The Gaming Outpost

After reading over Mark’s Patterns, article I started thinking about the various things that I do as a GM that have become patterns. Those things that when I pull them out of my hat the players look at me and say: “Ah yes! The Old blood painted on the walls trick.”



I think every GM has some predictable aspects to the games they run. Be it a favored setting, NPC, speech patterns, type of game, what have you. We all have patterns. It’s fun to try something different on occasion, and breaking a pattern is one of the ways to keep your players off guard.



Keeping your players off guard isn’t done to be mean or cruel, but rather because it’s fun to be challenged and surprised. If we usually have the bad guys wear black hats, or if you overuse a horror tool (such as a rotting body), it won’t take long for the players to key in on that pattern. Even if they don’t intend to they will often end up exploiting it, or they’ll no longer be affected by it as they should be.



Here’s a list of things in my games that I’ve discovered to be patterns which I’ve tried to change occasinally. Some are harder for me to break out of than others.



-Dark settings (Vampire, Wraith, Delta Green… gotta get chipper one of these days…)

-Dead babies

-Bad guys are very physically distinctive (very tall, strange eyes, unique/exotic weapon etc)

-Bad guys and important NPCs are rich and dress in only the finest clothing

-Friends and family will, more often than not, die tragically

-PCs won’t get killed unless it’s dramatic and done with player consent (working on this one – very tough pattern for me to break as I don’t like killing PCs even when I should)

-Combat between PCs is stopped

-Clues written in blood

-“Ritual Sacrifice” killings

-PCs rarely fail



I’m sure I can come up with others if I think on it a bit more. The point isn’t that GM patterns are bad, but that once we recognize them we can find ways to break out of them. This adds some fun and spice to the game. It can also help us correct “bad” behavior.



“Holly cow! I really do kill off at least 5 PCs a night in my Star Frontiers game… that’s not good…”



Same thing works on the other side of the screen as well. As players we have our patterns that we should identify and try to break out of occasionally. Some of mine are:



-Fantasy PCs are almost always a Ranger type

-PCs have the same interests and likes that I have

-Chaotic Good alignment

-Martial arts aptitude for PCs

-Do “the right thing” even if it’s out of character

-PC prefers to drink wine

-PC dwarves have a Scottish accent

-I will have my PC “try it out” just to see what happens (e.g. Pick up item, open door, touch evil altar, etc) even if it’s out of character

-Won’t willfully attack another PC

-Will try to lead the other PCs even if that’s out of character



They say that admitting something is the first step to correcting it. While patterns in our playing or GMing aren’t necessarily in need of correcting – Change is good. Find a pattern you have and break it. Apart from the fun such a challenge can bring, it’s always a good time to throw your GM or other players off guard.

  I’d made a note to myself a few weeks back that it might be interesting to start the third year of this series with an article on perseverance.  It comes to me that two years ago, on June 1, 2001, when Game Ideas Unlimited launched with a column inauspiciously entitled Introduction, it was the first of five weekly columns by various authors anchoring the new Gaming Outpost site.  Today it is the only one of these which remains (although I am encouraged to see new weekly columns springing up from new contributors, giving hope for the future of the site).  A recent site survey suggested that it is still worth reading, and thus worth writing and posting here.  Certainly, one of those long gone other columns came to the end of its purpose, and quietly said goodbye; and none was obliged to stay so long as this.  That this column should still be here, though, says something about staying on task.  It reminds me of several stories and phrases, including Edison’s words, Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

  And then my mind halts.  I wrote this column already.  Number twenty-four in the series was entitled Edison, and talked about the importance of keeping to the task, of putting in the effort to bring a good idea to fruition.  It reminded us that the world will never know how many people failed because they did not know how close they were to success when they gave up.  To persevere is to succeed, it said, and told the story of the New Zealand man who penned those words as he spent ten years perfecting refrigeration so he could ship mutton to the hungry markets in Great Britain.  I can’t really write that column again; what else could be said about it?

  Then I remember Brett Bloczynski’s fascinating concept for a column, Expanding an Idea.  Whatever I write, he looks at it and finds something else to say about it.  In one thousand to two thousand words (the originally agreed length of the columns in this series, although it’s been outside those limits a couple of times), no one can exhaust a subject.  Certainly I could find more to say about perseverance; in fact, there’s probably more that I could say about any one of the columns I’ve written.  Forum discussions point to that, as many times others have brought out new aspects of a posted article that could be articles on their own–again, as Brett has shown.

  Besides, it’s not as if my life has been static.  Edison was published eighteen months ago.  Since then, I’ve managed to finish and publish my first novel, Verse Three, Chapter One, and that took a lot of work and a lot of perseverance.  I’ve probably got some stories I could tell about that, some lessons learned along the way, some ideas that I could share on the subject.  I recently copied down a relevant quote from author William Feather, Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.  I’m still learning; I’m still running games, experimenting with ideas, creating scenarios, writing books, watching the world go by.  There are new facets to old ideas, waiting for me to uncover them and see them in the new light.

  That’s the note on which this new year begins:  the thought of going back to what you’ve done before, and doing it again, adding the new ideas and insights and angles that you’ve found since then.  We’ve all pulled out our old scenarios and adventures, and thought, gee, did I really write this?  What was I thinking?  Yet within those old things, even if they are incredibly bad (and maybe especially so), there were things that were good.  Take the good things, and rebuild the old into something new, something better.

  Composers often take a theme from something they wrote and use it in something else, taking the core ideas of a piano concerto as the foundation for a symphony, or revamping a movement from a symphony into a chorus in an oratorio.  Painters will go back to a landscape or model they’ve presented before, and do a new and different treatment.  M. C. Escher’s work is filled with new approaches to old ideas.  It once was that authors wrote sequels in large part because they wanted to do more with the character or the setting than they’d done before (although particularly in literature, there has long been the pressure to write what people want to read).  Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There was penned by Lewis Carroll because he had more nonsense to expound after he finished Alice in Wonderland; he later declined to do another Alice book precisely because the style had gotten so popular that there were many imitators, and he wanted to do something different–yet after writing one Bruno and Sylvie story, he wrote a sequel to that as well.  Old ideas always contain the seeds for new ideas.

  Put another way, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.  Just because you did this idea once or twice before doesn’t mean there isn’t a new way to approach it now, a new twist to the old idea, another angle to exploit.  You’ve got an old castle that the players had to attack; can you recycle it so that now they have to defend it?  There was that derelict spaceship that the insane computer was running and the players all thought there was a real person somewhere; what if this time it really was a person at the helm?  If you changed one bit, how would that impact the rest?  Before you know it, what was an old dusty adventure you’re almost embarrassed to admit you wrote becomes a new idea ready for the next game.  All you had to do was recognize how to take the good and make it better, how to apply your new experiences and all that you’ve learned to something you did long ago.

  For my part, I’ll be going back to the beginning.  Valdron Inc has decided to run the series, now free, two years behind the original publication dates.  Thus this weekend, Game Ideas Unlimited starts a new run in a new home, and week by week I’ll be reading over the old articles as they become the new ones there, stirring thoughts and memories, and maybe finding new ideas in what I wrote before.

  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.

Standing astride a rusted ten-speed bicycle in the parking lot of Tychor Shipyard, and watching a Porsche 911 streak away up the hill toward the downtown of Straits City, I realized a fundamental truth.



Crime does pay, very well indeed. I could say that I can sleep at night, but sometimes the suffering of the guilty haunts my dreams. Probably the client rep, a peculiar institution relevant to this reality, this timeline, slept very well comforted by the pillow of easy wealth. If his conscience ever bothered him, he might well remember his suffering, a bruised finger, a taunting remark, one summer he actually had to work for a living, to delude himself into believing that he had earned his priviledge.



Who was I kidding? For all I knew he could be a tortured soul. But somehow I doubted it.



I biked up hill a quarter-mile, and began to search the blocks looking for parking lots. My hope was that the client rep had chosen to eat in the downtown area seeing as it was more expensive. The second lot I found had a fellow who with a little help with his lunch money pointed out the car. He didn’t let me get close to it, but that was all I needed to know. That and directions to another restaurant.



The third nearby shop had reservations, a snooty waiter, and expensive wooden chairs infringing on the public space of the sidewalk. Somehow, I knew I had found my target.



Another bribe, err gratuity, got me in to eat quickly. And I saw my target talking to a young lovely with too perfect blonde hair. The chances of this being his wife were, well, slimmer than even she was.



I ate a sandwich, and onion rings, and contemplated courses of action. Sitting twenty-five feet from the guy put me rather in the position of the dog who caught the car. Now what do I do?



If I accosted him, I would get thrown out, or I would thrash the help until the police showed, and then eventually, I would end up in jail.



I could not hear what he said, and the little I could lip read seemed to be the type of stuff best not repeated.



Some people have argued that humans should be called homo faber, tool-maker, instead of intelligent. I lacked the tools. No camera, no parabolic microphone except for my Lekostian cyber-ear which would not work in this low tech of an environment. It was optimized for the Lekostian Star Empire’s tech level, and so even simple techs required high levels of technology to activate them. When they worked, they worked very well. My cyberware required a thought command to activate.



I really needed to get some more less advanced cyberware installed.



The dinner ended, and the lovebirds headed out the door, and I still wanted to pass on taking pictures of adultery, so I sat there and stewed trying to think of some way of getting the goods on the client rep. Finally, the waiter chased me out.



I stood outside on the street, and considered. A few ways into the problem opened for me. They were illegal however. Wiretapping, hacking into his computer, posing as a person legally authorized to look at his bank statements, I rejected these approaches as not ethical. In other circumstances, say overthrowing a tyrannical government, such action would be acceptable, but in this case, I would cause more harm than good. Besides, there were more legal methods available, I was sure of it.



Coming back down to my chained up bike, I saw a cut chain, and no bike. Stolen. In my bleak mood, I just accepted it as more proof that the universe had it in for me. The afternoon streets seemed forlorn and people gave me ill-favoured looks as I moped about.



Eventually, I found myself walking along the waterfront as the sun began to go down. Dozens of beautiful white boats crowded the boatyard perched at the end of a pier, and so fascinated, I walked up it past the couples, and the fishermen.



The floating boatyard turned out to be an artifact of some obscure twist in taxation law which shielded it from taxes as long as it could be moved. I walked along the rocking and falling wooden dividing sidewalks with their cut-in-half tire bumpers, and felt a certain excitement and glee. The sea air and the lovely ships contributed, but also a plan was rising up out of my subconscious.



For some reason, I looked closely at the names of the boats. “Happy Runner”; “Daytimer”; “Rich Retiree”; none of them inspired me. “Ruthless” looked interesting.



I talked to the owner, a weathered and white-haired but still muscular man, who was working on board. Yes, he had been involved in shipping. And yes, he had been royally messed over by some of his office mates. I asked him about the name, and he grinned.



“I first christened her ‘Ruth’ after my second wife. When the corporate thieves got me out of the company, and she left me, why I changed that to ‘Ruthless’.” 1



Laughing, I went on to ask him how he afforded this now.

“Simple, I finally learned my lesson. Wife number three has limited tastes, and I made them buy me out at top dollar. Too bad, because the company went on to split its stock twice since then.”

“And you were bound by a non-disclosure agreement.”

“Yeah. Look, its a crooked world. I could fight them, and lose, or I could get something that I earned, I earned mind you, and get out.” He still looked uncomfortable with his choice, and I thought I had my man, my pawn.

“How would you like to be the agent of justice against some other thieves?”

He chuckled, and then stopped when he saw I was serious.

“Why?”

“It might help you sleep at night. Or it might quiet that burning inside that a just man feels when confronted with corruption. Think of it as Pepto-bismol for the soul, and probably cheaper than a surgery in a few years.”

He laughed, and then he said in a moment of startling insight.

“Just how old are you?”

My mind went back over the decades that drifted into centuries. I think it was under three centuries, but I was not sure. Then I understood what he was thinking.

“I’m not an angel.”

“But you might have been sent by one.” He replied almost reading my thoughts. If only he had grown up in a different world he would have been a formidable psionic with that acute perception.

“I’ll make you a deal, I’ll tell you what I am, if you help me get these crooks.”

He climbed off his boat, and onto the floating dock to stand in front of me.

“All right, you got a deal.” And he shook my hand.



Taduesz

1: The “Ruthless” story came from a Reader’s Digest piece.

So I’m running my regular D&D game a Friday or two back and the party comes to a portion of the adventure where they are face to face with the main bad guy. Combat begins as they struggle to get past his defenses and to protect themselves from his powers.



One of the players has a spell up that he feels will protect him from the soul draining power of the bad guy. No luck, I say, as the bad guy singles him out and sucks his soul into a gem. I can see that the player is ticked off, but I’m not sure if it’s at me personally, or just at the situation or what. So I decide to lock that away for now and move on. Eventually the party defeats the bad guy, just barely, and they are able to rescue the lost souls and the PCs are saved.



At the next critical juncture that evening the party is transported to a new world whereby the apparently loose 90% of their magic items, some of their spells are not working correctly, and at least a couple of them have lost a few levels. To top it off, they’re now face to face with the bad guy once again, but this time he’s in a strange new form.



After that encounter I could once again see the ticked off look on the player’s faces. Frustration was high, so I wrapped up the game session with promises of more explanations and information to be forthcoming. I told them not to worry, and that I was sure they could rise to the challenge I had laid before them. Sure, it was a tough spot to be in – Trapped on a new world and apparently without much of their hard earned magics, but they’re adventurers I thought. Tough spots are meat and drink for the likes of them! Right?



Mark’s article Arbitrary brought the events of that game session and the days that followed to my mind as the word “Arbitrary” was one of the things I heard most often from the players after it was over. They were pissed at me as they felt my rulings in combat, and my removal of magic items and character levels were all arbitrary. They felt they we’re getting shafted by the GM and they didn’t like it one bit.



I found this out from one of the players who is basically the group spokesman. There had been a lot of inner party email going on where they complained and railed against me, so the spokesman took me aside and explained the group’s feelings to me. Not to berate or condemn my actions, but to tell me that the group was upset and that he thought it would be very helpful if I sent out some of my promised info before the next game. A pre-game email with some explanations and information would go a long way to help remove the fear and doubt that was creeping into the group.



I have to say I was shocked at what I heard. I knew there was a problem, but I had no idea things were as bad as they were. What the group saw as an arbitrary ass kicking by the GM I saw as a GM built challenge for the party to rise up and defeat. I thought I had done a great job in putting the party into a tight spot, and that they would surely see it as an opportunity to meet and overcome the challenge. Obviously, I was mistaken.



After I sent out some info via email, I started thinking about things and I realized that the root cause of all the complaints was my delivery. I was using a similar delivery method that I use with my Vampire group, which is very successful, but it was not working at all with my D&D group.



During the first big combat with the bad guy, one of the players has cast an anti-magic shield to protect himself. I had already determined that the only protection that would stop the soul ripping attack were spells that protected against negative plane energy – nothing else would work. The party was very high level and they have these types of magics (spells and items) available to them, and they’d used them in the past, I felt they would figure it out. Sure, it wouldn’t be easy, but it wasn’t supposed to be easy.



The problem was that when the player with the anti-magic shield had his PC’s soul ripped out and he asked “Why didn’t my spell work?” I said “You don’t know.” The player tried to push for an answer, but I told him I was not going to explain why his spell didn’t work in the middle of combat. He and the others needed to figure it out themselves.



And then when the PCs were transported to another world they asked why they lost levels and why their magic items disappeared. I again told them that they didn’t know at that point. They didn’t have enough info to determine the cause yet. One of the players said “I have a very high level in plane knowledge,” he then rolled the dice. “I rolled a 30.” I told him it didn’t matter what he rolled, because at this point they were once again in combat with the bad guy (his new form now), and they didn’t have time to focus on these things.



The cleric tried to cast a healing spell and I told him that didn’t work either as he felt his connection to his deity was severed. He asked why, again, I said he wasn’t sure – combat was on and they didn’t have time to delve into these things, unless they wanted to ignore the bad guy and give him big to hit bonuses.



Now, with my Vampire group my delivery wouldn’t have been a problem. Simply saying “No, it doesn’t work and you’re not sure why,” is enough to get that group thinking of other ways to accomplish their goals. They know the explanation for why something didn’t work will come later, when their PC has time to think about possible answers. I’ve also been playing with these guys for over 12 years so there’s a lot of history and trust that we have with each other.



My D&D group on the other hand is only in it’s second year, and everyone comes from a different gaming background. We don’t have the level of trust built up that the other group has. I made the mistake of assuming that a game group is a game group and that they would fall in line eventually. Obviously, that didn’t work.



So, I’ve decided to change my delivery with the D&D group. I will offer more info instead of just “No, it doesn’t work and you’re not sure why,” and I will also be sure to tell the players that they can expect some disclosure at the end of the encounter or game session. Sure, I will need to keep some things hidden from them, a GM can’t give away everything especially if it’s in the interest of a long term campaign, but I will give explanations so the players don’t feel my actions are arbitrary.



The other thing I’ve decided to do is ask the players to bear with me and realize that we all have different game styles. I will do my best to adapt and change to help them out with my delivery, but they will also need to help me out by having trust in me. I trust that they won’t cheat, so they need to trust that I’m not arbitrarily denying them because I don’t want them to succeed. There is a reason for why I tell them that something does or does not work. They may not know exactly why at first, but they can find out eventually.



I think I could have avoided this problem if I had paid closer attention to the players reactions to my delivery. If I had asked them what they thought of the game. It’s not always easy to read people and know what they are thinking, but by taking note of the players reactions I can then, after the game (or in game if necessary) ask them what’s bothering them.



Just remember: When you ask for what someone thinks be prepared that you may not like or agree with what they say. You will need to listen to what they say and be calm with your reaction to their thoughts.



If the player tells you that he doesn’t like it when you do X, you can’t tell him that he’s wrong or stupid or doesn’t understand the finer points of GMing. You can explain what you are trying to do when you do X, but you can’t be rude. You asked what the player though, you gotta be prepared for truth. And the player also needs to be prepared for your thoughts as well – Truth cuts both ways.



The other thing I learned from this experience is that anything which appears to be an arbitrary outcome in my game takes away from the realism of the world. People want to know why something happens. Yes, sometimes it’s not easy to find out or the info isn’t readily available, but people want to know why. If we as GM’s never provide the why, or at least hints or directions on where to find more info, the players feel cheated and the game world looses some of it’s realism.





Well, that’s it from me. See you in the Forums!

  Welcome to the one hundred fourth entry in the Game Ideas Unlimited series.  While one hundred four might not at first glance sound like a milestone, it in fact is a quite significant one.  One hundred four is eight times thirteen; that is, it is two times fifty-two.  Put more plainly, this column marks the end of two years of continuous publication of the weekly series.

  Perhaps you remember this event being foreshadowed four weeks ago when we presented our one hundredth column Century.  At that time, we noted that you might think the one hundredth column in the series to be a major milestone, but that we would be talking about milestones in this column.  It seems in one sense as if it would have been perfectly sensible to note the one hundredth column as a milestone, a moment for celebration.  At the same time, the one hundredth column wasn’t terribly important relative to the calendar, and in that sense this completion of two years means so much more.  Or does it?

  It is certainly the case that we have established the pattern of looking back every three months at the articles which filled the intervening weeks.  Last quarter we commented on this when we discussed Patterns, and at the same time we looked at the dozen columns of the winter quarter of the year.  Now, with summer upon us, we take a moment to recall what we’ve done this spring.  Here, in brief, are our recent installments.

92. We began with an Exercise, an idea for sharpening our ability to multitask which could be done in connection with a common recreational activity:  reading the credits after the movie while listening to the music.
93. Objectives recalled several previous columns about player characters working together, reminding us that characters with conflicting goals will eventually come into conflict with each other.
94. Bridge was a lesson in strategy, borrowed from a card game, about what assumptions to make when faced with a challenge.
95. CharGen was one of several this quarter that examined the mechanics side of game design.  Here we looked at several popular methods of character creation, and offered some ideas on freeform approaches.
96. We were talking about humor at the gaming table when we reached Funny, attempting to distinguish the laughter that helps the game from that which gets in the way.
97. The two-pronged nature of Rewards systems was our next foray into game mechanics, showing how rewards systems needed to consider both what was being rewarded and what was being encouraged by the reward.
98. Negative Points returned to character generation systems and gave some ideas on how to improve random and point-based approaches.
99. Romanian was about ways to work with unusual character skills, whether they’re included by the player or suggested by the referee.
100. In Century we looked at the importance of mindset to the setting, beginning with the recognition that every moment in time has its own ideas which should be grasped to truly recreate that moment.
101. We found out that I don’t particularly care for Waltz music; more usefully, we considered the danger inherent in the artificial constraints of form crushing creativity within a medium.
102. The next entry reminded us that the odds are Cumulative, and that every time you pick up the dice you’re taking a chance.  This is something of which to be mindful both in play and in design.
103. Sometimes a small victory can be a Token reward that keeps people in the game.  The value of this to scenario design is considered in last week’s article.

  As mentioned, at the end of the last quarter we talked about the pattern of looking back every quarter.  Because of that pattern, we are celebrating the one hundred fourth article as a milestone, rather than the one hundredth.  Certainly it might have been different–we might have looked back after every ten, or twenty, twenty-five, or fifty articles.  Those would be milestones based on our decimalized number system; these were milestones based on our calendar.  It doesn’t particularly matter; that is, one set of milestones is not more valid than the other.  Both are, ultimately, arbitrary.

  If you’ve been saddled with trying to learn the metric system, blame Napoleon Bonaparte.  It was his idea to create and use a system of measurement in which everything was based on multiples of ten, and his scientists worked to provide this for him.  Celsius temperature, then known as centigrade, liters, grams, meters, and the other units of the system are all interrelated, and all use what he perceived as the very rational decimal relationship.  Certainly this works quite well for those of us who use base ten for our number system, and it’s certainly easier to learn than the wonderfully colorful English system used by most Americans and Brits, at least.  Yet it is not really less arbitrary; it’s just better related to other things.  The decimal number system is itself arbitrary, developed because humans (in the majority) have ten fingers, and so could count that far before needing to find another way to indicate the next number.  It’s a very impractical number system for our current computers.  Built on a system of on/off switches, they are really much more facile in binary (base two), hexadecimal (base sixteen), and perhaps base two hundred fifty-six.  The next generation of computers might have trinary chips (using positive, neutral, and negative charges for three digits), in which case base three, base nine, and base twenty-seven would be the logical numeric systems in which they would work.  Creatures who had different numbers of fingers probably would wonder for a long time why we chose something so mathematically unusual as base ten.  It seems so arbitrary; in the end, it is.

  Interestingly, Napoleon also attempted to institute a ten day week.  The predominantly Catholic French would not allow him to change what God had established.  Divine decree aside, the calendar is rather arbitrary.  It is useful to us; we tie it to the seasons, and so know when to plant and when to harvest based on it.  Astronomers use a different calendar, though, one which is based not on the relationship between the earth and the sun but on the position of the earth relative to the stars.  The number of hours in a day is arbitrary, chosen for the ability to divide the day into convenient increments.  When the day begins is also arbitrary; a number of ancient cultures begin the new day at sunset, and others at sunrise, and there certainly is less logic to beginning it at midnight than either of these choices.

  So there’s really nothing inherently significant about two years, no more or less than there is about one hundred entries, or indeed than there is about any other number.  Each column added to the series is itself a new milestone, a greater accomplishment than before.  We can’t celebrate each of these as milestones; to do so is to decimate the notion of celebration.  We pick a pattern, and we stick to it.  We give ourselves token goals, new objectives, and we celebrate when we reach them.

  In grade school I was shown a movie in which a fantasy kingdom was installing its first clock, and the king ordered someone to set it.  The servant hesitated.  To what time should it be set?  They contacted an astronomer, and asked him.  His answer was to set it for whatever time you like; what matters isn’t what time you choose initially, but that you abide by that decision thereafter.  In designing worlds, at least, it’s perfectly fine to be arbitrary about many of the decisions you make.  What matters is that once you have decided, you abide by your own decisions and stick with the pattern.

  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 reintegrated in the next world with my head swirling from the excess of magic I had been playing with in the last world. Casting an open-ended spell to summon revenants, and powering it with my pain could get addictive despite the agony. The physical sensation of power seduced the soul.



So I was happy to wake up in a stinking alley with a flickering yellow electric light shining down in my face. A quick check assured me of what I already suspected. Flatlined psionic and magic abilities made most of my spectacles and my skills in those areas unavailable.



The overcast skies, a gray omnipresence dimming everything to the point that day seemed closer to night, cracked open and let loose a steady drizzle.



I fished through my backpack for my medieval style cloak, also gray. The matte black M-5 I slung underneath the cloak, and behind my back from its strap. A good knife went up my sleeve with its pop-out holster.



A snap of my wrist, and eight inches of elegant and simple steel filled my hand. As in so many things verser related, the knife was a compromise. I wanted a straigtforward blade, utilitarian, but in many cultures a fancy knife was the symbol of nobility. So, I had nifty engravings put in the hilt, and filled with gold and gems which hardly detracted from its usefulness.



My backpack went on over one shoulder, and I set out into the drizzling rain with my hair beginning to drip.



The wet tarvey street and the yellow line down the middle assured me of a modern world even more than the light had. But Moscow had roads which hardly anyone used except for the nomenklatura and their bosses, the Politburo.



I searched further looking for clues as to the nature of this world. A newsbox of robin’s egg blue caught my eye as it was designed to do.



“Straits Tribune; The Union of Yukonia’s Premier Newspaper” The top line said. Yukonia: Yukon I supposed, I was probably on the northwestern coast of the American continent.

“May 10, 2007″ Told me the date, and the blaring headlines below it accusing the Mayor and the local Governor of complicity in botching a corporate espionage investigation to possibly aid one Roger Norman who would walk free, assured me. Only in a free country with a relatively law-abiding population would you find a valuable device not chained to the ground, and shouting out abuse at the local and territorial leadership.



I slipped my M-5 off my neck, and stowed it in the backpack. This world felt safer, if a bit cold and drear.



Hunger prodded me, and I looked into my financial situation. Most of my monies would either be valuable artifacts, or junk, or way too revealing if the right person got their hands on them. The photonic computer encased in a plastic poker chip saying “$5 Tunica” would no doubt excite all too much interest as would my billion year old computer clock in the coin. So I dug into my dwindling supply of pirate gold and jewels, and came up with the last handful.



Oops. I’d spent more than I expected. I should have taken the gold crusted microphone from the Aztec world with me.



I set out in the direction of the skyscrapers figuring that when I got close to them that I would begin looking around for a pawn shop.



It worked well enough, and I found Bob’s Pawn Emporium, a metal-sided small warehouse type building. I walked in underneath a gaudy glitter covered “diamond” affixed to the plastic sign looming over the broken sidewalk.



Stepping in I saw a long narrow room, and Bob bored enough to slouch on a bar stool behind the glass cases of the counter. A couple other rough-looking customers gave me the once-over, and I stared back with a warning in my face. I would fight if need be my look told them. They turned away.



Stepping through the metal detector seemed a bad idea so I mentioned this to Bob, and he woke up a bit, and looked me over. Then he pressed a button under the counter.



“SCA?” He said as I walked up to him. Delighted, I grinned back.

“Yes, and you?”

“Former girlfriend was into that stuff.” He grunted.

I took out my handful of gems, pearls, silver and gold coins. He separated the pearls.



“Not very good. I can give you five bucks apiece for them.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Ever since the Hawaiaans got those robot subs to work, the pearl markets been flooded. I expect in a few years, they will be considered costume jewelry.”

I took my ten pearls back.

“Where did you get this stuff? Kingdom of Iterin?” He said squinting at a silver coin.

“Oh, you must have hand cast these. Pretty cool.”

I smiled noncommittally not ready to expand Bob’s perceptions to include multiple universes.

“Now, you’re trying to get rid of them.”

“Something like that.” I said.



He made an offer, and I countered. Poor Bob had little experience with customers as skilled as I in the art of haggling. Most of his clientele bought things at the price offered. I’d lived places where the principle form of entertainment was insulting the merchant’s goods for an hour or two.

About the third time, I’d headed for the door, Bob gave me his final, last-really-last-offer. I thought he was sincere, or at least so tired that he would forget the deal, and throw me out.



So I took the three thousand dollars in hand, and then put it back on the glass countertop.



“That sword on the wall looks good. Why don’t you toss that in to boot?”

Exasperated he informed me that it was a real weapon, and not a cheap replica.

I nodded in agreement, and he gave me the double bladed four foot long, hand-and-a-half sword.



I walked out happy to have gotten probably half the worth of what I sold him, and liking my new sword. My stomach rumbled, and I turned back at the door to see Bob wince.



“Where’s the nearest restaurant?”

He relaxed, and gave me directions in his bored way.



I nodded and walked out into the storm which had increased to a downpour. No one bothered me on the way; it is possible that seeing the expert way I had swung that sword they thought better of assaulting me. Or maybe they were innocent customers I was maligning in my mind. Hard to say.



The Waffle House lit a smile with its dim glow in the darkening world. I walked in and crossed my fingers. It would be just my luck if they served oysters and kalamari burgers in this timeline. I don’t object too much to the above because a verser learns to eat whatever he can, and a picky stomach is decided penalty to a verser. But when I want real food; it would be hard to be gypped out of it by the universe.



Three sides of hash browns with cheese and tomatoes, four cups of coffee with cream and sugar, a BLT, three glasses of Coke, sausage and eggs, a stack of pancakes with lots of butter and maple syrup, and two slices of chocolate whipped cream pie and I was dry, warm, and contented. My waitress looked at me with a steadily rising eyebrow as I packed the food away.



“Hungry, honey?” She asked.

“You bet. Or I was, but not anymore.”



I settled up, gave her a good tip, and bought a paper in the alcove, and came back in for more Coke and another slice of pie which I moved to a booth for space for my paper. Somewhere, I had modified my body to be able to deal with excess amounts of sugar. One of the best things I ever did, I decided with a smug smile as I began to comb through the classifieds.



It being still early and before the dinner rush, the waitress came over to talk to me.

“You new in town, hunh?”

“Am I that obvious?” I replied motioning for her to sit down. She was an older woman, and from the way she stood her feet bothered her.

“It’s not like it used to be when we first got our independence from the Three Powers. The Boom has gone bust, if you ask me. I think its those idiots in Nome House. A new rule every time you turn around. My husband had a good job in the uranium extraction mines in Siberia, and then they add all those safety precautions which just happen to benefit the company that belongs to the President’s second cousin. It stinks if you ask me.”

“Three Powers?” I interjected my question into her unburdening herself.

“Oh,” She wiped her face with a work-hardened hand. “Russia, Canada, and the U.S.. That’s what we in Yukonia call them after they let us secede. I don’t think Russia wanted to do it, but it was either give Siberia to the Chinese or to us, and Canada couldn’t stop us what with the Qubecan Uprising, and well the hardcore gun nuts and the oil companies of Alaska had enough of the ecofreaks ruling from Washington about how we couldn’t drill for oil because some caribou they had never seen might suffer ‘emotional trauma’. Least that’s the way we see it up here, and if you think differently, you might be careful who you speak too because some people get a mite touchy when a Lower 48er starts spouting off.”

“No offense meant.” I assured her as I started fitting the data together.

An economic recession caused by nepotism and over-regulation, and probably an over-extension of credit in the preceding boom was what it sounded like to me. Not the best environment to find a job in, but I needed one anyways. My money would not last all that long.



I took out a pen, and began to circle jobs and housing that looked interesting. I had to ask her what the various abbrievations meant.



“You won’t be able to get most of those even if you are qualified. Gotta be a union member.”

“Can I join?” I asked back with a quirked eyebrow.

“Not easy. The Business Support Bill made it so you have to have a government permit to join the union because the unions were getting too strong, and strangling business, or so the Nome House said.”

“But if you have the right connections, grease a few palms, you can become a union member, and make good money, right?”

She nodded.

“My husband got his membership suspended, and now we can’t get up enough to get back in. So he collects unemployment, and I got a job here at sixty hours a week.”

I nodded in sympathy.

“So, what jobs can I get quickly?”

She pointed to the undesirable ones. Security guard, janitor, private detective, convenience store clerk.

This was a temporary measure, or so I hoped. I had an advanced degree, but no proof since I got it in another universe. And I had a bunch of other knowledges, but first I needed to get my feet on the ground, and have some time to think.



I looked again, and my eyes fell on private detective. It sounded interesting, and if it turned out to be only about photographing couples engaging in adultery, then I could try being a security guard. That should as I worked up a plan to start a small business if the environment was at all conducive.



I stood up, and paid my bill again, and left a couple hundred dollars on the table.

She came running after me.

“You can’t give me this, you need it. I wasn’t asking for charity.” The pride and generosity of the lady surprised me only a little.

“Its not charity. Its a consultant’s fee. Your information was very useful to me. ” She nodded acceptingly, clutching the money closer.

“You know, I’ve met kings and queens who were not as honorable and kind as you.” I said, and bowed, and walked out leaving her perplexed but pleased.



I walked down the street further to a seedy motel, and checked in for the night. A bribe made the credit card unnecessary. No one bothered me after taking a good, long look at my face. I was not looking for trouble, but I was ready to shake his hand.



In the morning, I walked out to find breakfast at the Waffle House again. Then a couple blocks north to my first target. He accepted me right away which was a warning sign.



The scraped panelling of the cut in two trailer and the pot to catch the water in were further warnings.

I told him I did not do adultery cases.

“Me neither. After I got shot the second time by some lover-boy, I gave it up. We do corporate stuff around here. Business is a little slow though.” His voice was even deeper than mine, a contra-bass growl that came from the vicinity of his kneecaps.

“I can hire you for a week, and if it picks up, and we like each other well enough, we’ll keep it going.”

“Deal.” I said thinking he probably had a project he wanted done that he did not want to do.

I took out some of my weapons, and his eyes widened. He especially liked the M-5 fletchette autopistol.

We got to trading gun stories, and he showed me his collection. He had what he called a Yukon Express heavy rifle for the frequent trips he made to the back country to fish. It seems the bears had objected to the competition on several occasions, and the YE saved his life.

My chatter got me a place to sleep, a beaten down couch of yellow and brown with visible springs next to the water catching pot. He said he’d take the rent off my paycheck, and it was a lot cheaper, and safer than the hotel.

“Nobody thinks to rob the Siegel Detective Agency. They know how good a shot I am.” He told me, and I relaxed.

“Do I need a P.I. license?”

“No way, its not like in the States. We are the last vestige of the Wild West, we detectives. Too rinky-dink for the Nome House to care about us.”



He gave me an assignment to go interview and look around this shiphard, Tycor Shipping. I was out the door, and riding a bike he loaned me before I realized that in effect he’d sent me out to drum up some business. Great, just great.



Still, I biked in the rain-freshened morning air through downtown Straits City, and enjoyed seeing the big city come to life. Elegantly dressed people walked past crews repairing the road, and buskers juggling wooden fish, and I felt the rising energy of it all. Big cities are nice places to visit once in a while.



Past the skyscrapers and the increasingly crowded streets which forced me to dodge and weave more and more, I broke out into a nearly empty sidewalk which led downhill to the harbor, and Tycor Shipping.



I walked in, and asked to see a manager for a few minutes. This felt a little embarrassing.



After half and hour, I presented my case to the PR flack who found a ten minutes for me. Siegel Detective Agency had received information from another client that led them to think illegal activities had occurred between a now fired employee of this client, and Tycor. Were they interested?



He said they were, but they didn’t want to disturb things. He spoke in such a way that made me distrust him. I got over my embarrasment, and began to smile oh so faintly as I leaned forward.



“So why don’t I take a look around, assure you that someone is not disturbing things right underneath your nose.”



Looking unhappy, he agreed, but with the warning that he could not promise any pay.



“Only if you want the final report.” I said.



I let myself out, and picked up a badge and a hardhat at the front desk. The PR flack looked unhappier still, but he let me go.



I walked out, and around back past some lounging workers who were smoking, and let myself in the open back door of the office complex at the front of the shipyard. It was the very same complex I had been too just a minute before.



Slipping through the halls with a bored purposeful attitude to ward of inquiries, I came to the empty office next door to the PR flack. Jack Whitcomb was his name.



Listening through the lightweight wall, I heard the PR flack, Whitcomb, speaking agitadedly on the phone.



“Look, Mr. Callton(??) we have a guy down here from Siegels looking for trouble. You know he hates us after we messed him over in that last case. Uh-huh. Yes. Okay, okay, I got it.”



“Uh, hmmh.” I turned and saw a man looking up at me with a curious expression on his face.

“Why are you here?”

“Here?”

“Yes, here, here in my office.”

“Did you have trouble with your copier?” I asked barely avoiding the lie, but definitely leaving a false impression.

“Yes, I did.”

I gulped a little, and set to work on his copier. My memory came to the rescue; almost all copier problems are the paper getting stuck, or out of paper. Really simple stuff to fix, but the end-user is scared to touch the machine lest he break it. At least that is what I heard.



I tried it, and it worked. The paper was stuck, and after a few minutes I worked it free, and I gave the service to him free of charge as a minor problem not worthy of charging for. This again impressed him. I wondered if I had a future as copier repairman in a small business. Something to think about.



I let myself out back, and looked to the right and the left at the big warehouses that gaped over the central paved area. Further down at the water’s edge, I could see the dry docks that totally loomed over the several story tall open sided warehouses.



I walked around flashing my badge at various foremen, and just looked for something of interest. This would be so much easier if I could just tap into a few people’s brains.



Hearing some shouting men and one lady, I moseyed in that direction. Shouting was good as far as I was concerned.



There was a small circle of suits facing each other surrounded a slight remove by a bunch of guys in yellow rubber waders with a few carrying a pipe wrench and one a sledgehammer.



The suits looked at me, and in that look I saw enough authority to order me off the property if I bothered them by say standing by and listening in. So I kept walking like I had business somewhere else.



To the south of the main office, and to the east of the southern warehouse, a collection of trailers served as offices for the less important.

I walked into that general area, and saw my aisle dead-end against a twenty-foot tall chain-link fence. Then I heard the group that I had just walked past heading my way.



So I slipped off my shoes, and tossed them under the trailer to the south of me. I leapt at the facing trailer as high as I could, and cushioned the noise with flexing legs. Rebounding blindly in the other direction, I rotated a quarter-turn along my height axis, and came down on the top edge of the trailer’s roof with my palms which I used to cushion the impact to a faint creak of the trailer. The slight noise might make a few people inside stop and listen, but it shouldn’t have them curious enough to go outside to check it out.



A handstand on the trailer’s edge, and then lowering myself straight down to my head let me roll out onto the roof in quiet.



The crew of suits and their attendant workers came down the aisle between the trailers.



“Your specs are off. You should have checked the actual measurements before you had us build the thing for your ship.”

“They were the design specs.”

“What kind of idiot doesn’t know that things change when they are getting built?”

“James, Mr. Halston has a point. They were the design specs.” The prissy and superior voice grated on my ears.

“Whose side are you supposed to be on?” James said in exasperation. From the noise of the crew, it sounded like they agreed with him.

“I was hired to be a client representative, James. Now, let me talk to the client in private, and we will see if we can work something out.” The client rep said.

“There’s no need to work something out. Its as plain as the nose on your face. Halston Ships messed up, big-time, and they are trying to stick us with the bill.” James’ outrage drew approving murmurs from the workers, and splutters of anger from the Halston Ships man.

“Possibly so, but we do want to avoid arbitration, and getting a bad reputation in Straits City shipping circles. Let me talk to the young Mr. Halston in private, and maybe we can work something out without the interference of the crew.” His snide tones of superiority to the workers grated on me. The client rep and “young Mr. Halston” entered the trailer, and outside I heard James muttering to himself, and the crew saying things like “I’ll show him interference, the pompous jerk.”, but James remembered his loyalty to the management and sent the workers back to their jobs. He and his secretary waited discussing how much of a hit they would take if Halston got their way.



Interesting.



I searched for a way to listen through the roof, but only came up on the right vent in time to hear a very pleased finale from the client rep.



“Well that’s all settled then.”



They went out, and the client rep broke the bad news to James that unfortunately due to some legal technicalities the young Mr. Halston had a point. Then the client rep walked off with a jaunty swagger.



I dropped off the other side of the trailer, and retrieved my shoes, and followed him out to his new Porsche 911. Candy apple red, and he peeled it out of the parking lot like he had no money problems whatsoever. I smelled a dead fish, and not just with my nose.



Unfortunately, my bycycle was going to have a hard time keeping up so tailing him right now was out of the question. What to do, what to do? I thought as I stood in the middle of that empty paved space.

“First thing. Let’s call the boss, and ask him what’s his beef with Tycor.” I nodded to myself in satisfaction. I was getting the hang of this detective stuff.



Taduesz

Mark’s article Token tells us about the importance of having small, sometimes seemingly insignificant, rewards for players during a game. While Mark speaks to the campaign as a whole, I’d like to look into PC specific token rewards. I’ve found that these kinds of personal rewards can go a long way to giving players a feeling of accomplishment and increases enjoyment of the game.



One of the things that most gamers in your group will do when building a PC is to create personal goals/desires along with the list of skills and character history. What fun is it to have an elven fighter who was exiled from his homeland without a personal goal or agenda? These things give the character life, and that’s what most players are looking for.



Some gamers I’ve spoken to over the years have told me that it’s the player’s responsibility to try to realize their PC’s goals. They argued that the player needs to role-play their PC’s desire to achieve these goals so that the GM knows that the player wants to delve into them. If the player doesn’t make them a part of the game then the GM doesn’t need to waste his time working on something that the player isn’t interested in. I disagree.



Yes it is important for players to, in game, remind their GM of their PC’s goals. It’s also important for the GM to include these goals in his adventure and campaign design, giving the player a chance to experience the joy of attaining, or the heartbreak of falling short. I see these goals as I do the PC’s disadvantages – if the GM isn’t going to use them, then they’re useless. The player took the time to create these goals and desires for their PC, that means they want to experience them in game.



The hard part for a GM is to implement PC goals into his adventures without seeming like he’s directly tooling the entire thing just for one or two PCs. To combat this when we set up an adventure we only place bits of our PC’s goals into things so they have a chance to step into the spotlight briefly and grab some of that token reward goodness. The thing all GMs run into eventually is that the players are going to do something unexpected and you can bet they’re going to miss out on the token reward goodness that you planned.



Let’s say you have a thief PC who wants to find the rival master thief who killed his teacher. Our PC is hungry for clues for the whereabouts of the master thief, so you’ve planted a note in the next adventure for him to find that will clue him into the fact that the master thief is running the guild in the next town. And then, as you dreaded, the poor PC passes by your obvious hints to search the bookshelves and fails to get his token reward. At this point, I see two options: Find a way to get the info to the PC, or let things go and don’t give the info to the PC.



For me the choice is often to let things go. The idea of a reward, no matter how token it may be, is that it must be earned by doing “the right thing.” The right thing may be taking the time to search the bookshelf, questioning the local snitch or not shooting the bad guy who pleads for his life – but if you don’t do that right thing, you don’t get the reward. But, I’m also a softy for players. I like rewarding them, so I can’t always play hardball.



To help combat a PC’s failure to find our token reward I build in more than one way for the PC to obtain the reward. Doing this really isn’t all that much extra work, and once the PC finds the token reward point you can remove the reward from the other locations, or keep them in place. There are advantages to each approach.



If our PC thief fails to search the bookshelf for the information, but questions the snitch in the alley and gets it that way, you can not only remove the bookshelf note, but also fact that he could get the information by talking to the barmaid at the inn. Removing these cleans up loose ends so you don’t have to worry about the other reward points and can focus on the rest of the game.



Removing these reward points also let’s you limit the amount of token spotlight time each player gets. These are only token rewards, not major plot points so we don’t want one player getting all the glory. Sure, you can eventually turn a PC’s goals or desires into major plot points, but right now we’re only giving token rewards. These rewards are best used as way to build towards the attaining (or failure to attain) a PC’s goal.



There are some advantage to leaving all your token reward points in place however. If you leave things in place your PC thief has various was of corroborating the information he received (Which is always a nice thing to do when dealing with advice on thieves). The fighter who’s vowed to kill all trolls from the Bloody Hand tribe because they killed his brother now has a chance to lay waste to more than just one because he happened upon both of your Bloody Hand trolls. Leaving things in place will also give you the ability to hint at bigger rewards to come.



When our fighter slays his fourth Bloody Hand troll in the town, when he normally finds only one or two at time in infrequent intervals, he is tipped off to the fact that the Bloody Hand trolls must have a strong presence in the area. There must be something up. And something up means more token rewards or maybe a major plot point and even bigger rewards!





In my years of gaming I’ve found that token rewards for the group are fun, but we can’t forget the individual PC. By paying attention to the PC’s goals and desires we have a chance to help bring that PC to life, make the game world seem real and give them a sense of accomplishment even when other things in the campaign may not be going so well. I’ve also found that it’s a lot of fun for me as the GM to give the players individual things they can accomplish on their own. Sure it’s fun to be on the winning team, but there’s a greater pride that comes with doing it yourself.





That’s it for me – See you in the forums!

Drat! I’m late again with my article. Well, at least I’m rather consistent with my being late… Bit short this week so let’s get to it.



In the beginning of Mark’s article Cumulative we are told:



“Every time you roll the dice, you take a chance.”



I found this to be of interest to me, as it’s something I use in my improv styel. The fact that almost anything is possible at any given time is a great way to break into improv GMing.



Your gun can jam in a gunfight, you opponent’s sword can break as it’s struck against your shied – heck a meteorite could fall from the sky and crush you while walking across the street. Sure the odds of the meteorite falling on you are much slimmer than having a gun jam, but there is a chance such a thing could happen.



Two tools that many RPGs implement to try and simulate these types of seemingly random, yet possible occurrences are critical hits and botches. Sometimes it’s a simple metric that tells us if we do double damage with our powerful hit, or that we loose a turn due to our spectacular failure. Other times it’s a chart that has various events listed on it that happen to use depending on what we are doing (Rolemaster is famous for these). While these options are fine, they can often lead to dull or repetitive results.



One of the things I’ve done to spice the results of these chance events up is add my own descriptors to personalize things a bit. This not only helps to make things more colorful and to cut on repetition, you can then modify the results on the fly if needed.



If the official results are “monster beheaded,” and the PC is actually using a crossbow and not a sword, you can switch the description to something more fitting the situation. These types of changes are simple, but vital to keeping players in the moment.



If you simply read off the stock results of the critical or botch, and then have to back-peddle to correct yourself when you notice it doesn’t fit quite right, you effectively stop the game. Which takes everyone out of the game while things are sorted out. Obviously stopping the game isn’t always unavoidable, but the more you can do prevent this the better.



The other tool I use, which is more difficult, is to totally wing it. Don’t use charts, tables or stock descriptions of any kind – look at the situation and determine what would be the most dramatic occurance and that’s what happens. This is a skill that needs to be practiced before it will come naturally, but once you figure it out it’s a lot of fun. I must also admit that this tool isn’t very effective if you’re a “let the dice fall as they may” kind of gamer.



Here are the steps I take when I use this improv tool when the players make a critical hit, or the horrible botch:



·Take a quick assessment of what’s going on. Are they in a desperate combat where things are looking grim? Are they digging for a clue in a massive pile of unordered papers and computer disks? Is this a non-dramatic event such as fixing a broken radio while wasting time for an NPC contact to call?



·Feel the mood in the room. This will help you figure out the level of drama to use. The more tense the mood the better off you’ll be going with something very dramatic. If the room is relaxed, you can keep that mood, or you can change it up with some added drama.



·Determine what you as the GM want or need to happen in this encounter. Should the villain escape so that he can trouble the PCs later on as you planned? Would this be a great time to have a new mystery NPC show up to lend a hand? Should you stop the PC from dying/failing because it would throw a huge wrench into your plot?



·Explain the results to the players.





As I said this takes practice. Not everyone is a natural at this kind of quick thinking on their feet while GMing. Practicing this was one of the ways that I broke into improv GMing, and how I continue to work on my skills. While this idea most likely won’t sit well with those who don’t like a narative approach, I think it’s a good way to get into improv GMing as criticals and botches don’t happen regularly so you don’t have to always be on your toes.



As I said, this was a short one so I’ll stop for now and see what eveyone has to say on this. See you on the forums!

  My wife recently won one of those contests run by the fast food companies to get you to eat at their restaurants.  She pulled off the tab from her drink, and announced that she’d won something.  She won an order of French fried potatoes.

  At that instant, I wondered why these places insult our intelligence by telling us we won free French fries.  Seriously, they might as well announce that we’ve won a free drink refill.  They give these things away as if they cost nothing as it is.  We’re sorry we completely messed up your order by putting fish cakes on all the sandwiches instead of hamburger patties; would you like some free fries?  We’re sorry you had to wait so long for your food that you completely missed all your afternoon appointments; can we give you some fries?  We’re sorry your kid got run over by our delivery truck in the parking lot; how about some fries?  Fries mean nothing to them.  If they can’t get you to take them, they usually throw away whatever’s left over at the end of the night, or sometimes what gets cold in the middle of the afternoon.  Thus I am underwhelmed when I peel off a contest sticker and learn that I’ve won free fries.

  The lottery does this, too, at least in New Jersey.  There are a lot of reasons I don’t particularly like the lottery, but this isn’t the place for that discussion.  If you’re interested, I wrote about it elsewhere.  I don’t play the lottery, because I don’t like losing games.  Yet when I lived in a particularly depressed portion of the state, I found it impossible to walk into most convenience stores without getting on line behind some clearly impoverished person with a long list of lottery tickets they wanted to buy.  New Jersey has these scratch-and-lose tickets, ranging from one dollar to several dollars each.  People buy them, and immediately scratch off the boxes in the store.  I’ve never seen anyone win more than a couple of dollars.  I have seen them win–now, this is the interesting part–more lottery tickets.  Someone will spend a dollar on a dollar lottery ticket, and they’ll win, but not even get their dollar back.  They’ll get another lottery ticket.  That seems silly to me.  If they got rid of all the tickets that said you win another ticket, they could save a lot of money on printing, because they wouldn’t need as many tickets.  Somehow, though, those who scratch off the boxes and get another ticket count this as winning.

  It’s a mystery to me.  French fries and lottery tickets are not prizes.  What is the point in pretending that they are?

  The point is that those who win these nothings are made to feel as if they’ve won something.

  One thing that they teach in motivational training is to set attainable goals.  It’s difficult to illustrate this, as one person’s attainable goal is another’s pipe dream; but the idea is to build up to your dreams in steps that can be seen as successes.  Education is a good model to consider.  A high school student might decide that he wants to be a lawyer; this will be accomplished when after seven years of advanced post-high school education he finally passes the Bar exam.  For some people, it might be possible to keep that goal firmly in view, and never hesitate on the road that leads to it.  For most of us, however, it makes far more sense to break that up into smaller steps, intervening goals.  Let’s make it a goal to get a solid B in algebra; we’ll celebrate if we get that far.  We’ll have several other clearly realizable goals which lead ultimately to high school graduation.  Frankly, on the road to becoming a lawyer, high school graduation isn’t really much more than winning French fries; but we’re going to celebrate it, because it’s a goal, something we set and reached successfully.  Beyond that, there are many more steps that can be recognized along the path:  the milestones of completing each of four years of college, a strong score on the Law School Admission Test (L.S.A.T.), advancement within the graduate course itself.  Successful completion of the first year of law school doesn’t really mean that much; that is, if you stop there, you don’t really have anything.  People who wash out in the second year aren’t really any closer to being attorneys than people who go to work right out of college.  But if you can call that moment a success, the reaching of a goal, and celebrate it as such, it will help give you the motivation to push on through the next year, and ultimately finish the task.

  By now you’re probably wondering what French fries and lottery tickets have to do with law school admission tests, and what any of it has to do with gaming.  It all has to do with rewards–not necessarily the rewards systems that we build into our games, although it can be connected to that, but with the idea of building scenarios with interspersed victory points, intermediate goals that can be reached on the way to the ultimate goal.

  Let’s suppose you’ve got a great idea for an epic campaign that will be about the overthrow of an evil emperor who is oppressing all the civilized planets in the galaxy.  (O.K., I didn’t say it was an original idea; I only said it was good.)  It’s going to take the player characters years to bring down this guy.  They see the problem, and they start working on it, and they build up a resistance movement and begin the struggle toward their ultimate goal.  As play drags on, nothing is really happening.  That’s not true; you, as referee, can see that many things are happening.  The resistance is getting stronger, there is growing support on many planets, and things are moving toward the confrontation that will turn the tide–but your players only see that they’ve been at this for a long time, and don’t appear to be any closer to deposing this despot than they were at the beginning.  They’re losing interest.  It’s inevitable.  Who wants to keep reading a story in which nothing ever really happens?  Who wants to keep playing a game which seems like a perpetual stalemate?

  To solve this, you have to give the players intermediate tasks that they can accomplish along the way, moments that may have nothing to do with the coup against the emperor, but which will give them that feeling of success that they need to keep going.  So imagine that the empire has built, I don’t know, some sort of super weapon in a space station that can destroy entire planets (I didn’t say it was original, did I?), and that the group of which the player characters are part has managed to get hold of the plans for this weapon.  Let them try to destroy the weapon, and make it something they can accomplish.  It really does very little to end the reign of the emperor; it does feel like a great blow for the resistance.  It gives the players that little token reward that inspires them to keep going, like winning French fries or free lottery tickets.

  It does something else, too.  If your games are such that the players might ultimately fail–that is, if it is possible that they could get to the point that they are confronting the evil emperor and prepared to bring him to justice, but they’re not up to the task and die gloriously in the final battle without changing the world–these token victories along the way will have given meaning to the story.  Maybe they didn’t see the death of the emperor; they did destroy his killer space weapon, unite the scattered resistance into a formidable opposition army, and rescue the princess behind whom the people would rally.  Those token accomplishments might mean nothing ultimately–the only thing that really matters is whether the emperor is defeated–but they will be remembered as victories along the road, and will have made the game worth playing even if in the end they failed to grasp the brass ring.

  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 floated in my ectoplasmic form in the supernatural borderlands, the Mistlands, Elfhome, of a world of fallen technology. Magic had risen to replace megacorps. And four worlds of which this was just one were each connected to one another by psi gates with the ambitious Alexander MegaCorp poised to conquer them all, if I read the situation aright.



Meanwhile, a High Fey in the temporary form, I’d wager, of a Bird of Paradise laughed its beak off, literally, at my joke. I joined in weakly, happy to avoid being turned into a shrub.



The bird put its beak back on, and flew up to land on the branch of a silver-coated tree that chimed in a rosemary scented wind.



“Okay, why did you come here, other than to avoid the psi hit team that is scouring the gate area for your presence back in what we laughingly call the Real World. And oh yeah, to avoid bleeding your ectoplasmic self to death seeing as this realm is sorta timeless.”

I yawned at his recitation of my weaknesses. He had good points, but this was bargaining with the Fey, and admitting his points would be foolish.

“I’m a verser, you don’t think I’ve been in worse situations than this?”

He waved his wing irritably.

“Me, I see a bird that has his world being invaded by a bunch of tech lovers after he somehow managed to overturn the tech basis of the world?” I raised an eyebrow in inquiry. The bird puffed out his chest in pride.



“They were a bunch of soulless ambition ridden monsters who got tired of the game they had made for themselves. Or their children did. They started playing games of calling things magic when they knew it was technology. Then they started taking it seriously. Magic grew, and their tech was so good that they did not need to tend it for decades. So the technology fell, and the magic rose as the people grew to believe the robot factories were magic. And with technology failing sporadically, the people grew to believe in a chancy magic, fickle.”



“Like the High Fey?”

“Indeed. The reigning neutral power never saw it coming. We took his world away from him right in front of his eyes. Technogeeks are so easy to trick.” The bird rubbed its wings together in ectstatic self-congratulation, and then pranced up and down the diamond plated branch of the tree.



“And now you are invaded by more of those soulless monsters.”

“True.” The bird said bitterly.

“I want time to start an alliance against AMC.”

“And what will you give me in return?”

No matter how I protested, the Fey refused to bend from his selfish position. I pointed out that I was helping him; he shrugged.

“Fine, I shall let you have a better joke than the one I gave you before.”

He looked intrigued, and begged for a hint. I bit my lip to keep from smiling in triumph.

“A great incongruity it is.” I said with a significant look, and he started to think.



A golden train engineer’s watch plunked down on the ground below me. I reached for it telekinetically, and saw that it counted down twenty-four hours.



In the other world, the Aztec world, a feather drifted past the priests who were holding Twyla’s mind in a cage of fire. It distracted them. She broke loose of her imprisonment with a vigor that stunned them.



Upon seeing me near dead in her hands, she dropped me onto the surface of the granite flat pyramid while the crowds of spectators who wanted blood booed.



Then she crashed her head as hard as she could into the magical forcefield, and dropped unconscious.



I heard the announcer apologize to the crowd, and promise a free entry to tommorrow’s show, and a free night at the Hotel of the Bloody Heart for all visitors. The bribe worked, and rioting was avoided.

I had twenty-four hours before I would face Twyla again in a fight to the death. Plenty of time to rescue her, I told myself with faux optimism that I did not believe. Meanwhile, the Aztecan fight promoters would be patching my body back up.



Back in the Mistlands, I took the time to patch the gaping rents in my ectoplasm so that I no longer streamed energy into the ether. Then I walked seven times around a mound in the middle of the decayed city to get back to the “Real World”.



Psis still hunted for me, but I slipped silently into the earth and headed for one of the other gates on this world. The psis did not follow, and I do not blame them. The rulers and creatures of the world were hostile to them, and although the mightiest were not permitted direct action I would wager, there is an awful lot a spirit can do to you in subtle ways. I’m sure the landscape just shrieked menace and horror to the hunters. To me, it was kinda cute.



I slipped through an unstable rent in space-time, and skidded into the second more advanced world of the four. The world of AMC’s psi headquarters in an eighties’ corporate style seemed the youngest, then this one, then AMC’s home world of megacorps in 2050, and finally the world the fey had stolen comprised the whole quartet of related worlds, I believed. Now, I needed to find out about this world despite the fact that I remained an ectoplasmic form in a world that made that difficult to sustain.



I resolved to move cautiously, and refrain from using too much psionics. Meanwhile my watch had nearly ticked off an hour. I had to get moving.



Flying over the rock-strewn dessert remained not to difficult. Eventually, I found a thin, dusty road, and then a sentient in a big pick-up truck.



I touched his mind gently, and tried to sort out some opinions about the world, and my location.



He drove across Upper Uzbekistan. Piorro d’Florrenze got his degree as a Petroleum Engineer(he thought of it that way) from the University at Venice. In his off days, he smuggled cigarettes and women’s dresses into China for the money, the thrill, and the chance to spit in the Chicom’s eye. He hoped the American president would do something about them, now that the terrorists were smacked into line, but he had heard worrisome reports of new terrorist activity in what one would have thought of as very stable countries. He sighed, if it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

In that moment, I plucked a map from his head(very accurate one too with all the major oil fields clearly highlighted), and then I searched forward for any Chicom patrols sweeping near the border. He was clear of that threat, and I left him in the dessert none the wiser, although I was “sweating” from all the effort.



Then I pushed on through the planet in a straight line, or as near as I could make it. Those oil fields did help after all. I bumped into the lower edge of ANWR in Alaska, and readjusted my course.



The White House had a tank out front, and glass dome on the top, but otherwise it looked very familiar. Still, I took a moment to open myself up to the mental chatter around me, and just get a basic feel for this place and time. Its easy to assume that just because they are Americans in this alternate universe that they are like the ones back home. I faintly remember someone, Whisp?? maybe, telling me how much of a mindtrip it had been to defend Hitler against the rampaging goons of the British Nazi Order.



But the mental atmosphere tested out as clear as could be expected. The usual array of petty ambitions, spite, greed, and the like, but no overwhelming structure of such nature bleaked the landscape. And a certain basic understanding of the rules informed the games.



I gasped in effort.



So, I walked in unannounced into the White House. Most of what I expected to see was there. I was startled to see a small bust of someone called George Bush, Jr. as a two-term president. I’d heard of the guy before I left, but I would have almost bet money that he would never get the job. In my reality, when I left, Bill Clinton had been in charge.



The tock of my watch warned me that another hour had passed, and I needed to stop the museum wandering as fascinating as it was.



I went straight to the Oval Office, and saw a black woman sitting behind the desk. I paused, startled. She looked vaguely familiar, but no name would surface for a long moment.



Condoleeza Rice. Her eyes were sharp, inquisitive, and she laughed a bit to herself as she bounced between screens with a machine-gun pace on her three computers.



I liked her.



So I floated through the desk, and made myself somewhat visible by gathering light into a humanoid form.



“Ma’am?”

She looked up with her hand already under the desk.

“That won’t be necessary. I am just here to talk.” I said hoping she would not punch a panic button. This was hard, and my strength was running a little thin. I had to double and triple check every action I took just to avoid the mistakes that seemed almost inevitable in this world.

“What are you?” Her sharp voice of command was belied by the intent curiousity of her eyes, and at the same time a paranoia kept her looking about for some threat. She was smart, no doubt.

“I could be an angel sent to give you a message.”

She smiled at my deliberately diffident tone.

“Not that I believe that is impossible, but I wonder if an angel would have a Southern accent.”

“Why not, I think I heard of a dragon with a cracker accent.” I said without thinking, and she laughed.

“I read that book too. Rosemary Edgehill. Who are you, what are you? Is this your idea of a demonstration tech to try to get the Army to buy a new holographic generator. If so, I’m impressed, although there are official channels to go through, I understand that garage geniuses sometimes don’t understand that.”

It sounded like she met her fair share of nutcases and useful nutcases in her job. I had not considered that but People With A Mission or a Plan would tend to gravitate toward this office. I grimace, people like me.



“I’m afraid, its a little stranger than either of those explanations. Tell me, are you having difficulties with a new armed force attacking your people?”

“We might be.” She said leaning back in the custom-designed chair, and giving me a blank stare.

“People with advanced weaponry who are able to do things your experts find impossible to explain?”



“You’re their emmissary? I’m afraid the reports did not mention things like this. They only told about superhumanly fast reflexes, and autorifles with micro-missile rounds.”

“Cyberpunks. No, ma’am. I’m their enemy. I assume this is a shadow war still?”

“Still? And cyberpunks? That’s preposterous. I’ve read the fiction, and logically it just does not hold together.”

“Not here, not now, with a strong nation-state system to repress the megacorps, but elsewhere…”

“You are talking about alternate time lines.”

“Got it in three, Ms. President. Much better than I would have done.”

“That makes you an extradimensional. Are you from this cyberpunk world or where?”

“Actually, I’m originally from a world similar to this one, I think. I left in 1999, and no I haven’t been travelling for a decade, but much, much longer.”

“Interesting. You are assuming that the enemy is building strength in this shadow war, and will soon go to a full offensive. Its possible, but also a decapitation strike like my predecessor favored might be even easier for them. Also, corporate pschyology would favor such a move. Corporate types are more into Leveraged Buy-outs and such than full-on ground war. They take out the leaders, and preserve the assets.”

“You’re scary, ma’am, but in a good way.” I added the last in a rush when she looked up at me with a sharp glance. Then she smiled.

“That’s why I’m the President.”

“I was the President too, in another reality, a much smaller Reformed USA in something like 2016 after the nuclear war of 2003.” I confessed this kinda sheepishly but I knew she needed to understand on a more deep level the notion of alternate realities. She nodded, and then waved me to continue with the briefing.

“There should be gates which I can find for you, but they likely have factories already in operation on this side building new warriors.”

“We can cut off the resupply, and then unleash Ashcroft’s Assasins on the factory problem.”

“Ms. President. I have to do that now. Your world is very unfriendly on a reality level to ectoplasmic entities such as I am temporarily. I’m about to fall over.”

“Right, leave a message at a US embassy, code Southern Ghost, and it will get back to me within two hours.” She stood, and started talking urgently into her speaker phone as I walked out the wall.



Another thirty minutes, and I had located all the gates. Upper Uzbekistan, North of Oslo, Montana, and Ascunscion Island in the South Pacific held rents in space-time. I knew how to close such gates, but it was not possible in this world, and besides my method tended toward the kiloton release of energy. I dropped the note off at the London Embassy. The Ambassador got quite a shock when his pen start writing of its own accord a seried of coordinates, but I did not have time to explain.



I went back through the Uzbekistan gate, and rested for the remainder of the hour. Time slipped by.



The next gate took me to the AMC world, and I backed out double quick singed by psi-blasts and weakened by the inherent unsuitability of that world to my present form. No major form of psi would work there. Their gates were technological in form I had noticed in between the punks trying to flash-fry my noodle. If only I could go into that world full power, I could overwhelm their pitiful psis, but then if I could do that, their psi’s would probably be not so pitiful.



My last gate brought me to the 1980′s I thought from the architecture. I roared in because I knew they would be waiting for me. They were.



The psi-tech circle of metal held telekinetically in the air to amplify the natural rent in space saw flashes of light, and psis going up in pyrokinetic splendor. They were not used to fighting equals, and definitely not used to fighting their superior in talent. In strength, breadth of talent, and experience I outranked them, but in sheer mass of numbers they swamped me.



My first goal was to spread confusion. If they could get up a coordinated effort(provided they even knew how to do that), I might be a gone goose. So any officer types got treated to the Tennessean BBQ Treatment. Whoosh!



My second goal, well, I never got to it. I wanted to find out if there was any resistance in this world that I could reach out too. I’m pretty sure there was. But in between wheeling about the sky like a demented hawk, and flash-frying the the leader-types, and dodging the abundance of seeking scans, and psi blasts, and commands, I had no time.



I did have one advantage more, they could not use area effect attacks because a blanket command would have hit everybody. A shouted “Stop” would have hit me, but everyone else as well. I had no such limit. On the other hand, they had reinforcements.



I fled back into the gate, and far away. Injured and sore and badly in need of a victory, I sat down in mountain glen beside an overgrown Wal-mart because a unicorn capered in a charming way. It walked up to me even though I thought I was invisible, and bent to bow, or so I guessed. The horn pierced my space, and I felt health, vitality, and joy flood into me.

I stared into its gleaming blue eyes, and wanted desperately to pat it, but remembering the legends decided that might be hazardous.

“Thanks, buddy.”

It nodded, and cantered away in a playful manner. I followed it past ruined towers, and banks, and gradually something which I had known came back to me.

Nothing is invincible, except for my God. Nothing. This world had once had technology to shame the AMC corporation, and this world would have laughed at the threat of magic if it had understood it even existed. And yet a unicorn danced up the crumbling steps of the Amex Building.

There’s always a way. There are no perfect strategies in a finite universe. Every strength implies a weakness in even the best of plans. And somehow, I doubted that AMC corporation made the best of plans; if they did, why were they evil?

I bowed from the shoulders to the unicorn, and it accepted my respect as its due. Turning away, I went back to the very bright lady who held the highest office in her world.



“It’s been a day since you came here. What’s happened?”

I explained, and I mentioned the difference in time flow between worlds. Her face lit up.

“That means we are inside the decision cycle of the enemy without even trying.”

The military and the civilian advisors in the room chuckled like wolves contemplating a visit to the sheepfold.

One general said in my direction since I had not bothered to become visible this time,

“Are you familiar with the Apache?”



Later, I helped the pilot fly through the invisible gate to the eighties high psi world. My first blast of psi nullification meant to smack down their telekinesis failed in the face of their concerted will. That did not matter. They were set, very well, to protect themselves against another one of my raids.

This made it hard for them to shift over to telekinetically smacking physical objects out of the sky.

A hundred psi’s in relatively soft cover versus one modified for ground suppression of troops Apache helicopter with a minute of free fire before it even took damage is not a pretty thing. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition were expended.

We crashed due to some clever counter-attack, but gently with my help. I took on the last five by myself. Two surrendered.



Then the rest of the copters stormed in, and close behind them the heavy-lift copters hoisted in tanks and infantry.



Meanwhile back in the other world, a ramp was being rapidly constructed so that we could drive into the other world instead of being coptered into it.



The strike across country to a nearby airport netted us passenger jets which I modified by main telekinetic force. I promised to get the jury-rigged planes down in one piece if the pilots would fly them.



The pilots shocked me with volunteering to a person. I certainly wouldn’t have if some immaterial voice shredded the back end of a plane, pulled out the seats, and sorta glued it together. However, I did notice that everyone wore parachutes.



With tanks and copters inside the once commercial jets we used up the few remaining hours to fly to our target site. We had complete surprise for a while.



Then the planes started to wobble as parts started pulling off under long-range tk attack. I sent a message to the Fey to launch the attack we agreed upon.



Human magicians and sword wielders leapt through the gate from the fey world, and assaulted the psi site there. Most of their magic was of little use in this world, but enough worked to terrify the psi’s who were already frightened of them.

Only the weak psi’s from the prototype project in the AMC world remained as a collective force, and I could handle them if they ventured into this world.

We crossed our fingers, and hoped no other unified force, say an off-duty shift woke up, and got its act together in time to find us.



We landed on the interstate roadway near the AMC headquarters. (I had to tell a bicyclist on a ten-speed to get out of the way first.)

We roared into the parking lot of the headquarters, and met a panicking lot of psi’s who were not at all sure what was going on. They thought the native psi’s were rebelling.



I felt a slam as a powerful mind impacted on me, and then moved on to slam others. Following it brought me into the presence of an English teacher with glowing eyes.

He caught me, and I felt his strength. I thought I could beat him, but I was not sure.

“You’re the Hammer of Tyrants my wife precogged.”

He said, and I relaxed.

“You’re the rebel leader I wanted to get in contact with.”

Lacking a hand, we exchanged bows.

“Jack Mitchelson.”

“Taduesz, tyrants smashed, virtue upheld, and ice cream eaten.”

He laughed, and welcomed me to his group of psis who were stationed nearby every major post of the enemy he said. They had seen the wonderful attack by the machine. What was it? It turned out that they did not have as much technology as I expected; psionic tricks did much of their work.

Finally, I asked the question that bugged me.

“An English teacher, rebel leader?”

“Have you ever tried to keep a classroom of psionically gifted children in line?” He replied, and I shook my head in a grateful negation at the thought of the horrors possible to a mischievous twelve year old telekinetic.



*Time* I heard, and I saw in a vision the watch strike its last moments. I flew to the Fey without protest hoping my last play would work, or I stood in serious danger.



In the world of the Fey, I cast my spell, and soon stood in the magical borderland called the Mistlands. The bird of paradise, a High Fey, floated lazily up to me, upside down.

“You promised a joke, better than the last one. Time to pay up.”

I was nervous because a joke expected is harder to pull off often enough.

I waved my fingers, and conjured a small image above my hand. Two people, Twlya and Milos stood there.

“O Mighty Puissance, if you would bring these two to me, then I may deliver you your prize. But may I say first how successful this campaign seems to be?”

“Yes,” The bird said at first grumpily from its perch on a pearl strung branch, but it brightened.

“Yes, we cannot directly interfere in those other worlds, but we see that President Rice’s forces are holding the prisoners and the main town, and growing in strength. The rebels of the psi world are rounding up their oppressors who collaborated with the invaders. Soon we think AMC will launch a strike into the gates, but they still do not understand that they are not fighting in small groups, but an army. Their cyberpunks are impressive, but not quick enought to outrun a shockwave from high artillery. And I do believe that the other MegaCorps in the AMC world will not support their former competitor and now master. You have done well,Taduesz, but I could not let you go without my joke, its not in my nature.”

I bowed, and the bird summoned Twyla and Milos. They stood blinking, and both spotted me at the same time, and made the identical hand gestures, and the bird started cackling. Both stared at him in the same way, and he fell over holding his gut laughing so hard he could not talk.

They tried to ask me what was happening, but I shushed them.

“Very good, Taduesz. A very amusing pair. I have seldom seen so mismatched a pair who yet are obviously right for each other. The pacifist and the lady commando are still in synch after months apart. Quite an incongruity, all told.” The bird said as it stood, and wiped an eye with its wing.

“Yes, yes, I’m glad you liked it.” I said gravely with a false smugness. It had not gone quite like I planned it, but it worked, and we accept luck at this end of the table.



“Sir,” Milos said to the bird. “Can you help us? I cannot see my lady, nor she me?”

The bird paused and looked a chill eye at Milos.

“My help always comes with a price.”

“I’ll pay it, anything.” Milos said, and I tried to yell at him to shut up, but my lips would not move. You never,ever say things like that to the Fey.

“I’ll take that flower.” The bird said, and pointed a scarlet wing at the daisy suddenly in Milos’s hand.

“That’s the flower I gave Twyla when I first met her.” He said reluctantly.

“True enough. Plant a flower from its seed, here, and as long as you love her, another one will grow each year. And each year I will come down here to smell the flower. If there is no flower, then I will pluck you instead.”

“Pluck me?”

“You will die.”

“Die? What’s that?”

“Cease to exist in the material world.”

“Oh, that’s okay, if I did not love her, I would not want to live.” Milos said with relief.

The two suddenly saw each other, and they jumped at each other for a hug and a kiss accompanied by tears and shrieks of joy. They receded into the distance.

“Not bad, you are maybe not so far from the Lords of Light as you might say.”

“Maybe, but then again, its few enough true immortals out there that consent to the gift of death.”

“Immortals?”

“You didn’t know, Taduesz? They are pacifists, and know nothing of murder because they are immortal. Quite resistant to damage as well. They can operate for weeks with a spear in their heart. You could have told Milos there to rip free of his chains. He could have done it if he understood. Nothing the Aztecans had could have stopped him if he had known to just keep plugging onward.”

For a long moment, I looked into the distance grateful Milos was a pacifist.

“So maybe, I am not so good after all. Killing an immortal an all.” His aspect turned dark and menacing.

“If he turns from her which I rather doubt. No, I think when the Last Battle for Space-time is fought, you will be on the side of the Creator; probably sneaking out and hamstringing demon princes, and then eating their eyeballs.”

He cawed laughter.

“You’ll have to wait and see, Taduesz. Maybe, I’ll be using my talons on a paladin, on a white horse, by the name of Taduesz in the Last Battle.”



He flew away, and I went my weary way back to my body. Waking up in a cell while cruel and malevolent men in wrap-around shorts prodded me did not improve the day. Their stink annoyed me too.

“He awakes, but his opponent is gone from her cell without explanation.”

“So substitute another. The people are stupid; give them enough free wine, and they will not notice.” Another harsh voice replied to the first worrier.

I began to speak in a low mutter in a latin tongue. Promising things that few would dare promise, but then I am a verser, and what is life in a world I hate? I can go to another world of matter with a moment’s notice.

The spells on the rooms prevented good magic, but I knew a few spells not notably good by some definitions. One I had used on Gavin.

Still, their was resistance, the makers of the pyramid were not fools, they knew that evil-doers might work magic here as well.

I promised my life, and the spirits of the dead heard me.

Ghosts of all the dead who had been slaughtered on this rock began to rise like wisps of vapor through the floor.

“You will keep your promise, Taduesz. We are not kindly like the bird.” I shivered and nodded. The highest rank priest in the room was chanting some simple spell, the ghost drained him first, and then the others finished the rest in a rush of greed. Their dessicated husks fell to the stone.



A simple spell, and my chains fell off. I walked free surrounded by a horde of revenants, the vengeful dead. We came to a guard, and he died without a sound.



The wave of grew as the deaths fueled more revenants, and we came to the prison blocks which they made to enter and drain, but I forbade it. Their lifeless eyes peered back at me, and they grinned.

“You have no strength, Taduesz. You are tired and worn.”

“You know who I am; do you really want an enemy to the end of time, ghost?” I said. “You can take these now, but I will visit revenge a hundred-fold.”

“Will you now?” The ghost said as it dragged a finger along my cheek. Pain seared up and down my body like I was burning alive.

“Yes, oh, yes.” I said past gasps for air and concentration. They withdrew and left the prisoners alone.

We slaughtered our way to the surface sparing few.

At the top, I walked out to see the crowd in the stands on the other side of the magical forcefield. Hundreds of revenants crowded around me.

I telekinetically drew the microphone from its crane stand on the other side of the forcefield.

I looked at the crowd of thousands who wanted to see blood, innocent blood spattered on the stones.

No children stood in the crowd although I checked for a thorough five minutes with my psionic skills while the crowd grew restive.

Though it revolted my stomach, I saw it as righteous.

“Menes, menes, tekel, upharsin. You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting.” I said to the crowd, and released the revenants who launched themselves gibbering with rage at the magical forcefield. It buckled after a minute, and the crowd gaped in horror.

“Its time, Taduesz.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” I said to the ghost that had hurt me before.

“You promised a special one for us; these others will be quick as you specified. We will be glad to exchange a quickness for you with a length for them.”

I shook my head. It took a long time, but I think the pyramid and the stands were empty of the guilty, even if not their bodies by the time I finished screaming. Not a variant of the spell I am eager to repeat. I versed out.



Taduesz