand how to create your own.

  As Lewis says, there is no magic to the books of the past in themselves.  The books of the future would be just as effective, but unfortunately are not yet available to us.  It is that moment of stepping out of the prevailing thoughts of our own age that gives us the understanding not only of another world, but of our own.  From that understanding, we create.

  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.

I’d versed out from a cold winter’s wasteland trying to follow another verser, Kyla, into another universe.



Or had it been Twyla? Years had passed between my talking with her at Menlo Park and seeing her fighting to speak around a mouth full of blood at Duluth Community College, and of course, those two separate incidents were in far apart alternate universes. One happy, and the other almost saw the extinction of the human race.



Twyla claimed I owed her blood debt for rescuing a divergent, an alternate me born in some other universe, from a torture chamber. I did not remember, but I did not doubt her. My memory has a great gaping hole in it, and too, it could have happened in the future of my personal timeline, and still be in her past. Versers jumped from world to world with virtually no limits; they could arrive and find a statue of themselves from an earlier visit which they personally have not done in their own biological timeline yet.



Plus, if Twyla said it was so, it was so. Heavy bones, dense muscles, wide shoulders, black buzz cut hair, a blunt face with harsh eyes, and for accessories boots, chameleon fatigues, a black tank-top, and a Haupt-Reismann four foot long magnetically accelerated dart thrower described her. She did not feel she had to bother with lying as she could stomp most anybody who got on her case about her sharp-tongued opinions.



“I could vaporize a head at five klicks, with Dusty here.” The first time I met her, she had patted the shoulder slung monstrosity of a dart thrower and introduced herself to the crowd of versers at Menlo Park with data about her weapon, rather than her name.



The newness about her since last I saw her was she had a dark-haired and tattoed boyfriend who she had a problem seeing, as he did her. And he thought Twlya beautiful which is not the word that comes to mind when you meet her. Dangerous, healthy, bad-tempered are more natural words. But you could see the love between them.



And for some reason she seemed conditioned to kill herself, and she demanded my help.



So, I opened my eyes and looked about to spy out my new world. Blue-tinged beaches, and purple skies with an orange and a white sun peeking through the cloud cover echoed with the noise of something like a flock of gulls with iridescent feathers. Parakeet gulls, you might call them.



A quiet reaching out with my sense for scriff brought nothing. I waited an hour and tried again with equal results. So, sadly, I drew my knife and readied it, hating to give this world up with its exuberant natural beauty.

“No.” I heard from up the beach, and a pair of inhuman bipedals with exotically large eyes and a lyrical voice came out from where they hid. I touched by accident their thoughts, and found a sweet kindness and innocence there and a curious bewilderment as to what I was.

“I’m not from around here. Gotta go.” And so I used my dagger and fled that world.



The smell of a strange citrus whose precise smell I have never seen elsewhere told me I lay on Naga World. Carefully, I stood up, and hiked over the night-darkened plain in this dangerous and deceptive world.



Umak Tek’s gates opened to a magical “Open Sesame.” And I went in to talk to the Governor and Governess of the place.

I dropped off a copy of my traveller’s log for them to store and to let other’s use as they saw fit.

They told me another verser or two was about, among them a first-timer named Kelly.

“As much as I want to stop and greet the newbie, I don’t have time, I’m on a mission.”

“From God?” The Governor asked with quirked eyebrow.

“From Twyla.”

“That’s worse, God is known to be rather forgiving.” The Governess said. I smiled, and nodded. Then I handed her some vacuum-packed spice packets, and made a charade of slitting my throat.

The Governor nodded, and psionically shut down my body. I versed out.



Twlya is high on the list of versers that I require a very good reason to cross. There are others more powerful such as Whisp, but she brings a professional commando’s perspective to things. The same logic applies to Friend who annoys and befuddles a lot of us warlike types with his pacifistic ways. The fact that he is superhuman mentally and physically and incredibly patient makes his negotiate until consensus work for him, but I cannot do it. And because of his peaceful ways, I am not too afraid to cross him; usually he just negotiates a way for everybody to get what they really want. I think he and the Martian Terraformer from the Twenty-Seventh Century come from the same milliau because they have the same feel to their thought process, and they detest each other.

Some versers are more purely killers than Twyla, but they often lack the skills and the equipment to deal out significant damage. She is a dangerous combination of power and intent hardened by professionalism.



My next world found me deep in space, and breathing oxygen light-years from any planetary star system. I took my time sensing and even did a clairvoyant search, but found nothing alive except for the telepathic stars which burned coal.



They assured me they would keep an eye out for Twlya if she happened by. We talked for several hours as I waited for my body to stabilize after versing since it can be dangerous to verse out too quickly, too often.



The stars had a fascinating view of life, and I could have floated there for several weeks just chatting with them quite happily and practising my telekinesis while telekinetic coal-burning stars soared around me in an intricate dance. I was the first “bacterial level” intelligence they had encountered, and we shared a mutual fascination at our differences, but duty called in a harsh commando’s voice.



Perhaps, I could have stayed on in that world and not been any slower to get to Twlya since time differences did not matter between worlds, but I did not want to try it.



Spiders creep me out, and so when I woke to find a two-foot wide one sitting on my chest, I did not think, I reacted. Lunging for my plasma cannon as the most powerful weapon available did nothing since my arm was bound in spidersilk to a black and tattered tree.



A chittering around me, and I saw dozens of the creatures in the small vale.

Revulsion and terror grasped me, and I reached for a mental strike that would fling them all far away from me.

*It is intelligent. Let it go.* I heard an urbane voice in my mind, as I gathered strength for the fatal blow. So, panting, I stopped and trembled.



Let free, I stood with goosebumps competing for space on my back with cold, wet sweat.

*What are you ugly beastie?*

*Not a beastie; it is smart, see how its brain is listening to the communal chatter*

“Not as smart as us.*

*Probably right, but maybe it is smarter.*

*I am human* I interjected in the flow of words, and caused silence, and then a storm of chatter.

Finally it subsided.

*What do you come here for? To rob our young of life?*

*Uh, no, I seek these two, and I showed them mental images of Twyla and boyfriend.”

*Looks just like you*

*No, they don’t; he has ugly bone hair on top, and they have proper black feathers.*



That was one way to look at it, I supposed.



*We have something strange we find. Looks like something of yours.*



A dozen dozen hands cooperated in passing a yellow, metal tube up through the ranks of the spiders in an eerie harmony that uses scrapes and and clicks as its background music.



The spider who had sat on my chest gave it to me, and I twitched when its two foot long leg brushed my hand.



As soon as my hand touched the cylinder, a message begin to play.



“Taduesz, I hope you are keeping your vow. We need your help desperately. We live in a nice world with much to investigate and little danger. A high level of telekinesis is possible here. So we should be able to stay here for a while. We’ve bounced out of several worlds, but I hope this is a keeper for a while. And that you can catch up with us here.”



*I have to go*

*Probably for the best, your horrific appearance is scaring some people.*



I nodded and versed out with relief.



“About time you arrived.” I heard as I staggered to my feet. The heavy black granite beneath my feet shuddered under the waves of the cries of thousands about me in the darkness. The speaker stood five feet away outside a pentagram. His clothing was a feathered hat, and a turqouise skirt. The torch-lit shadows swallowed up the rest. He pulled a microphone and cable out of a recess in the pyramid top.

“Quiet people, please. Quiet, or we will start sacrificing crowd members to the gods.” The electronically magnified threat boomed out into the dark, and silenced the crowd.

I took out my plasma cannon.

“See, a fighter indeed. The Lord of the Sun will be pleased.” The now breathless voice hardly needed to whip up enthusiasm as the crowd shrieked in ecstasy. Lights came up, and I saw an oblong flat pyramid top with tens of thousands of humans sitting on the hillsides of the natural stadium that surrounded the pyramid. The spectators screaming for blood, my blood, gave me a headache.

Across from me, a dull-eyed Twlya, crusted with blood and scab wounds stared at me in abject misery from inside her pentagram.

“Don’t hurt her, Taduesz! They refuse to heal her.” I heard the scream from the base of the pyramid, and saw her boyfriend tied up in a rack while leering torturers loomed over him. They turned the screw, and whoever had imposed the conditioning had left no stone unturned in their malice. She heard him utter a short, sharp scream in agony, and she bounced to her feet with a killing fury in her eyes.

“A moment of quiet please as we dedicate this sacrifice to the Lord of the Sun. When the demon’s heart is torn loose from his or her rib cage, then will Endless Night be staved off for another year, as long as your regular sacrifices keep coming in. To our worldwide audience, let me say that any gift in excess of two pounds of gold automatically enters you into the lottery to be a member of this crowd of the blessed by the gods.”

The profound silence was broken by Twyla’s words to me.

“I thought it was safe in this world; no one could beat me in a straight fight here. And this was a world that my superiors enjoyed for their own reasons, so they gave me more time with Joyu, my heart when I consented to stay here. But even I must sleep sometime.

Since, I’ve been captured, I’ve killed three versers in the last two years, plus a dimension travelling wizard, and some unlucky dufus who fell through a gate. Their magic keeps me in a berserk state when I enter combat so I cannot just die. You have to kill me. Then Joyu and I can verse out of this world. We can meet up later.”

I bit my lip as I frantically tried to think, and watched magically created madness descend into her face.

“Let’s get ready to rumble!” Roared out across the crowd, and the magical barriers that bounded us in stood, but those that separated us dropped.



Tadeusz

As a GM, I sometimes have these flights of fancy where I see my games transcending entertainment into the realm of political and social change. In actuality, I’m an idiot for thinking that. Sure, a game might occasionally allow a player to see a different view on a certain issue or subject. Most of the time however, it’s just a game.



I don’t think I am alone in that thinking. This week, I am going to take a deeper look into the whole idea of using a game to change someone. Is it possible? If it is, what sort of change is possible? How do we do it?



Of course, you might read this article and tell me I am full of it. You might even agree and have your own experiences to share. Please post in the comments section below. I want to read your stories.



Change Is Good?



Mirroring current events in the world is something I have done numerous times. Sometimes, I do it by accident. Other times, I do it on purpose. You see, I am a politically active fellow. I have numerous opinions and ideas that I think would improve our system of justice and government. I think most of us do. This fact, whether we like it or not, affects our games no matter what we do.



For example, I am a Christian. I rarely ever portray Christians as terrible mindless heathens in my games. Self-proclaimed “Christians” have often been villains of my games, but there is usually a process where the heroes reveal that the villain’s faith is actually based on evil. Therefore, he or she is not a Christian. In many games, God has been consistently shown as a force seeking to redeem creation. This is part of me and the way I see our world.



As humans, we all do that. Our biases come out to play in the world of imagination. Sometimes, it is not necessarily appropriate. Sometimes, we don’t really mean to do it. It just happens. We take it for granted.



What happens when we consciously act on our ideas to show the superiority of a certain idea over another? What happens when we try to change someone’s opinion or life through the game?



Let’s say I am running a weekly D&D campaign. I have decided that I hate monarchies and think they are a terrible idea. I decide that democracy is the best form of government ever. My goal is to prove this in the game, as a sort of subplot going on while the heroes do their thing. So the heroes go galloping around the kingdom, slaying evil creatures, and saving the day — meanwhile, the king turns increasingly corrupt and greedy. Eventually, the heroes are forced to do him in. In the power vacuum that is left in his wake, several advisors and citizens of the kingdom gather together to build a new government, a democracy, and they live happily ever after.



Okay, so I am sort of skimping there, but you get the drift. At best, my players will be cool with the fact that some imaginary people are happy and have a new system of government. At worst, my players will wonder why I went to such lengths to illustrate the glories of democracy.



I doubt any of my players will suddenly pop up out of their seat, shouting “DEMOCRACY IS THE ANSWER!”



Of course, the change we may try to force on our players does not have to be anything to do with society or politics. It can be game related. Let’s say that you are pissed at your player’s minotaur barbarian because all he wants to do is fight, kill, and maim. You are sick of this. This week, you purposely then plan an adventure with very little fighting, taking great pains to insure that every encounter is going to see your player’s character helpless or hurting. In essence, you are teaching your dear friend that making a character designed only to kill is bad.



What happens as a result? Your player gets pissed off and quits the game. Alternately, your player might be smarter than you think and come up with unique ways to use an axe in your masterful adventure, getting out of the tight bonds that you built to ensnare him. More likely, your player gets frustrated and pissed. In all, a gaming session was wasted because you wanted to teach a lesson.



Okay, to come clean, I have done that before. I have done it numerous times. You know what? It has never worked. It only ends up hurting feelings. It ends up being bad.



So, is there a way to set up your game so that it intentionally teaches players and attempts to change the way they see the world? Quite possibly — but it does not involve a GM forcing something down his players’ throats. In fact, if there is a way, it is the decision of an entire group to explore the theme or overarching question of the game. It is not a singular choice.



Of course, can the act of gaming change someone? Let me rewind. Before, I simply asked — can you change a player through the game? Now, I ask – can gaming change someone?



My answer to that is a resounding yes. I am by no means saying that gaming is a noble and true artform, and that all humans should have time set aside each day to take part of in it. Negative. In fact, I am saying the simple act of gathering with your friends, sharing some snacks, and using your imagination in a positive way is a way to change someone. People need community. People need to belong somewhere. A gaming group can be a place like that, a place where folks can unwind, vent their frustrations at life, and have a good time for a few hours before returning to the daily grind.



To conclude, gaming can be a positive thing that makes someone’s life better. Gaming can also be a real drag, especially if folks decide to make it a platform for their personal agenda. We can’t avoid that our own biases come out during the gaming session, but we don’t have to force it down a player’s throat.



Great. Now get out there and game!

  In The Thomas Crown Affair, insurance investigator Catherine Banning is asked whether she speaks Romanian.  Who would ever bother with Romanian? she replies.  The point is that in the grand scheme of the world today, this is an unimportant language; world travelers don’t need to know it.

  It catches my attention because it happens that I did bother with Romanian once long ago.  I was in Romania for three weeks one summer (traveling with a high school choral group at the invitation of the Romanian government).  Many of the locals spoke English; but if you wanted to buy anything, if you wanted to be able to order food or beverages, if you wanted to get directions to your hotel, or merely to ask for an outlet to plug in the amplifiers for the guitars, you needed to know at least a few words of the language.  Romanians still bother with Romanian, and if you’re going to be in Romania, it is still useful to know a few words of the common tongue of the land.  The fact is, Romanians need to know Romanian; people who want to talk to Romanians need to know it.  Most of the rest of us don’t have that much use for the ability.

  Every high school kid has at some point asked about some subject he had to take–most commonly something in the math field–when am I ever going to need to know this?  It is difficult for me to sympathize in retrospect with that question, as I’ve probably used most of the things I learned in high school for something through the years, and certainly have more than once wished I could remember things I should have learned then, or which I once understood but allowed to fall into disuse and forgetfulness.  I may be exceptional in that regard; there were probably many things I learned in high school for which most people would find no use whatsoever.  Then again, at the time I could not see how most of it would ever be relevant to my planned career as a phenomenally successful musician and recording artist.  I didn’t even know what a role playing game was back then, let alone that it might ever involve me in using the formula for acceleration at one gravity to determine how much time a character had in which to act before he hit the ground, or that I might create an algebraic equation to help me design a dragon who would be an adequate adversary for a particular paladin.  I’ve done a lot of things I never expected I would do, and so discovered uses for a lot of skills I never thought I’d need.  That doesn’t alter the fact that most people learn a lot of skills they’ll never use.  How many readers have gotten any serious practical use out of whatever foreign language they had to learn in high school?  When was the last time you calculated the volume of a sphere?  If you dissected a frog (a task I managed assiduously to avoid throughout my extensive educational career), do you remember any of the parts?

  Taking those three examples, however, it is clear that some of those skills have been useful for some people.  My sister was for a time a United Nations translator; the years of French she had in high school combined with the mastery of Cantonese she attained in college gave her that job.  We’ve got an engineer on our forums who probably has had several occasions to calculate the volume of a sphere, and indeed of considerably less regular objects.  My wife cares for critically ill patients three nights a week, and probably could still give you a tour of the insides of that frog.  These skills have value to the right people; they just don’t have much value to the rest of us.

  There are undoubtedly thousands of skills in the real world which are like that.  They are very important for some people, and not for others.  They are important for those people because their lives have taken them into places where they use those skills with some frequency, and need to have that knowledge to operate effectively.  The ambassador to Romania probably should have a functional grasp of the local language, even if the Romanians are going to provide English-speaking contacts for his convenience. 

  In a role playing game situation, however, it is in some ways far more complicated.  Player characters usually are limited in the number of skills they can have, and in the number of skills at which they can excel.  Because of this, it is inherently important in play that character skills align well with game world realities.  No one should speak Romanian unless the game is going to take them to Romania, in which case someone should.  Getting this match between character skills and game needs can be tricky, and many games fail to address the problem.

  I will admit that Multiverser makes no efforts in this regard.  However, as should appear through the article, there are reasons why in that particular case it’s not so important.

  The oldest approach to solving the problem is a type of niche protection built on character class or template.  That is, the game designers identify a variety of skills that are certain to be useful within the game world and the types of adventures and scenarios they envision, and apportion these such that no character can have them all.  We spoke of such approaches to niche protection briefly in CharGen and again last week in Negative Points.  This could be said to be a sort of cookie-cutter approach:  we have one basic concept of what is going to happen in this world, and four, or ten, or a hundred, basic types of characters whose skills are useful within that concept.  Pick whatever pre-made character type you like; his skills will be relevant to the world, and as long as each player takes a different type of character there won’t be any situations one of you can’t handle.  It works, certainly; in a sense it is a brilliantly simple solution to an extremely complicated problem.  It is also very limited and very limiting.

  Very early in the hobby another approach developed:  tell the players during character generation what abilities they’re going to need to have represented in the group, so they can be certain to select them.  If the game is going to take the players to Romania (or require that they interrogate some Romanian prisoners), someone should have the language.  Skills that are usually silly and superfluous which are going to be important because of unusual circumstances need to be recognized as such up front, for game play to be effective.

  This, however, has at least two significant drawbacks.  The first is that it tells the players well in advance that there are certain events they should expect in the game ahead.  There are only so many reasons why a character might need to know Romanian; once it’s stated that they will need this skill, the players will be looking to determine how it will be used.  The other is that it involves a particular sort of pre-plotting by the referee, which often (although not always) indicates a sort of railroading of the story which will carry player characters into situations whether they wish to be there or not.  The referee may plan on the villain escaping to Romania.  If the players are a step ahead, should they be able to thwart that escape (particularly since, thanks to the skill needs announcement at the beginning of play, they know Romania is important and will be watching that specifically)?  If the villain does make his escape, and the players decide not to pursue, should the referee attempt to coerce them into doing so?  The referee may have an idea of where he expects the game to go, but if he has locked that idea in place, the players have lost a great deal of autonomy.

  As a possible solution to these problems, you might try what we could dub mystery skills.  At character creation, the referee should announce that there are certain skills which the characters should have which will be revealed as they are needed; they’ll go on the sheets as Mystery Skill One, Mystery Skill Two, and so forth.  Then when the villain escapes to Romania, the referee asks who has Mystery Skill Four, and tells him he can speak Romanian; later, when they find the nuclear bomb counting down, he informs them that the character with Mystery Skill One has studied the operation of such bombs and has a chance to deactivate this one.  The necessary skills are in the game, but the players don’t know what to expect from having been told to have them.

  Yet there are good reasons to take this power away from the referee and give it to the players.  That is, why should the players design characters to fit the referee’s scenario?  Doesn’t it make at least as much sense for the referee to design a scenario that gives the players the opportunity to use their skills?  To do this, the referee must understand that whatever skills the players give to their characters, those are the things they want to do in the game, and it’s up to him to give them opportunities to do those things.  Similarly, if the game allows them to take disadvantages (as in character generation systems that give the player points to spend on his character if he takes a characteristic that might be disadvantageous), the referee should assume that the player expects any disadvantage he takes to be implicated during play as a problem.  The way the player designs the character should be a reflection of what the player wants the game to be.  The referee then should respond to this by creating a world that meets the players’ expectations.

  Of course, if player characters are sufficiently complex that they have many skills and can find many solutions to any problem, a lot of this is of considerably lower concern.  Also, if the game includes a system for adding needed skills to characters on the fly, this, too, can take the sting out of it.  If within the game there is any mechanism for the spy to suddenly say, But of course, I speak Romanian, so I can communicate with the underground effectively, then a lot of this doesn’t matter.  That is a viable way to play; it will not appeal to everyone.  No single solution will appeal to everyone.  The trick is to find the solutions that best work for your group, and mix and match them in the most effective balance.

  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.

In Negative Points Mark talks about random chargen and gives some good insight into what Mark feels are strong points for that type of system. While reading this I began thinking of other randomly generated things in our games, like wandering monsters, to hit rolls and damage rolls.



As Mark pointed out, not everyone likes random chargen. I would expand that to say that some folks aren’t too happy with randomness during gameplay either. In combat, one of the main areas of randomness in a game, we have the chance that a single roll of the dice can wipe out a character that took five years of real time to develop. That’s not easy for some players to get used to, and it can be hard for GMs to be the deliverer of that kind of bad news as well.



In order to avoid what may seem like a random character death or tragic dismemberment, GMs have been known to bend the truth a bit. We look at the dice and say “You’re hit for ten points of damage” even though the dice and damage modifiers should clearly double that amount and slay the PC on the spot. I’ve argued this with other gamers in the past, and with Mark’s article I thought now would be a good time to bring it up here. What I’m talking about is the art of fudging, shaving or just plain lying about the random numbers that come up during combat or other potentially deadly events.



Everyone who has GMed has messed with the numbers at some point. Even those who proclaim they always “Let the dice fall where they may” don’t follow that creed 100% of the time. Part of the GM’s job is to bend and tweak numbers to help ensure that everyone is having fun. But, if it’s not done properly, we run the risk of upsetting our players or even being labeled cheaters or bad GMs. I’ll lead off with a short example that my regular group loves to remind me of from time to time and then we’ll get into this a bit more.



In one of my Vampire sessions some years back I brought my girlfriend to one of my games. She wanted to see what the gaming experience was about, so she sat behind the screen observing what I was doing.



In the process of running a very large, dramatic combat with a female NPC, I picked up a fist full of ten siders and rolled to hit one of the PCs. I rolled obviously well, lots of tens, eights and nines. However, I didn’t want to slay the PC then, the time wasn’t right for such an event, so without missing a beat I glanced at the dice, shook my head in disappointment and announced:



“Damn! So close! Her claws rake through your shirt, not close enough to scar you but…”



To which my girlfriend cut in with:



“If your not going to use the numbers you get why do you bother to roll the dice?”



That of course stopped the game in it’s tracks as the entire table erupted in laughter. I could only stand there, mouth hanging open, with no response to my being called on my actions.



The reasons that GMs tweak the numbers are many, but it’s the How that I want to focus on today. Whenever a GM decides that it’s time to bend the rules, tweak the numbers or, as some folks would call it, cheat, he needs to do it in a way that convinces the players he’s not actually doing anything of the kind.





One of the main tools for this is to always roll the dice away from the players eyes. No matter if your rolling damage or for a chance the PC may hear some goblins approaching, keep your GM rolls hidden. Even though you’re not going to mess with the numbers all the time, in keeping the dice hidden the players are none the wiser if/when you want to make a change to the number you rolled. Sounds very elementary I know, but if you fail to maintain an air of mystery about the dice rolls you make as a GM, you’re going to get questioned about why you suddenly are hiding the dice or modifying the numbers. This can lead to arguments and a breakdown in trust between players and GM. Neither of these is a good thing.



The other thing you need is to make sure that the expressions you use when you mess with the numbers is the same as when you don’t. I’m a very physical GM, I stand through the entire game, shouting, laughing, jumping around, whispering, waving my hands, frowning, smiling, and generally wearing myself out during the game. When I need to announce the results of a die roll I use the same facial and body expressions no matter if I messed with the numbers or not.



Even if you don’t stand up or gesture wildly during combat, we all have methods we use to deliver good and bad news. Just make sure that you stay “in character” when you deliver news based on fudged die rolls. Consistency in delivery is big in getting the players to believe your telling the truth.



There are times you know you need to tweak the dice, but you don’t know how far to go. You want to modify an encounter, but you don’t want it to be too obvious. I mean, if the giant the PCs are fighting has been handing out at least ten points of damage with every hit, it’s going to look strange if you suddenly drop it to four or five points. Just as consistency is key with your delivery, you need to maintain consistency during the encounter.



One of my tricks in this situation is to ask, just before I roll the damage dice, “How many hit points do you have left?”



I then roll the dice, put on my “Wow you are sooo lucky!” face and announce damage that is so very close to killing the PC it practically makes the player sweat, but still leaves them barely alive. The player gets the relived look of someone who just cheated death, and the rest of the party is elated that their companion survived a close call. While useful, this strategy isn’t alwasy going to work. The consistency during your encounter is the factor that can override your number tweaking.



Let’s say the PC you ask for a HP count from tells you that he only has five HP left. And let’s say the giant has been pounding the PCs for at least 15 points of damage with each hit. You can’t cut the damage to four as that will break the consistency of the encounter. This leaves you in a tough spot to try and pull off your number crunching. However, that doesn’t mean we still can’t salvage our need to mess with the dice and the outcome of the encounter.



If you use negative HP in your games (e.g. the old “negative ten equals death” in D&D) you don’t announce the damage number. Instead you tell the player that his PC is down to negative ten and he’ll be dead next round unless someone can heal or stabilize him.



If you don’t use negative HP, you can still tell the player that his PC is down and dying unless help arrives in the next round. Again, you don’t announce the damage number, just give the results of the hit and let the players react.





Those are some of the tricks I use to make the times I mess with the dice seem as natural as possible. I’m sure others have their own tricks and tools that help so feel free to share in the forums. We’ll just have to be sure our players don’t read the posts or we’ll have some explaining to do at the next game.

Eighteen Duluthian scavengers with their newest member(that’s me, Dear Reader) were led across the permanently snow-covered plains of the Dakotas by our Selected. One yellow school bus slipped and slid in the snow that covered the empty interstate despite the chains on the tires. Inside the bus the heat cranked up to the maximum while outside a four year long winter continued to chill the planet in the wake of the Spasm.



I had been listening to the conversation for the past several hours trying to understand the world I fell into from across the dimensional divide.



The Frost obviously meant the four-year Nuclear Winter which led me to conclude the Spasm was a short nuclear war.



“So, how did this happen, this Spasm?” I asked at last when I realized nobody was going to explain it in casual conversation because everyone already knew. This is a big problem for versers; the most important data bits do not get much mentioned in most worlds.



They looked at me and then at each other sideways as I reminded them that they did not know much about the new guy they had picked up in the road.

“Uh, well…”

“I was out in an area far from news when it happened.” I said which was not exactly a lie. I’d heard of inter-dimensional news services, but I expected they did not cover this universe.

“OK,” My explainer smiled in relaxation, and I saw several people take their hands out of their jackets. “OK, well, a nuke went off in Pakistan. Probably a Middle Eastern provocation to give the Paks an excuse to nuke India. Seeing as the nuke blew in an isolated country area.”

This started an argument. Finally, he continued.

“Anyways, we KNOW the Paks nuked an Indian armoured column. Then the Indians went one better and threw a city-buster at the Paks. But they followed up with another which they said was aimed at an army base near the Chinese border with Paks. The Chinese swatted it down, and launched a major spread over India. NK went for Tokyo in the general enthusiasm. The Japanese surprised everyone with lasering down the missile, and threatening to counter-nuke anyone who fired another weapon.

It almost worked, but the surviving Chinese leadership was, well, ‘insane’, ‘grief-stricken’, just afraid that Taiwan would finally win their long rivalry, and plainly terrified of the shocking news from Tokyo.

So they tried for a quick strike which failed. Things went to pot. The Anglosphere finally launched a massive strike aimed at killing anyone with the potential to use nuclear weapons.”



It did not make sense to me. Until someone casually mentioned an epidemic plaguing the Far East at the time. Someone, who knows who, had been playing at bio-warfare at the same time this chaos had broken out.



I studied it more, and it developed that the incidents happened against a background of treachery all about so that no one in any captal trusted anyone else to keep their word.



America had tried to be isolationist, and ignore the world in the wake of the Cold War being won. The Peace Dividend had been far deeper, and the movement to close the doors of immigration and ignore the world had won out. And then the final act of re-involvement had been a desperate over-reaction which threw the globe into Nuclear Winter.



I pondered this as I got out of the bus to help push. We were stuck, but they had plywood, and sand, and even winches to help pull us out. Half the group stood around watching the surroundings for an ambush.



It seemed that I had revisited this turning point a number of times. In my first world in 2016? Pakistan and India went at it, but the rest of the world powers reacted a bit more rationally. It made me wonder about the pressures on the leaderships; supposedly much of the downfall of Rome could be traced to the Imperial family using lead welded plates to eat off of which caused “bizzarre”(if you want to be charitable) behavior. I might never know the full story of this world, but it showed another path for the critical turning point at the end of the TwenCen.

David had told me of a world in which a fairly reasonable world government had been the response to terrorism and nuclear devices. I’d seen a world of Hostage Cities and the “villagification” of the targetted West. And here, everything had gone to pieces. And I still did not really know why. It was frustrating.

Was there a world out there somewhere where some truly happy result was achieved to this problem?



The bus started forward again, and we all scrambled on to the moving bus. The driver did not want to stop, and risk getting stuck again. Only the Selected and the driver stayed inside the whole time.



Another hour, and tension gripped the bus as it slowed. Rifles, pistols landed in too well accustomed hands.

“Iceman or banditti?” Someone called out anxiously.

“They got the road blocked, but they have a pallet of ‘trade goods’. So I’d say they are Icemen.” The driver replied, and a certain tension ebbed a bit.

“Who goes out?” The Selected called. I felt a jab in my back of a rifle.

“He could be one of them. A spy. Send him out.” The guy said behind me to general smiles at the neat solution, from their point of view.



Irritated, I walked up to the front of the bus with my M-5 resting on my right hip, and pointing skyward. It stood out as a fine weapon among the deer rifles and ancient M-16′s.

“You’ll leave that here.” A man said reaching for my gun. I stepped back a step.

About a half-dozen guns pointed at various parts of my anatomy.

I looked at their unsympathetic and smirking faces, and I knew that this was just the start. Soon enough, they would go through my backpack, and take all my stuff. Never once would they show a bit of true courtesy despite the kindness I offered them.



To them, I was an Iceman, whatever that was. Not really human they had categorized me as. So, if they wanted me to be different, I would show them different.

“Got the computer working well yet, Selected?” I sneered. She gave me a hard and thoughtful look. I smirked back.

“Activate total meltdown-two minutes.” I said and my pocket pc vocally assented.

They hollered at me, and I smiled until the Selected ordered quiet. She nodded at the man who had stuck a gun in my back. His rifle came up under my nose.

“Fix it; give me the gun, now.”

Something in me snapped. Frustration and contempt gave way to a barely held in check fury.

And the phrase beloved of very enthused defenders of gun rights sprang to my lips.

“You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.”

The Selected waved him back, and I relaxed a bit. Then someone produced a knife, but she waved that off as well.

“Not enough time.” She said in one of the coldest phrases I had ever heard fall from a beauties face. She knew torture would not break me in time to save her precious computer.

So I backed out of the bus, and reevaluated things.



They were respectable, until you pushed them a bit hard. And while I have a temper, that passed my usual level. And it did not shock them. Maybe it was customary in this world. Maybe in other worlds, the gods kept humans from being able to overreact, to a degree, but here, humans were permitted the full opportunity to make idiots of themselves? I’d heard of worlds where you could not even think of murdering someone even though your guns worked just fine.



The short walk toward the wall of ice across the road, and the pallet of furs in front of it let me relax which was strange because I went into deadly danger.



“Citizen, I offer you prize furs, and gasoline. We need penicillin.” The wretchedly scrawny fellow in his poorly tanned furs bowed to me. I saw weapons held on the other side of the wall. It was a stick-up of sorts. The Duluthians did not want to trade for this garbage probably, but they wanted less to get in a gunfight.

“Why do you not keep the gasoline?”

“It is for the rocket to the stars. To get closer to the Sun so the College can warm up the planet again for all of us. And we could use it, but it is good cause.”

“And you need penicillin more.” I made clear in a polite tone the relationship. He nodded miserably.

I bowed, and walked back.

They stopped me ten feet away.

“What does the Iceman want this time?”

I told them, and they refused. So I dropped my rifle down to the left where it was not point at anyone except the engine. They let me.

“You know what a hypersonic fletchette made of titanium will do to a steel engine block?” And I smiled. So, we did the trade. And they left me by the side of the road.



I made friends with the Iceman tribe a bit, and found out about the banditti who were the real scum of the Frozen Land, according to the Icemen. The banditti killed for the heck of it since, as they said,we were all dead anyways, and we might as well enjoy the Last Year. I was told, a few of the more sane banditti claimed this was Fimbulwinter and the Spasm had been Ragnarok. I noticed the Icemen praying to Thor to come back from the dead when they thought I did not notice.



The penicillin seemed to have no affect, but it looked and smelled like sugar water to me. A shot of something that named itself in florid letters on the side of the needle “Pow!” I tried. This drug I found in the bottom of my backpack claimed to be a sovereign remedy against bacterial and viral and fungal infestations. The expiration date was 3205 A.D., and I had no memory of the world where I got it from. But in ten minutes, the young girl wanted to be let out of bed to play in the snow. They kept her in bed, and cleaned her off, and changed her bedding. Despite their appearance, these were educated people of the early twenty-first century.



The next morning, I set out with a brand new polar bear cloak which I had been forced to accept or the educated people were afraid the spirits might punish them for not showing gratitude. At one time, they had not believed thus, but as civilization had fallen so had a commitment to Western modes of thought.



Ordinarily, I approve of Western modes of thought, but in their situation, a supposedly more primitive way of life would probably be better at ensuring their survival. They had addapted physically and mentally to their new world. The problem for them was that humans can only adapt so far before we die. But if they died, it would not be for a lack of courage or for a cold-hearted stinginess.



I hiked ten miles to Duluth and took the off-ramp which led down to the Community College.



Guards behind ice walls that encircled the college tried to shoo me away. Past the walls, I could see a spot of green as evergreens grew inside greenhouses, and electric lights lit up the twenty or so old-fashioned buildings that made up the small college.



“But I’m a citizen. You can ask the Selected.”

“Which of the Selected?”

“The blonde one who came in on a bus yesterday.”

The guards shrugged, and sent for higher officers. They shrugged, and sent for higher authority. Soon, I saw a collection of black-robed men and women, and my favorite Selected with them(It was not that I liked her; she was the only one I knew.)



They let me in, and brought me into the commons. And they waited until everyone got out of the cold to start the arguement.



My favorite Selected was in favor of tossing me out. A few, bright-looking geeky sorts hemmed and hawed in my favor. Although, nobody wanted to say it, I gathered that my security protocol on the card still defested them. Besides, the professors from the PoliSci Department pointed out that I was legally a Citizen and thus entitled to a Trial before removing my Citizenship.



Deferential people came in to bring hot cocoa for the “darling professors”‘ our “noble Selected leaders.” and so on. The professors did not even bother to thank the servants who ladled hot chocolate and flattery out in equal amounts. I didn’t get any.



The social customs of the Seventeenth Century reborn in this new land made me ill, and the smell of the chocolate made me hungry. So, I opened up my backpack, and slowly and lovingly drew out a king-sized Snickers(r) bar from my last world. I had been planning to eat it when that sniper got me. Their eyes bugged out, and I could see the need for a candy bar which none of them had probably had in years obsess them. The temptation to eat it all very slowly was almost unbearable, but I shared it out in tiny bits to the Council which sat at the lunchroom tables in the Commons.



We politely dickered for a while as we tried to get the feel of each other’s positions. I wanted to be fed and sleep in a warm room. They wanted to use my computer for “calculations”.

“What type of calculations?” I asked.

“You wouln’t understand.” My least favorite Selected said.

“Ahem, Mel, please.” The chairman rebuked her gently.

“Oh, allright.” And she explained very quickly, and in jargon laden detail about the plan to put a rocket they had built into orbit to rendevous with the O’Neill Space Station at LaGrange Point Five which was a stable orbit point near the Earth. And the station would likely be a “ballooned out” asteroid that was now hollow and could be made habitable.

“So, who are the Selected?”

“Those deemed valuable enough to make space and mass available on the rocket to the O’Neill. Intelligence and skills are what makes the grade.”

I bit my lip to keep from a mocking smile at the self-promotion because ‘Mel’ would have gone on any Ark due to sheer beauty. But then a progression of daily business interrupted our meeting and I got to see how the Selected ran things.



Men came in and made arguements that they needed more resources, and they presented long details which went over the professors heads or under their feet. The engineers, including one fellow from as far away as Vancouver, talked a language of pressures and sublimation rates that went clean over the PoliSci chairman’s head. And the peasants, for what other name could I use, had such tiny details to relate about trying to survive in frigid conditions that none of the Selected had to deal with, and yet the Selected were supposed to provide the wisdom as to the proper course of building houses and whether newspaper should be limited to insulation, or allowed to be used for tinder.



The Council tried, but they were not up to keeping track of everything. Many decisions, including several that sounded important and urgent were referred to committee.



But, I confess, I misjudged the blonde and blue-eyed Mel. Her beauty and aura would have been enough to make her a Selected, but she was a faction leader of the Selected group, I called mentally, the Realists. Even more than the others, she favored harsh action forced by dire necessity. When a man was discovered to have buried his dead child secretly, and giving the extra portion to his other children instead of reporting the loss, well she wanted to hang him.



I reached for my gun at the time. And her eagle eyes spotted it.

“See, he goes for a weapon. Just like I’ve been telling you. He’s not trustworthy. Guards…” She called out in loud tones, and several guards perked up from their comfortable doze while the chairman tried to get her to shut up.

“Um,” I cleared my throat, and lay my rifle on the table in front of me. “Anyone, and I mean anyone who points a gun at me is dead.” I looked around the room and ended with Mel.

“But I will first shoot the one who orders it.”

She opened her mouth and closed it several times.

“Perfectly reasonable.” The chairman said in a suave voice. He lied because it was not at all reasonable, but I was tired of being reasonable to these people. Some people require a two-by-four up the side of their head to get their brain in gear.



They let the poor man go with a warning although he almost looked like he would have preferred hanging.



So, I had my citizenship and they gave me a room and coupons for food and coupons for fuel, and a pile of paperwork to fill out. I wandered the grounds looking for the appropriate people to sign this piece of paper or that piece. And thus I ran into the rocket warehouse.



A giant bell shaped vehicle towered forty feet up, and nearly as wide. A professional guard kept his hand near his wooden crossbow, and his eyes on me at all time. For which I was grateful in a way. One lunatic with a spark, and this whole place would achieve orbit all right.



The engineers babbled in an arcane jargon that I understood in part. When I tried to get the chief engineer to sign off, he was too busy, and pointed away. The Vancouver fellow suggested in a bland tone that the office next door had run short of fuel. I looked at him, and he shrugged. It was my decision. So, I took him up on it, and dumped the nearly foot-high stack in the Franklin stove where it could do some good.



And then I tracked down the engineers who had gone on break. I wanted to know why they were building the bottom of a mult-stage rocket.

“Why not a SSTO, single stage to orbit. And why a disposable? You are leaving plenty of people back home.”

One guy almost slugged me then; it seems like he was Selected but his family wasn’t. I sat back a second; these engineers wanted to win; they did not want to see their friends die. All they needed was an idea or a means.



The equations were cold and unforgiving and they demanded sacrifice, human sacrfice, or so the Selected said.



I waited until the end of a meeting with the Selected Councilwoman in charge of Aesthetics. An hour later, they got ready to go back to work.

“What about an Apollo rocket?”

“Like the one at Huntsville? Not big enough.”

“No, I mean a metal plate, and nuclear devices popped off underneath.” The room got still, and then the chief looked me dead in the eye.

“I like ya’ kid, but the Council had declared talk of such a plan to be treason. So shut up.”



I went away, and studied the various rocket books I could find. In the end, although SSTO was better than what they had, and using a baloon like the Vancouver guy wanted to do as the first stage was better still, I did not think these people had the time to do anything but ride a bouncing metal plate into orbit. But they had a justified severe case of nuclear phobia. It would deepen the winter, but the planet was already dead.



The engineers could save them; the people were smart and able, but the leadership did not know how to delegate. I looked down at my M-5 rifle. I knew one solution to this problem, but I hated to just walk into the council and mow them down. Besides, the people might well revolt. But, if need be, I would try it. I would not let the Selected toss most of the human race left from the troika to save themselves.



The equations might be cold, but I could be colder still.



It was hard, but I found a map of the nuclear weapons sites nearby in the plentiful missile fields of the Dakotas. Then I forged documents, and bribed guards which was easier than I expected. Of course, a black market flourishes in any command economy.



I sent the engineer from Vancouver since he had come that way before and about twenty others on a little trip on “behalf of the Council, a most secret mission”. The Icemen family unit I had been given the cloak from were their tour guides.



I had no clue how to build a giant flat pan with shock supressors to serve as my base plate without the Council finding out. So, I trusted in magic. Competive bids were placed out in the black market for parts for it, and my currency was a promise of a ride to the stars.



Eventually, I got several dozen in on the revolution. But I made extravagant promises, and borrowed “received investments” from Peter to pay Paul back from what I had stolen from him with his approval. It was not a healthy capitalism. It was a speculative bubble. I sold life, and they wanted to believe.



And in a way that I still don’t know how it happened, we got our base plate built, and we turned the bell-shaped first stage into a relanding vehicle that would carry the dissasembled in space plate back home after it served as the passenger hold upstairs. Magic happens.



The Council knew something was up, but they also found how fragile their control was in the face of hope.



We launched the “Nuclear Summer” and took the first load into orbit where it found an uninhabited and ready to set up housekeeping space station. Then it landed, and we used some of the abundant nuclear weapons scattered over the Dakotas to refuel.



The council abdicated.



And we sent messages all over the world for people to gather in spots to be lifted out.



Things were going well. A lunar mass-driver had been set up, and the second O’Neill was being heated by a solar powered laser so that it melted and ballooned out to make a hollow core and eventually another home.



I stood in the commons while busy and excited people ran about trying new ideas of their own, and co-operating in ways that I could not begin to control if I had wanted to, and someone ran in shouting my name.



“Tadeusz, come quick. This strange woman just appeared…”

I ran because I could hear screaming and sense another verser.



Up to their thighs in snow, the lady commando I had last met in Menlo Park, and a skinny guy next to her writhed and screamed. Plowing up to them next to Mel, I saw each held a knife, one a kris, and the other a simple double-bladed dagger. And they were trying to stab themselves in the neck with one hand while fighting it off with the other.



One fellow, quicker than me, tried to get the knife away from the broad-shouldered and black buzz cut commando. She back-fisted him with casual ease. So, I applied a disabling strike to the inside of her elbow, and wrapped my legs around her neck.



“What’s going on, Karla?”

“Is another man here, dark, terribly handsome with an arrow tattoo on his cheek?”

I looked over at her companion who was being restrained easily by Mel. The description fit him if you dropped the terribly habndsome part.

Then I heard him say,

“Please, let me go, I do not want to hurt anyone. Really, I’m against it. Just, please tell me, is there a black-haired goddess somewhere near here. I cannot see her. Tell me please.”

Even Mel’s hard heart melted at the agony in his plea, and she nodded yes while mouthing a befuddled profanity at me emanding to know what was going on.

Karla saw my face, and looked blankly at the space I was looking at.

“He’s here, isn’t he? Oh darling, I wish you could see me.” And then he and her started madly gnawing at their tongues.

She stopped with a horrible effort of the will evident by the bulging eyes and the horse breath.

“Tadesuz, you owe me. Blood-debt. I claim it. You said you owed me ten lives for rescuing your doppleganger from that torture chamber.”

I did not know what she was talking about. But no one ever accused Karla of being a liar, or a coward,and no one before today had accused her of being beautiful, and if she said she needed me, and I owed her, then it was so. I nodded.

“Come with me.” She said around a mouthful of blood. I nodded, and let her go.

Pulling out a dagger of my own, I flipped it end for end so the pommel rested in the palm of my hand.

“What are you doing? Are you mad?” Mel asked me looking askance as she released the dying tattoed man.

“There’s more things in heaven and Earth than are written of in your philosophy, Mel.” I said and drove the dagger in one strike though my rib cage and into the bottom of my aortal sack ripping it, and ensuring a very quick versing out.



I hoped I went with Karla and her love.



Taduesz

This is not a review.



I cannot offer a review on a game I left in France several years ago, when I had to trade the mantle of a dreamer for that of a scholar. Yet, when I learnt that Rêve de Dragon had been translated into English… well, it awakened memories. Out of some twenty years adventuring, out of more than a hundred RPGs, this one is among the few that make me wish I could trade again my keyboard for a sword. Or rather, for the walking stick of a wanderer.



Obviously, I will not detail the content of the rulebook(s). What I can do is musing on what I remember of RdD after some ten years. On what makes it special enough for me to remember.





Background





The first age was the age of dragons. Dragons dreamed the world, and the world was one. Dragons shared a same dream, and in that dream they dwelled. Until the day when the dream escaped them, when humans and other creatures the dragons had dreamed emancipated. They had learnt to dream for themselves, to change the dream of the dragons. They had learnt what, in other worlds, would be called magic.



The dragons left their own dream. Humans who had learnt to master it, the so-called high dreamers, took their place, or so they thought. They could see no limit to their power, but for each others’. They began to battle, to destroy one another with spells so potent they could shatter the dream. They made of the world a nightmare, and many a dragon awoke, and the world was no more.



Thus ended the second age, the age of the high dreamers, and began the third, that of the wanderers. Today, the dragons are back to sleep, but the world is no longer one. The dreams are numerous: fragments of the old dream for some, new dreams altogether for others. If those dreams are connected, it is but accidentally: shimmering curtains act as doors one may pass without even realizing it. Doors which, more often than not, are one-way tickets to the unknown.



What is a wanderer? Not every traveler is one, but most everyone has been. Usually, wanderlust will seize you in your teens. You will leave your owns and travel… as far as the next village, maybe, then back. Or as far as the next town. Or city. Or maybe will you be one of those who never stop. Those few are the “true” wanderers, who will finally leave the dream they were born in, willingly or by mistake, never to see it again.



It never left you. The urge to go forward, to discover new horizons, to meet new challenges. Your possessions are what you, and whatever mount or carriage you may possess, can carry. You are living for today, and tomorrow is always new.





Atmosphere





RdD is poetic, with a tinge of humor. It is what really makes the game, and what I feel unable to render here. To give an example, though: quests have little to do with accumulating wealth, or fighting monsters. Too much wealth cannot be carried around, and fights can be deadly even for a seasoned adventurer. As it stands, to travel and explore is in itself the “quest” of a wanderer, full of dangers, full of wonders.



Another type of quest is to realize a dream. You have a dream so vivid that, when you awake, you feel the need to make it true. It can be as simple as tasting a loaf of bread made by the best baker in the next town, or as strange as wanting to see its mayor dancing with a bear. If you can make your dream come true, you have an epiphany: you remember parts of who you were in past lives.



Past lives? Yes! Because you are a wanderer and live fascinating adventures, the dragons find it hard to forget you. When you die, you “awaken” as someone else, who looks a lot like your past self did. You have the same attributes as your past self at the moment of death (they increase with experience) and some of the memories, veiled in dreams.



In some circumstances, as with the epiphanies already mentioned, that veil may be lifted and so, you may remember skills that one of your past selves had mastered beyond your current level. That is one of the ways to improve, though maybe I should have mentioned that in the next part of this no-review:





Rules





RdD is a skill-based system. It revolves around one percentage table, which fits on the character sheet. Now, beside RdD, my other favorite games are BESM (Guardians of Order), Amber DRPG (Phage Press), and the first Starwars RPG (West End Games). I tend to prefer rule-light systems, which RdD is not. I had the same discussion with the author as I had with Gary Gygax some fifteen years later. Both of them will tell you that rules are important if only to prevent the game master (and Denis Gerfaud hates that very word, “master”) from being a puppeteer, with the players as puppets. I will not carry that discussion here, I will simply admit that, in the case of RdD, the rules fit the world.



Actually, it is one of the aspects of the game that make it so special: everything fits. Why you adventure, your quests, the way you gain experience, why you can join again the party after your death, how magic (the high dream) works: the world may be a mosaic of shattered dreams, it is conceptually coherent, and the rules blend seamlessly. I remember one time when I did not know the rule for some specific circumstance: I quickly came up with one, only to discover later that I had but reinvented what was in the book. Once you “get it,” it all fits, it all flows smoothly, like a dream.





Art





I own two editions of the game. The second one has known two versions, I think, both produced by Multisim. The first of those versions was a box with three booklets and a screen. The illustration for the box (the same as for the screen) represents a stage which expands into dreams and the characters’ reality. It is by Florence Magnin, one of France’s most famous Fantasy illustrators, notably for her work on Zelazny’s Amber (novels, tarot, French translation of the RPG, even a separate art book). Actually, her vision of Amber did not fit mine as well as Kucharski’s (who illustrated the original RPG). On the other hand, her very personal style heralds RdD perfectly; her illustration for this game is still, in my eyes, her masterpiece.



The interior art (all in black and white) is by Rolland Barthélémy. I fear I have to repeat myself: his work fits the game to a tie, making it easier to get into the right mood. In addition, his work underline this great quality of coherence I have mentioned for the game, as (1) he alone drew the interior art, (2) his art does illustrate the very text you read, (3) he often makes use of a few “iconic characters” (the main one being the sassy Nitouche Peregrine) to illustrate different aspects of the game.



Alas, if Rolland Barthélémy’s artwork can be found in the English translation for the game, it does suffer from its adaptation to the .pdf format. The problem is: no greyscale. But line art is translated in pixels not only as black and white but also as shades of grey: without grey pixels to serve as a transition between the black pixels and the white, a smooth line become a ragged (pixelised) one. Of course, the use of greyscale would have made for a much, much bigger .pdf file, making it a nightmare to those of us with only a 56k modem.





English Translation





First, I should point out that I had but the most cursory look on Rêve: the Dream Ouroboros. The following comments only deal with details; if you want to know more, I can only advise you to download the free main rulebook (and the free Excel character generator, and the free character sheet, and…).



I was both thrilled and afraid when I learnt about an English translation for the game. Thrilled because I can only wish for one of my favorite RPGs to find new gamers; afraid because Denis Gerfaud’s prose can be very difficult to translate. An example? Let’s consider the guerrier sorde: “guerrier” can be easily translated as “warrior,” but “sorde” is a bilingual pun: its echoes both “sword” (an homophone) and “sordide” (French for “sordid”). How do you translate both aspects? Much of the game’s peculiar mood stems from such poetic puns; in French, the book(s) are a delight to read.



[Edit: When I submitted this review to RPGnet, the translator sent me an email to point out that his “sordid warrior” could be read aloud as being a “sworded warrior,” thus preserving the pun.]



It was a relief to learn that Denis Gerfaud had sanctioned the translation. Yet, I do remember him to be very adverse to the word maître (master) in maître de jeu (game master). So, how comes that the Gardien des rêves is now a Dream Master? Of course, the literal translation (Dreams Guardian) does not sound like much, so I understand it was discarded. Still, my point is: a game with so peculiar a mood, conveyed less by rules than by poetic use of a language, can only be challenging to translate into another.



I could go on with my nitpicking; a precise bookmark index makes it very easy to dig out whatever you are searching for, and I was searching for problems, for what I knew had been especially difficult to translate. If I like the use of “dreamtime” for “haut rêve” (high dream), I have found the very title of Rêve: the Dream Ouroboros to be more esoteric than poetic. Now, a literal translation for Rêve de Dragon would be “Dragon’s Dream,” which sounds very cliché in English. Still, I would have preferred a title such as “When the Dragons Dream…” More poetic, maybe? Your mileage may vary. Denis Gerfaud has approved the translation. Multisim, the French editor, has approved it also. And I am grouchy like a groin.





Links





http://www.lachimereauxmillereves.com

http://www.malcontentgames.com/index.html

http://www.multisim.com