The Gaming Outpost

My mecha, a hundred twenty-eight feet tall, and close to several million tons of mass smelled of oil and metal and new paint. The new paint was to make the new parts match after being burned off by a near-miss with a tactical nuke last week, said my chief engineer.



I nodded back trying to act like I had the faintest clue what I was doing. He patted me on the arm. And he told me that I just needed to get back into the swing of things after my almost going kabloowie.



Good, he thought my nervousness was due to fear of getting killed. My doppleganger might well, and probably did fear that, but I was a verser. I’d died more times than I can recall without checking my logbook.



I patted the side of foot of the mecha since the top of the foot was out of reach. With frightening grace and speed it turned, and lowered an arm to point a hand, and then a finger at me.



I walked onto the finger, and we whipped skyward, only to be carefully placed next to a catwalk with a door closed that led into the mecha’s head.



Hopping onto the catwalk, I looked about, but hardly…

Towering spires of churches stab through the smoky clouds that fill the night sky, while the stone and wooden homes of the commoners huddle together on the streets. The light of the full moon creeps it’s way through the mist and smog to create small patches of illumination. These only serve to amplify the darkness of the shadows, causing them to seem longer and deeper than they are during the haze of daylight.



The night air is filled with the familiar smells and tastes of the city. The labs of the local alchemists spew out thick clouds of fumes through an assortment of different shaped chimneys that always seem to smell of sulfur and sea salts. The markets of the city, normally a cacophony of bartering voices and animal sounds, are now quiet. Leaving the scents of the sweat meats, fruits, stale wine and horse dung lingering to create an atmosphere thick enough you can almost taste.



If you were to climb the wine merchant’s building in the alley you’ve been sitting in, there would be nothing to see but more and more city. Avalon surrounds you like a womb of corruption, reaching out and holding you close enough to It’s heart that you know you can’t escape until It’s ready to give you up. Nothing you can do will pull you out of the depths. At least, that’s what It wants you to think.



The city is everything you’ve ever known, or at least this part of it is.



You’ve never been through the whole city. You don’t have the time, the money or the inclination. Besides, it would take too long to even try. The whole damned thing is some hundreds of miles across. At least that’s what you’ve been told by the storytellers on the street you used to give your hard fought coppers to when you were younger. But later, when you learned to pick the pockets of the marks who bothered to listen to those tales, you’d forgotten most of those stories as anything other than a moments amusement.



This isn’t where you would be if you had a choice, but choices are hard to come by here. Besides, you don’t know where else you’d be with your skills. You have no idea what lies outside the city, and right now, it doesn’t matter. There’s work to be done.



The incessant night fog, mixed with the stench of the sulfur fumes and the coal smoke from a thousand different furnaces combine to make an almost constant night, wrapping around you like the well worn cloak your wearing to help you blend with the oppressive blackness. The light that has managed to filter through the concoction of gasses and soot during the daytime has long faded, leaving only the flickering of candles and lamps in the surrounding buildings as the only current source of light. A sudden breeze of the cold night air comes through your alley, causing you to shift slightly in order to pull your cloak closer, while your steady breathing creates small wisps of frozen air that drift out of your cowl.



You’ve been waiting in the alley at the corner of Copper and Water streets for almost three hours now. The chill of the night is starting to settle into your bones, making your knees feel like they might lock permanently into the crouching posture you’ve been holding next to the old wine barrels. The smell of the stale wine and vinegar is strong. You would have ignored the smell, but as it gives you a hint of what might await you at the Red Crow if all goes well, you allow yourself a moment to notice.



As another half hour wears on, you start to think that your contact might not show, which would destroy six days worth of work and about twenty gold talons in bribes, most of your savings. But, you quickly remind yourself that if this score goes right, it means big payoff. And, the Lamplighters Guild is always on time. Always.



Just as you finish adjusting your position behind the barrel to try and keep your blood flowing, the Tower Clock in the center of Avalon strikes nine. At the last stroke, as the sounds of the massive bell begins to reverberate into the night, the Lighters materialize out of the inky shadows. Their soundless strides and raven black cloaks which refuse to move even in the strongest winds, makes the Lighters one of the more peculiar residents of Avalon. They make their rounds each night, stopping at every oil lamp on the streets of Avalon, providing a little glimmer of bright hope in the bowels of the city. And, thankfully, they are so punctual that all timepieces are set after them.



Apart from their obvious job of keeping Avalon out of perpetual darkness through their self appointed duty, these mysterious beings also keep most of the secrets in Avalon. If it’s happening, happened, talked about or rumored to be, the Lighters know about it. And, luckily for you, they charge a fair price. At least it’s one that you can currently afford.



“Greetings, Dispeller of the Darkness and Bringer of Hope, how do the lamps burn this night?” You’ve learned the hard way that the only way to get anything out of the Lighters is to be overly dramatic, use long sentences, have the right bribe and be very respectful.



The Lighter slowly reaches out with the glowing brand of his staff towards the glass covered lamp and ignites the wick with the small flame. “The Lamps burn well this night. Though, not bright enough.” His voice is soft, almost a whisper, but still as easily heard as if he were speaking into your ear.



“Oh, that I could aid you,” reaching into your cloak and producing a small candle made from the fat of a newborn calf, you offer it to the Lighter. “Perhaps the light from within this one’s eyes may help your task?” The Lighter turns his face towards you, in order to examine the offering. This is the part that makes your stomach turn.



It’s not the gaunt face neither is it the thin lips that hide the needle like teeth nor the cadaverous flesh stretched taught across their bones that causes the problem. It’s the missing eyes.



Not that the Lighters have sockets for eyes that are no longer there, but rather their skin seems to create one elongated forehead that starts at their chalk white hair and stretches over where their eyes should be and ends at the top of their hawk like nose. That along with the fact that they seem to see more without eyes than you can with them makes your skin crawl every time they “look” at you. You are positive they can see inside…



“Yeah it’s the real thing…I mean,” You stammer slightly at the invisible visual scrutiny of the candle as you fight to regain your composure. “I mean…I would be willing to part with this, although it is very dear to me, if one such as yourself were to have insight as to the inner workings of the upper floors of the exquisitely designed Hansen estate…” the face turns from the candle to you, causing you to swallow hard. “For I have need of such information so that I might secure the…” The face is now inches from yours, and disturbing your concentration horribly.



“Eternal light that shines within the diamond the size of a Quall merchant’s eye?”



“Uh…Yeah. That’d be it.” The directness causes a lack of etiquette on your part, but as the Lighter produces the one of a kind parchment, and takes the calf candle from your hand, you know the deal is sealed.



“May the One Who Illuminates Us All shine upon you,” The thin lips part in what you think may be the first smile you’ve ever seen from a Lighter as he hands you the parchment. Then, without further comment, he moves on to the other lamps on the street, methodically lighting each in turn.



“And may the Darkness Never Dwell Within,” You finish the parting as he walks away, adding, “Whatever in the Hells that means…” under your breath as you turn and hurrying down the alley, as much to get to the Hansen estate as in fear that the Lighter may have heard you. The Lighters take insults very seriously.



Your thought’s quickly turn to the job at hand. You’ve got the map of the estate’s third story complete with trap locations and lock descriptions. The house guards that could be bribed have been, and you’ll just have to deal with any strays quickly and quietly. You’ve timed the patrol of the Griffins so you know the city guard won’t be a bother and night is getting on. It’s time for the real work to start.



* * *



With what feels like all of the Esoteric Order of Ancient Knowledge watching, you slowly begin the mixing of the catalyst with the concoction of lead, mercury and various other elements that you have been working on over your last term as an apprentice. The sweat is beading up on your freshly shorn head, running in small droplets down your temples and into the collar of your gray robes. The stadium benches that rise up around you and the testing tables in the center of the depression of the small room that serves as the location for your final exam is filled with the various professors and accomplished alchemists that make up the Testing Board.



Here, in the two story tubular testing room at the compound-like setting that makes up the home of the Order, you have reached the culmination of the testing that you began when you were a young boy. This test is all you have thought of since you began your study. When you started, you were plagued day and night by your superiors demands for cleaning their rooms, sweeping the floors, emptying out the waste water, cooking meals and the occasional scrapping of the remains of an unfortunate alchemist from the floor of the lab.



Now is the time to earn the respect you know you deserve.



After years of struggle and trials, you have succeeded in your quest for the final exam. Here you will attempt to turn lead into gold. The task that is given to every student at the end of their studies even though no one has yet to accomplish the feat. It is more of a tradition than an actual attempt to turn lead into gold, more of a test of your skills and abilities than an actual experiment.



Most students don’t even give it much thought after their final exam. Just one more thing to get over before you are allowed to practice and get on to the “real work” of the alchemist. You, however, have taken it to a much deeper level. The other applicants for graduation have snickered at your determination, making you the butt of many jokes. “The One” they’ve taken to calling you in mockery of your drive to be the first to actually accomplish the transmutation. In their mocking you they have only sharpened your focus and forced your determination to new levels.



Your parents had spent most of their savings to get you into the Order. They weren’t wealthy, being mere carpenters, but the talent you showed at the initial trials the Order held when you were only ten winters old, made your parents determined to give you a chance for greatness. They took you to the Order once they had managed to gather the entry fee from their savings, kissed you goodbye on the massive marble steps and waved to you as the massive iron bound oak doors closed them off from your boyish view. That was the last time you saw them.



You heard they died a few years back, you’re a bit over 25 now, but by that time you were so involved in your studies, and so close to your graduation and you can’t remember what you mother looked like anymore… You’ve decided they would have wanted it this way.



The clink of your silver spoon on the glass alembic shatters the reminiscence, jerking you back to the situation at hand. You quickly glanced up to the benches… No, they didn’t seem to notice your slip. You continue on your task without thinking further of the past. You are not allowed to use any written notes, so all of your mental fortitude needs to be focused on what is happening now. Everything needs to be perfect. You remind yourself, as you swiftly cross from the large oak table on your left to deliver a portion of your mixture from it’s drying dish to the final set of glass beakers and tubes on the smaller table to your right, that you can’t afford any foolish mistakes at this point. Any errors would be excuse to fail you. Fail, and you’ll be out on the street with no chance for survival. You have no other skills, and if you fail, the Order won’t allow you to practice. You have no choice but to succeed.



You pull back the frayed sleeve of your worn and charred student’s robes as you light the fire under the ceramic dish at the end of your complex maze of tubes and beakers. Your concentration is complete. The rest of the room ceases to exist. The sweat has stopped flowing due to nervousness, and is now due to the effects of work, strain and time. You are drawing to the end of five hours worth of work and, as you quickly catalogue all that you have done in that time, you allow yourself a small grin. It will work. It must work! You will achieve what the others have not!



“Congratulations, Alchemist,” you jump at the touch of a firm clutching hand on your right shoulder. Turning slowly, you wipe the sweat from your head and stare with bleary eyes at the professor.



“I…”



“Yes,” another hand grabs yours and begins to shake it vigorously. “You’ve done well.”



“All we’ve come to expect…”



“Beautiful, technique.”



“Excellent!”



“Perfect concentration!”



“Precise!”



The handshakes and the words have blended into a smear of faces and grasping fingers. You can only stammer the occasional “Thank you,” as the professors lead you towards the far end of the testing floor, pulling you from your experiment to the single, black door that will allow you entrance to the graduation hall. There, you will officially be given your first set of the black trimmed red robes that will be your vestment for the rest of your days.



You glance through the crowd towards the door and are filled with a sense of awe for the meaning of the image. Passing though the blackness of the abyss that the door symbolizes, you will walk beyond, crossing the portal that will leave behind the name of Student, and be granted the title you have awaited and worked for all these years: Alchemist.



You reach the door as it is opened for you by the senior professor of the testing panel. His wrinkled and pitted face smiles warmly at you. He pats you gently on the arm, much like your father might have if he were here…The gold!



You must see! You twist suddenly in the mass of celebrants, pulling away from the professor and attempting to make your way back to the testing tables. You never saw if it worked! It had worked hadn’t it? Why didn’t you see it then? You’re feeling of elation at success is quickly eroded by the panic of the addict who just realized that he has eaten his last lotus blossom.



You tear yourself away from the groping hands that seem to reach out from the floor to hold you, keeping you from your prize and push back towards the testing table.



“Now, now my young Alchemist,” The voice is deep, strong and invading. It clears away the fear causing you to focus your eyes on the speaker. “There is no need for such foolish dreams.” It’s Felix.



You never thought you would see the Master, but here he is. At your testing! His red robes with the black trim signify that he alone is the head of the Order. He alone is the Master of Alchemy. Said to be a thousand years old, keeping his youth through his art, he founded the Esoteric Order decades ago as a way to expand the art and improve the status of Alchemists. Because of him, Alchemists are revered, as well as feared, by all of Avalon. You have never seen Felix before, few people alive today could say they have. His very presence causes a silence to fall on the room, broken only by his voice.



“We have all thought we were capable of the feat,” His voice is calm and soothing, seeming to exude understanding and peace. His mouth turns upward into an odd smile that is both disarming and enchanting. You nod dumbly at his words. “Now, hurry on and accept the honor that you have earned with your diligent study and your exceptional skill. Forget the dreams of the apprentice, and awake to the truths of the Alchemist.”



You are patted lightly but firmly on the shoulder by his pale skinned hand. He then motions you towards the remaining professors who stand with heads bowed in respect. You take a step away, and are quickly whisked towards the open black door by the others.



As you pass through the portal, you manage to steal one quick glance back towards Felix who is now standing by the final cooling plate of your experiment. Through the dimness of the poorly lit room and the maze of people, you watch as he lightly reaches out with his right hand and grasps something from the ceramic dish, quickly placing the small lump into his belt pouch. But, not quick enough for you to miss the glimmer of gold in the lamplight.









-Brett

For my first Multiverser game, I agonized over my choice of worlds. Not having any world books yet and wanting to get started without having to design my own world from scratch, I found myself pretty much limited to what I could come up with from books, movies, and TV. For two of my players, I had no trouble finding fictional universes they’d enjoy, but the third was a challenge. She’s very discriminating in her literary tastes, and a lot of the books she likes, I haven’t read.



Finally, I hit on an idea that I thought was perfect. She adores Harry Potter, so I set her up at Hogwarts, giving her the opportunity to become a student there. At first, she was having fun getting her wand and other equipment and meeting Harry, Ron, and Hermione, but gradually she began posting less and less frequently. While the other players were zipping through weeks of game time, she passed about a day. Then, suddenly, her character decided to play with Fluffy, the three-headed dog, and verse herself out. She let me know that she was getting bored and felt hemmed into a plot that she already knew.



So, for the next world, I took the opposite route. Where Hogwarts had been friendly, comfortable, and full of cool things for her to learn and acquire, Post-Sympathetic Man was a dangerous place, where people would shoot you as soon as look at you if they could get something out of it. I’ve also added in plenty of angst for her character by having her meet twisted, alternate versions of her friends. Her circle of friends is a group of assassins, and her boyfriend is a moody, obnoxious thug.



The result? She went from posting once every week or two to almost every day, and she seems to be having a ball. From this experience, I’ve learned that there’s a world of difference between being nice to players and being nice to player characters. I should know it from my own experience as well, since one of the most entertaining experiences I’ve had in a game was the time my paladin discovered that her sister was a prostitute.



Sometimes, the nicest thing you can do for your players is to torture their characters a little bit. A lot of players, especially players who are more into role-playing than roll-playing, enjoy playing out their characters’ reactions to unpleasant circumstances. Those problems also keep players from feeling like everything is being handed to them without their having to work for it.



There is, however, such a thing as taking challenge too far. One GM I had took it to a nasty extreme, plotting campaigns for a bunch of new D&D players that went way over our heads. He was used to gaming with veterans, and we just weren’t ready for the complex strategies and subterfuge that he created. The problem in this campaign, however, wasn’t just the difficulty of the tasks set before us. As far as I was concerned, the real issue was his obvious frustration with our incompetence. He was always annoyed by our mistakes and made no effort to hide it. I would often walk away from the game feeling like a complete and utter moron. Also, despite the fact that he ran several games for our group, he never seemed to catch onto what we could and couldn’t handle. He also never realized that many of us were more interested in creating interesting characters and playing them realistically than we were in solving complex problems or fighting challenging battles. The fact that our party consisted of a minotaur fighter, a pixie, a cross-dressing dwarf, and a stripper-turned-bard should attest to the fact that we were not the serious gamers he was hoping to play with.



So, when you set out to create a suicidally tricky challenge for your players, there are a couple things to keep in mind. First, like I said in my last article, know your group and adjust the challenge accordingly. This mostly means knowing their experience as roleplayers, but it also helps to have some familiarity with their areas of expertise and interest in the real world. For example, someone who reads every Tom Clancy novel when it comes out is going to have plenty of ideas about the strategy of, say, sneaking into a building and disarming a nuclear bomb. That same player might be lost in a campaign involving political intrigues between the human and elven kingdoms. Giving players something that’s difficult but is in line with what they know can allow them to feel that they stand a chance. You can also ramp up the challenge more in those areas where you know they can handle it.



The second thing is to draw a firm line between being mean to the players and being mean to the characters. My old D&D GM never got that distinction down, and his sarcastic comments about our ineptitude got old pretty fast. If you give players an insane challenge, let them know that you know it’s hard and that you’re trying to make them struggle. Implying that the game should be easy for anyone with half a brain isn’t going to win you any prizes. Also, even when they fail, point out that all is not lost and that they performed admirably when the odds were stacked against them. All right, you’re all bleeding, the paladin lost her sword arm, and the invading army of orcs kidnapped your cleric, but at least you held the attackers off long enough for the villagers to get to safety.



Another way to be kind to the players while being cruel to the characters is to do horrible things to them that don’t involve putting their characters in danger, at least not the physical kind. Make life difficult, but not out and out dangerous. Emotional perils, especially those that stem from a character’s back story, are a good way to do this. My player wasn’t in any danger when she found out what kind of people her college buddies were, but it was an eye-opening shock. Her character actually went through a minor nervous breakdown, but the player appeared to love every minute of it.



Especially in a large gaming group, drawing out elements of a character’s back story lets that player get a piece of the spotlight, even if it’s done in a way that deeply upsets their character. I’ve always been a little frustrated in campaigns where I spent ages working out a great history for my character, but it never came up in game.



Another thing to keep in mind is that the rewards need to match the challenges. Campaigns where you have everything handed to you are just as bad as those where you face overwhelming odds and get nothing. If you want to toss some insane challenges at your players, give them a huge reward to motivate them. Again, tie it in with what you know about the player and the character. For one character, a shiny new weapon might be the best reward, while another character would do anything to settle a grudge with a longstanding enemy (but wouldn’t object if a shiny new weapon was part of the bargain). When the going gets tough, remind your players what it is they’re fighting for.



It also helps to break up the challenge with periods of rest and relaxation for the characters. This can come as part of the reward, or it can be a transition between two quests, but it’s nice to give the characters some down time. This can be a good place to introduce some humor to kill the tension, especially inside jokes related to your group. Bits of humor interspersed through the challenging bits are good too, and, while it is sometimes the GM’s job to crack down on wanton silliness that holds up the game, you should let your players kid around. This is especially appropriate when it’s done in character. In another campaign I played in, the party had just dealt with a Bohrs the Bloody, a half-orc bandit who’d been menacing the town. We rode back to town as heroes and, of course, sold his stuff. Imagine our surprise when we’re all hanging out in a bar, and a giant half-orc comes over to our table. He bears a striking resemblance to Bohrs and is wearing some rather familiar-looking armor.



“Hello, ladies,” he says. “Apparently we have a friend in common. You’ve met Bohrs the Bloody, yes? I’m his brother.” At the moment when our characters are all contemplating making out our wills, our half-elven ranger pipes up, “Oh, we’ll be seeing you again? Great. So we’re going to get to sell the armor twice?” This was a great stress reliever for all of us.



My last bit of advice for throwing curveballs to your players is to pay close attention to their reactions. When the character’s miserable, the player might be having a blast, but when the players seem bored or frustrated, it may be time to lighten up on them before you drive them completely nuts. If you pay attention and get to know your group, you can figure out what kinds of challenges are best for them, and you can be an evil GM and have them loving every minute of it.

“All right, everyone. Listen up.” The harsh voice brought me out of my verser transition coma, and I woke with a splitting headache. Around me, were dozens of people sitting on benches. They had rubberish suits in varied, bright, primary colors.



Sometimes, recovering from transition, especially if you have not done it in a while, can be like waking up with a bad hangover.



So when this too loud voice yelled out a list of names, I put my hands over my head, and groaned. The others sang out in altogether too cheerful voices.



“T for Tadeusz!”



“Here.” I croaked before I realized what I was doing. No one else spoke to contradict me.



The voice of the roll caller came closer which meant that although I felt better, the stimuli was greater so I continued in my bleakest misery.



Someone grabbed me impersonally under my arm, and lifted me with surprising ease.



“Wouldn’t have figure you for the type, Tadeusz. But the rules are the rules. You’re first.”



“Hunh?” I said eloquently as I was drawn through the crowd in what appeared to be some metal-sided locker room filled with young men and women. They put on a metallic seeming but quite light backpack.



“You know what to do.” The obvious NCO type told me.



“No I don’t!” I yelled back over a sudden increase of noise and wind.



“Always a card, eh, Tad?” Then he shoved me backwards out the door with a deft push-kick.



I flipped head for head and kept on even as the spaceship dwindled away from me. The curve of the planet below me chiilled my brain, and it started working again.



Obviously, I was on a practise mission for either a sport team or a military effort. And that meant, the metallic device on my back was some sort of parachute or rocket. I’d bet on rocket because I was way too high for a parachute.



If I had to fall to parachute level, then I’d black-out from lack of oxygen.



Come to think about it; why wasn’t I already feeling oxygen deprivation? I wondered as I tilted myself into a nose dive to accelerate and help control my flight. It doesn’t help your thinking to see a planet rising and setting in front of you every fifteen seconds.



A glimmering around me in all directions at a variable distance of between two and three feet told me the answer. A forcefield held in the air from the spaceship for me to breathe.



Still I needed to get down faster. At this rate, I’d breathe all the oxygen in my bubble before I hit the ground about ten minutes from now.



So I pulled off the backpack, and started to examine it. A number of straightforward controls with large pictograms that were readily decipherable told me much.



Whoever designed this did not respect the intelligence of its user that much, but freedom of action seemed to be assumed.



I fiddled with the forcefield control for a bit, and only once did I open a tiny hole in the shield which I promptly closed by reversing the direction of the nob.



“Tadeusz, um, what are you doing?” The sergeant’s voice came over the backpack.



“Altering the forcefield to increase velocity due to a more efficient teardrop shape.” I replied blandly.



“You know T, the techies get all upset when you call the Dimensional Gradient a forcefield, but I don’t care. What I’m wondering is why you are not heading toward your target, the big blue thing to your left. Remember your mission.”



“Perhaps you’d better brief me on that mission again.”



“T, I swear, okay, okay, I’m cool. T, look, land on the back of the mech in orbit like I’ve told you about five hundred times, and make your way inside. Please don’t mess up this practise, what with the generals watching and all.”



I looked to my left and saw a distant blue dot not that far below me. I could not make it.



“Fraid I can’t do that. I’m going to have to land this puppy on the planet.”



“The jokes on me, you got me, now get over to that mecha. You don’t have enough fuel to land with your rocket pack.”



“Ah, well then we have a problem. I honestly don’t remember.”



“Amnesiatics admininstered in his drink during last night’s party. Probably the Opposition’s agents.” A different voice came on sounding more intellectual and quite grave.



I listened for a while as they discussed plans to rescue me. It seemed hopeless was the consensus.



That freed me to try out a scheme I had. I started manipulating the forcefield again looking for just the right configuration that would allow control and stability and be a lifting surface.



It took me nearly twenty minutes, but I found myself in a giant spiral toward the surface in my forcefield glider.



Problem was I was running out of air. The solution required opening the backpack grille, and pulling out a small marble sized ball that was green for Oxygen. I cracked it with my titanium nails, and sweet blessed O2 rushed out of the pressurized marble.



Ten minutes later, I landed, or more accurately, crashed. But I got up and walked away from it to the surprise of my watchers, and I refused medical treatment which the military backed up calling me “a real fighting man” in public and “a stupid troublemaker” in private.



They took me back to Sam’s Sledgehammers, a proud group of twenty hundred ton mecha. A mecha is a giant humanoid robot of at least fifty feet n height. Ours were one hundred twenty feet tall.



My particular one was painted black and grey as I was in the scout element. It had a name painted on its hull.



‘Tyrantsmasher.’ I felt goosebumps go up and down my back. Why did it seem like I was already living here, when I’d never seen anyone here before? And if this was a doppleganger of me living here, then why such advanced technology?



“Hey, Tad, nice job. The Boss says an extra fifteen for you for today’s work.” A desperate and restless sort came up to me while I studied the Hammer. I raised an eyebrow.



“Yeah, the Boss said you’d act like that, but you did good. The mission is probably detained for a week while they go through the theories

of what happened. What went wrong, and so on.”



I nodded.



“Should we be talking so openly?”



“Err, yeah, I’d better push on. Got more floors to clean, and when I have to supervise a mopbot for five acres that is just too much.”



Now it seemed like my doppleganger was a traitor. Just what was going on here?



Tadeusz

  I’ve got something of a ghost story this week.  It’s not one of those scary ghost stories we used to tell around the campfire.  Rather, it’s one of those modern clinical ghost stories that we take not to be scary because they’re told with a scientific air, the idea that they’re really true stories carefully and meticulously investigated, and so something quite natural which we need to understand and not fear.  Right.  When someone wins the Randi prize for clinical research into ghosts, I’ll believe it.

  This story comes from a book I read too many years ago to recall terribly clearly, about a modern jet airliner (747/DC-10/L-1011 sort of thing) that crashed somewhere in, I think, Florida.  The book (which I believe was entitled The Ghost of Flight 401 and am reconstructing as well as I can recall) went to great lengths detailing the events leading up to the crash, which seemed to include someone bumping a switch just hard enough to turn off the automatic altitude control but not hard enough to reset the gauge on the pilot’s panel so he would know that they were descending.  It was a terrible crash, and a lot of people were killed.  Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigators poured through the wreckage, and worked out what had happened fairly well.  It had started when the plane, on approach to land, couldn’t get a positive confirmation that the landing gear was functional, and so asked to be diverted into a holding pattern over the Everglades while they tried to figure it out.  While they were futzing around trying to check fuses and bulbs on the indicators, the plane accidentally got dropped into a slow descent, and crept toward the ground below.  An air traffic controller got a glimpse of a wrong number on his screen, but wasn’t sure whether it had been an error at his end and was distracted by something else before he got back.  The pilot’s altimeter was still locked into the autopilot setting, and the copilot, who had bumped his control stick when he stood up, was not in his seat to see the discrepancy revealed on his panel.  By the time anyone actually was aware how low they were, it was too late to pull up, and they simply flew into the swamp at full speed.

  Once the investigation was ended, there were probably several thousand parts of this plane scattered around a hanger somewhere that technically belonged to the airline.  They did something quite reasonable:  they went through the pieces, saved the ones that were only minimally damaged, and used these to make repairs to other, similar, jets in service.  I remember in particular that one got a galley oven.  Some seats were saved, and several other parts found their way into these other planes.  And that, according to the book, was when the fun started.  Planes that contained parts from the one that crashed started being the hosts for some very strange events.  Apparitions were seen, settings on equipment were changed, and other experiences typically associated with hauntings occurred.  The airline didn’t want people to think their planes were haunted; but they couldn’t ignore the stories.  They hired some professional paranormal investigators.

  From there, the book tells the stories of individual ghosts.  I remember only one.

  As mentioned, the reason the plane was in the air at all at that time was that it had already experienced a problem.  It was on approach for landing, and set down the landing gear.  When the gear goes down, there’s supposed to be an indicator that says it’s in place, one for each set.  One of them didn’t light.  That could be very serious; it could mean that the gear didn’t work, and they can’t land without getting it operational.  On the other hand, it could as easily be that the bulb is burned out, or there’s a fault in the wiring, and it’s not a problem with the gear at all, but merely with the indicator.

  The only reliable way to be certain is to look.  The pilot sent the flight engineer down to take a look.  The engineer never returned; the plane crashed into the Everglades before he was able to report his findings.

  That engineer kept appearing on planes, or so they said.  He startled people; he frightened people.  No one wanted to see a ghost, and no one who saw one wanted to stay around long enough to interact with it.  Yet it kept coming back.

  Finally, the investigators were able to track down this apparition, and interact with it.  It indicated to them that the landing gear was down, and then left, never to be seen again.

  This is what interests me.  Personally, I am doubtful of the entire story; but the idea that people are being terrorized by a spirit from beyond the grave who wants nothing more than to deliver the very important message he was trying to deliver when he was killed, to anyone who will take it, is extremely interesting.  It’s the sort of Oh, THAT’S what happened that through its very quirkiness gives the story a logic and a legitimacy, even as it takes the fear from it.  It is an answer to the question of why there is a ghost here that seems so human, so credible.  The ghost is here because he has something very important to tell someone, and although there is no one left to tell, he still must tell it.  It is a meaningless message to anyone now; surely the NTSB investigators determined that the landing gear had properly deployed, so it doesn’t even help us better understand the accident.  It has no importance to us.  Yet it still has import, vital import, to the messenger.  Please hear the message; please tell the captain that the landing gear is working, and he can land the plane.  He needs to know that.

  There are, I suppose, few game worlds in which an idea like this would work.  For some, the dead hunger for life, and hate the living out of envy for what cannot be transferred from the other to the one.  In others, ghosts are mere nonsense, something that doesn’t exist but is believed by the superstitious.  Others use ghosts as monsters with special abilities, with no real concern for the logic of where they originated or what they have become.  There may be many other ways to handle the idea of a ghost; but could there not be an interesting game about such a ghost as this, who has a message to deliver, or a simple task to complete, who has been here ever so long awaiting the opportunity to do so?

  In Charles Williams’ book Descent Into Hell, there is a construction worker building a house sometime late in the nineteenth century, who in his own despair and depression hangs himself from the wooden framework.  Then he finds himself standing within that framework looking at his own body hanging from one of the beams.  Time rolls on.  The house is finished, people move in, a bedroom is built on that frame, and another man stands looking out the window at the world outside; yet beside him, unseen by him, there is a man looking that same direction, for whom this is yet the unfinished frame of a house with a body hanging from one of the beams, a body which was once his own.  The question for the ghost seems to be, You’re dead; what are you going to do now?  The answer might be, I have something unfinished here, something very important to me; but after that, I don’t know.

  During pre-publication playtesting of Multiverser, I had been versed into a World of Darkness game; I was staying in an old home in Chicago that had been refurbished by a local church to serve as a safehouse against evil spirits.  One day when I returned to it, there was a man I could barely see sitting as if in an invisible chair staring at a blank wall.  He seemed completely unaware of my presence, but as the clock indicated the top of the hour, he rose, walked over near the wall, reached down as if turning off a television set, and then passed through a wall that had been recently added to go up a flight of stairs that had been removed.  This was his home; it had not changed since he lived here.  My presence was unnoticed and irrelevant.  As long as the house remained, he would watch the news each evening and then go up to bed, as he had done every night of his lonely life.

  It makes for an interesting turn on a ghost story.

  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 was nine years old, and I had engineered the rise of Richard Milhous Nixon to the Presidency rather than John F. Kennedy. Kennedy got the Massachusetts senatorship as a consolation prize, and avoided a trip to Dallas. America dodged the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then the Vietnam War.



Nixon was far too wily and strategic and ruthless, let’s not forget that one, to get drawn into such a conflict. Even though George Kennan told America’s elites that we needed to fight so as to give the Russians time to mellow out; instead Nixon kept the fire on them.



First he went to China, and turned an enemy into an ally of convenience, and he got the Nobel Peace Prize for this. I saw this on our b&w television and my eyes trained by modern day television watching (that is late ninties) saw the smirk in his eyes which showed what he really thought of that joke of a Prize usually given to dictators.



The Russians began the Berlin blockade, and Nixon began war games nearby with tanks. The blockade was hastily papered over as a misunderstanding. And then when he had the Bear on the ropes, Nixon went to Moscow.



I was enormously frustrated to find the meeting sealed, but both sides agreed to demilitarize Europe. The generals howled that we could not afford to leave Europe because it would take us weeks to resupply, and only days for the Russians to move in.



Still, it happened, and if Nixon had not already gotten the Peace Prize, he would have then. A fair number of fundamentalist churches speculated that he was the antichrist.



But I saw a method to his madness, after a while. Europe was forced to rearm itself with our help. In effect both sides began to have their puppets start an arms race, and since the Soviets had been ahead of us, starting over again at zero for both was an advantage.



And it freed our forces to maneuver around the globe, and defuse the Cuban exportation of mercenaries. And since we had not promised Cuba that we would not attack things were rather more nervous in Havana.



Nixon won in a landslide.



But enough about international politics, I was growing from eight to twelve. I made several friends of note during this time. We played basketball, and my insistence on running, and more running all summer long up to five and ten miles a day paid off. Even though we weren’t that talented, we worked together well, and we ran our opposition into the ground on our way to the semi-finals for the City Championship in our freshman year.



My friends had thought I was nuts; now they half-thought I was inspired.



Another thing I showed them the summer of ’62 was a little game I called Dungeons & Dragons. I privately apologized to the spirit of Gygax, but I figured he’d invent something else cool, and the world would be a much better place with RPG’s a decade earlier. And I made a point of getting a number of ministers to put blurbs praising the game on the back cover.



I started the business with my Dad as official president, but I did all the work with my buds. The groundwork was not as well layed as in ’73, but then I had a long history of future knowledge about games to help me out.



So the mail-order business was doing great in a few years, and I started advertising in Popular Science and some war-gaming magazines.



The other friend I had who thought the whole game was “stupid”, and she was the first person in this universe to sneer publically at “hack-and-slash” gaming as not being a story worthy of the name, was a young girl with a sad look, and sharp eyes, and big glasses.



She was right about it being hack-and-slash. Vampire would simply not have appealed. These were teenage boys in the sixties; they wanted to kill things and loot the bodies. It did remind me that if I could manage to alleviate the girl shortage in gaming that many geeks would thank me. I’d have to think about that one.



The girl was a poet, and a writer, and although I was better than her, that was practice, not natural talent. In fact her first words to me after reading one of my reports were…



“You have a very old soul.”



This was spookily close to the mark, seeing as I had a three hundred year old soul in a ten year old boy’s body. I almost turned around and ran right then.



She did not fit in. Her block sat around and played backgammon and charades. Mine played volleyball. I enjoyed volleyball; she hated backgammon and conformity and yearned to stretch her wings and be free.



Our town and our time were not friendly to non-conformists who would rather write scarily good poetry than play backgammon.



She started writing darker poetry, and frankly I was worried for her. Not right now, but in years to come.



Nixon had cracked down on the mobs, and despite some rather cowardly bits of hesitation which he fixed by firing the administrators, the crackdown held. Their were marches, but they were peaceful by and large.



Thing is my friend’s parents decided to follow Nixon’s example. Problem was that she was a genuine artist and noncomformist. Most of those in the street were goof-offs, or people seeking political power, but not willing to pay a hard price for it. My friend was willing to pay.



She had come to the conclusion at the age of eleven that integrity was worth imprisonment. More courageous than ninety-nine percent of the population, and a bit lack in perspective as well. Her parents threatened a mental hospital, and she dared them to do it.



I tried to intervene, but got told roundly to stay out of their business. So, no surprise, I was ticked off which probably influenced my choice of tactics.



A little b&e followed by swiping of the audio tapes and the application for admittance files, and the theft of several valuable pieces of electronics which I dumped at the mission across town combined with some vandalism resulted in a dead standstill to their lives for several weeks as they pulled things back together.



Then I approached my friend with an offer. Publication to a wide audience, for pay, good pay indeed. I just needed poetry to fit into my D&D modules. And poetry that would appeal to girls; make them buy the modules.



She said no. Then she yelled she would never be a sell-out; especially to such a low-class outfit as mine. I mentioned our sales figures as compared to a leading poetry magazine. She said yes, and that poetry annoyed many a guy who wrote me long letters complaining about it while they ordered the next module. The girls letters started to turn up as well, but they were shorter and used words like “incredibly moving”.



I sent an envelope with money to cover twice the cost of the stolen items in the mail a month later. Naturally, it was anonymous.



On the national political scene, things were less polarized. Nixon was not so suspicious, and without Vietnam to terrorize a generation and with firm, but polite police force we had a much calmer Sixties.



The Northern Democrats and the Republican Party still united to do away with Jim Crow, and although I think Goldwater raised some good points about state’s rights, I couldn’t say he was right. And I enjoyed very much the classic D&D module where the paladins rescued some slaves from a swampland, and gave them swords to help them get the right to control their own city by voting. Of course the paladins fought in front. And the orcs who opposed this had wolves on leashes. Heh.



There was no Race to the Moon. Russia was finding out that without its armies in Eastern Europe and with Warsaw Pact owning their own weapons that independence of thought was circulating through the land. Heh. I think Nixon planned it.



We did have a race to orbit and a race to make cheap heavy-lift capability. A lot more astronauts died in the race, but we went a lot faster too. X Prizes and such helped a lot, but I made a point of memorizing the names of everyone who died in the space race. Because in a very real sense, I had chosen their destiny.



Prague Spring came and melted into Summer. They did not openly defy the Bear, but liberalization was very evident. Even if they called it Marxist-Leninist; it was more a Nordic socialism.



Robert Dole, the vice-president went on to win in 1968, and he did show some of his wit in the fight.



We had a smaller, but more effective socialism than LBJ’s Great Society. This made it more popular, and lessened the backlash. The Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, the Conservative Movement in general were looking like non-starters in this timeline. It took quite a bit to offend the Christians who had really wanted to stay home and out of politics; in this reality it looked like they would.



So we baby-stepped quite successfully toward liberalism. Woodstock still happened, and I went to see it. It was cool in that everybody was so pumped up, but at the same time, it wasn’t all that much. I’ve been to lots better concerts.



That reminded me. I had two people I wanted to see in 1969. One, I used my D&D connection to make an offer to the King to have him in a gaming module. I could not begin to pay him what he was worth, but he was a nice guy, and I was representing a new, cool thing, so we met for lunch. I used it to point out the errors of drugs. Finally, he got a little ticked at me, and asked me what I knew.

So I told him. What had happened. Who I was. All that. I hoped it helped.



Then I went to see Gygax, and he was a lot easier to meet, if harder to track down. I offered him and Arneson a combined twenty-five percent share in my company if they would work for TSR, Inc. Naturally, they took it, and I started his first day, by announcing that within six weeks I was going to take a sabbattical, and thus he would be president. He gulped and jumped in.



I bought out most of my friends at the time, and cheerily advised them that they might want to invest say ten percent of their money in a company that would be starting up soon I thought. The company would be run by a guy named Gates. Thing is I could be wrong. Either my memory did not have the data needed, or the ripple of my changes could have altered history such that Microsoft never takes over the world. But ten percent was a good bet balanced between an affordable loss and great gain, I thought.



The Dole Presidency went on without too much of note. He was more of a caretaker president although he did show his inner steel when informing Pakistan that it did not need to possess nuclear weapons. The U.S. would guarantee the security of the Kashimir border, and in light of that he started to negotiate with India for them to drop their nukes into our hands. I was seeing something surprising; Nuclear De-proliferation looked doable in this world. In fact, there was some talk, fairly serious, I think about Russia and the US drawing down their nukes to a lower level.



I began going to SF cons in seventy on a serious basis, and meeting a lot of my favorite writers. Asimov, Zelazny, Pournelle, and a bunch of others who autographed my little book. I had them autograph their novels as well, but I figured I could not take everything with me to the next world whenever that was, so I had my little book as well.



The next two years were great. Helping to organize world cons and going to college to study foreign languages and mathematics was a blast. And at college, I met some of the people in the “Chicago School” of free-market economics which was pretty cool.



My friends were doing well; my parents were well set-up (and better than they knew seeing as I had some trust funds set up for them); my younger sister who hardly enters this piece was just entering high school and badgering me for a car which I intened to get her after I hired a very talented fellow off the racecar circuit to teach her and scare some sense into her, but other than her driving habits and her badgering she was great.



The Cold War had been running hotter than in our timeline. But it still kept cool, and I thought I could see signs the Russians were going to crack early without doing something unthinkable.



Seventy-two came and new elections, and I found myself gritting my teeth just a bit as I headed toward the voting booth, I was going to …vote Democratic. The thought made me a little queasy, but then I consoled myself that it was for Ronald Reagan. Reagan beat Dole, and soon started to say some speeches that sounded awful familiar.

Stuff about “an evil empire” and the “ashheap of history” came floating out of his golden throat. The Russians met him in Reykavik, and just like in my timeline they demanded he give up his latest weapons program in exchange for almost everything he wanted. He refused, and that was the begining of the end for World Communism.



It made me wonder if there was something fated about the city of Reykavik.



The oil shock of ’73 hit us hard, and so we began to develop oil in Alaska and the North Sea helped along by some anonymous notes sent to certain ambitious petroleum engineers. And Reagan told the Saudi’s what for which broke the cartel over the next year.



Still, it was pretty severe, but no “stagflation”, and no double-digit inflation, and the Reagan tax cuts helped too. We got back on our feet, and watched the Wall come down in Seventy-Five.



The Bicentennial Celebration in ’76 was a lot better than in my timeline. I have a theory, when it comes to a national party, you want the Republicans in charge. They throw better parties, or extravaganzas. But then Reagan was a Democrat, so there goes my theory.



I got a job translating German professional math papers into English after college, and wished I could be back home in my own timeline. There had been no me, and none I cared for here; I had checked.



Reagan came to Chicago, and so I went to see the parade. I picked the best spot for him to stop and have an “impromptu” chat with the crowd. And my guess was right. He stopped and started charming the crowd, and then I saw him, the Assasin. Not Hinckley, but some other madman stood but ten feet away from me and a few feet forward. He stood out because he had a grim look on his face in this crowd of adoring fans.



As I pushed toward him shouting “Gun!” to little avail in the midst of the cheers, I wondered about fate again. Maybe certain people are fated to meet certain types of things in their lives.



He pulled the gun out with terrible form, but I could see he had the luck of those who don’t care about life. He was dead on target despite holding his gun high and all wrong.



So, I dove at him using a nearby too large fellow as a springboard rather than an obstacle. I came down on him, and started to go over him, and to fall head-first to the ground. He pulled the gun’s trigger as I looked into his stark, staring insane eyes; as my weight threw him down; as I thought “drat, I hate this.”; he shot me between the eyes, and I versed out on national television.



Poof. The resulting little cloud of dust covered one assasin face-down on the ground with a Secret Service revolver pressed into his neck.



And I never got to find out if Reagan’s plan to de-nuclearize the whole planet would work.



Tadeusz

About six months ago, after playing M.J. Young’s Multiverser game on the forums here, I decided it would be fun to buy a copy of the game and run it for my friends. So, I had the joy of not only running my first game, but of learning a new system at the same time. To make my life even more complicated, Multiverser starts every player in separate worlds, so I had to create not one adventure, but three. Although I’ve still got a lot to learn, I’ve come up with some good ideas to make a new GM’s life easier.



1. The Internet is your friend. Because I started playing Multiverser on the forum, it seemed natural to run my game over the Internet. Since I started the game near the beginning of summer vacation, and we were all about to head home from college, it was also a necessity if we wanted to play more frequently than once every month or two.



Running my game over an e-mail list has made things much simpler in a lot of ways. It gives me time to think and plan my next move, and it gives my players the opportunity to think their plans through. Playing on-line is also helpful if you’re running characters in separate adventures, whether they’re in completely different worlds or just in groups that have split up or not yet encountered each other. Because you don’t have to be physically in the same place, no one gets bored waiting while you’re dealing with the other group. As an added bonus, each group can move at its own pace. Since I have a couple players who post daily, sometimes twice a day, and another who’s more likely to post once a week, it’s important that everyone’s game can develop at its own speed.



The drawback to this, of course, is that if you have multiple PCs interacting with each other, they need to post at about the same level of frequency for it to work. Otherwise, you may have everyone else getting frustrated while they wait on that one slow poster. Depending on your game and your players, you could end up combining e-mail or forum posts with real time play through WebRPG or a chat room. When people are adventuring separately, they can work at their own pace, but you can still bring everyone together once in a while. If distance isn’t an issue, you can also combine internet games with face-to-face sessions.



2. Get yourself a cheat sheet. I’ve heard this advice from several sources, and it’s proved very helpful to me. Rather than wasting time flipping through your rulebook, or even through several sourcebooks, it’s a good idea to keep a short list of the most frequently used rules, noting when they apply and how they work. The sooner you can figure out the rule, roll for it, and move on, the happier everyone will be. This is especially useful if you run multiple systems or if you just have trouble keeping the rules straight in your head. Going back to tip number one, my Multiverser cheat sheet is here on the GO forums.



Cheat sheets for worlds and adventures are also useful. If, for example, you’re running a canned D&D adventure or something from one of the Multiverser books of worlds, you might find yourself spending a lot of time looking things up, and that can detract from the game play. Condensing twenty or fifty pages of source material into a page or two can be tricky, but it’s nice to have the most important locations, NPCs and facts about the plot at your fingertips.



If you don’t have time to create your own cheat sheet, and you don’t want to violate somebody’s copyright by photocopying pages of the game book, there are shortcuts you can take. I’m iffy on the copyright regulations, so for some games, copying might be perfectly fine. If that’s not an option, whether because of those rules or just because the game’s tonight and you don’t have time to get to a copy machine, you can always use Post-It notes or dog-ear important pages. You might also want to create, instead of a cheat sheet listing rules, a simpler one with page numbers where those rules can be found. Eventually, you may know off the top of your head that the skill learning rolls are on page 26 or that, in a certain situation, you always roll a d20 and try to get below your willpower stat. When you start off, though, a cheat sheet will make things much simpler.



3. Play with your friends. I refer to my Multiverser game as my “first” GMing experience, but that’s not technically true. It’s just the first one that got anywhere. A few years ago, I was playing in a Hunter: The Reckoning game on-line, bought the rulebook at the GM’s suggestion that each player should have one, and decided I’d like to try my hand at running it. Before I even had my adventure halfway planned out, I sent a message to a mailing list asking for players, and found a couple interested people. Some of them I knew already, some I didn’t. Because one was really anxious to start, and I wanted to keep everyone happy, I began the game before I really knew what I wanted to happen and before I was familiar with all the rules. Needless to say, it deteriorated rather quickly.



Because of that experience, I would never suggest starting your first game that way. Instead, grab a couple players from your current gaming group or other people you consider friends. Not only will your friends be more understanding of the time it takes you to prepare, they’ll also be more forgiving of the mistakes you make and more likely to give you a second chance if things don’t work out quite the way they’d hoped. If you advertise your game to people you don’t know, you may get some players with pretty high expectations who might be ready to bail (or just sit there and complain) if your game isn’t quite flawless.



Knowing your players also has another benefit. You can use what you know about their personalities to design adventures that appeal to them. One of my friends owns about a dozen swords, is passionate about the Middle Ages, and quotes from The Princess Bride constantly. So, I threw him onto the pirate ship Revenge where he’s having a blast learning fencing, fighting, and piracy from the Dread Pirate Roberts. Another player is into science fiction and is very good with technology. He wound up on Dagobah, and he’s currently working on building himself a light saber.



If you’ve played with your group before, you also know what style of game they like. If you have a player whose reaction to every situation is to kill something, you’re going to have to take that into account. You don’t necessarily need to provide him with lots of mindless bloodshed, but you should make yourself very familiar with your system’s combat mechanics, since you’ll need them.



Starting off with people you already hang out with is even more important if you’re playing a face-to-face game. If the game gets to a point where everyone needs a break, you’ll be perfectly comfortable piling into the car to make a pizza run, breaking out the video games, or just sitting and chatting for a bit. This isn’t to say that you should never bring in new people, just that your first game has enough inherent stress as it is, and playing with friends makes it much easier.



One more benefit to knowing alll your players before you ever start is that you have a better chance of putting together a group that gets along as a whole. For example, I’ve played D&D with several different groups of people, and, out of those gaming groups, there are lots of people I’d happily invite to join a game I might be running. However, there are some who, because of personality clashes, I’d never ask to the same game. Announce to a mailing list or large group that you’re running a game and need players, and you might end up with the two guys who have been flaming each other on said mailing list for the last umpteen years doing the same thing in your game.



4. Ask for help. If you’ve got a game situation that you’re not sure how to handle, advice from other GMs can be very useful. Don’t let them make your mind up for you, but it’s always good to bounce ideas off other people. Also, don’t overloook your players as a resource. Earlier, I mentioned that I have one of my players in a pirate adventure. Well, what I know about wooden sailing ships could be written on, if not a pin, at least a rather small sheet of paper. But, lucky for me, another player in that game knows more about the subject than I do, and I’m constantly hitting him up for information. This adds to the flavor of the game, and, as an added bonus, I’m learning a lot of interesting things.



Well, that’s all the tips I’ve got for right now. My next article will focus on the idea that it’s okay to be a little bit evil when running your game.

  This came to mind from a post in a forum, where there are several ongoing games.  One of the referees was apologizing for his failure to respond to recent game posts.  It happens.  I miss a day here and there, and I count running the game part of my job, the playtesting of new game worlds and new ideas, as well as the demonstration of how the game plays and how to run it.  I never hold absence against anyone (although I do appreciate it when players at least let me know that they’re still alive and planning to play again).  What struck me about this post was the referee’s reason for his continued absence, and failure to post to the game on that day as well.  He said he had had a lot on his mind and was in a bad mood.

  This is not one of my big problems, really.  I’m generally rather steady in my moods (steadily depressed, perhaps, but steady), and don’t have too much trouble setting aside my problems when it’s time to play.  Not that I’m perfect, mind.  On at least two occasions I have fallen asleep from exhaustion while running a game, and I’ve fallen asleep while playing more than once as well.  I have my foibles; this just isn’t one of them.  Yet it is a problem I’ve seen; I think the referee was wise not to run the game while he was in whatever darkened state of mind he was.  There is a referee around here (not someone whose name I know, but I’ve seen his games as he runs them in a public place) who is marked by his moodiness.  It is said that if he’s had a bad week, he’ll kill all the player characters; and then the next week, he’ll resurrect them all and give them incredible goodies, treasures, powers, particularly if he’s feeling good.  I’ve wondered why his gaming group stays with him.  It can’t just be that good referees are all that hard to find.  Perhaps its because when he’s in a good mood he’ll let them do just about anything they want, so they live with his completely destructive bad moods.

  Thus, although it is not something with which I have much trouble, I see some value in raising the question of how to keep our moods from spoiling our games.

  The idea of not playing when you’re in a bad mood is certainly a good idea, if you can do it.  For many of us, though, ruining the game by our absence is as egregious as ruining it by our presence.  The referee is not always the only person at the table who is indispensable.  Most games have their key players and key characters, those whose absence cripples the game and means we cannot play this week.  Certainly if you’re really in a rotten mood and you can get out of the game, it’s better to let people play without you than to spoil it for everyone.  Similarly, if you can play a different game, or get someone to cover for you, these are all ways to save everyone some aggravation.  They are, for some of us, pipe dreams.  The game needs us, and everyone is counting on us, and bad mood or good mood, we’ve got to be there.

  So cheer up.  That’s the next obvious option, isn’t it?  Get yourself into a good mood.  Do something that will relax you and clear your mind.  Get ready to play.  Everyone has things that cheer them.  I like to sing a bit sometimes; I can watch a video tape of a familiar movie or television show.  Maybe there’s a quick game of something else you can play to unwind a bit.  When we first started role playing, we almost always played something else first, every night we played.  Pinochle was our particular fancy, but our group was most commonly two couples so that worked well.  Board games were another starter.  We used games as appetizers before the meal of role playing, and it broke some of the ice and got us in the mindset of playing.

  That won’t always work, either.  I could write a hundred columns on ways to lift your spirits, and yet I know there have been times when I have been so down and depressed that nothing could cheer me.  It is at times like that when you have to go forward in the only sensible way possible.  You have to have fun without letting your mood get in the way.

  That may not sound either sensible or possible, but it is.  Remember, you’re there with other people, presumably friends, or people who want to be friends.  You’re sharing time together.  As we remembered in Togetherness, this is a social gathering, a party of sorts, and everyone is here to have fun.  Involve yourself in the festivities, in the fun, in the play.  Do what you would do if you felt better.  I’m not saying that will make you feel better; but it will help keep everyone else from feeling worse.

  To this end, if you’re the referee, it helps to play close to the rules.  If you’ve already got the habit of relying on the dice to guide the outcome, play isn’t going to be particularly different this week just because you’re not feeling so chipper; nor will it be so especially different next week when you’re doing better.  Rules provide a framework for consistency.  The more freeform your games are run, the more impact your mood is likely to have on them.

  If you’re the player, it may help to be a bit more immersive (whatever that means) when you’re down.  If you can sense more what the character thinks and feels at those moments, you can be less influenced by your own emotions in his choices.  It also helps to give thought to how to keep his conduct consistent.  He, after all, has a history of activity behind him, and he’s unlikely to break with that significantly without good cause.  That history can be to the player the objective standard that the rules are to the referee:  the thing that provides a sense of consistency to the game.

  Maybe I’m talking out of turn here.  After all, I’ve admitted that my moods don’t much impact my actions as referee or player.  However, maybe these thoughts are at least part of why that is.  Maybe I have some ideas about how to handle moods so they don’t so much matter, and don’t spoil it for everyone else.

  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 woke from verser transition madness which seemed to take an unusually short time period if time can be applied to such a thing.



And I rejoiced to feel solid, but I could tell I was ill, or damaged. I felt fragile, shallow in my mind. Even if I had wanted to get upset and find out what was going on around me, I could not.



My body wanted to sleep, no, it craved sleep, and I gladly enough acquiesced to the wisdom of the body.



For the next indeterminate amount of time, I woke, considered a few thoughts, or consulted a few memories, made a conclusion of minor nature such as to not worry, and promptly fell back in fathomless slumber like I have rarely enjoyed. Especially since becoming a verser. Living in worlds where plants can eat you, and animals rip you to shreds without warning like I have tends to teach paranoia, and light sleeping.



But being paranoid and taking a plan on that basis would have taken too much energy, I decided with a luxurious mental smile. Then I slept.



It occurred to me that I was probably in some advanced technological society’s regeneration chamber. Nice of them to fix me up after whatever cured me of my fogginess landed me in their world.



Later, they must have decided I needed some visual stimulation because they seemed to have begun shining a bright light on my chamber. It did help break up the tedium which was not really too bad. I slept mostly, and I had a peculiar relation to time. It skipped along, and I let it. And of course, the level of stimulation that would have driven me batty with boredom was the same that would now be overmuch for me.



If I needed any proof of how badly I’d been damaged, that was it.



I’d owe these people big time for all this work.



I started to feel things a bit more which was a decided relief. I could touch the nutrient tube, but I only did this a few times because it was so exhausting.



Later, I began to recognize a female voice. My nurse’s voice was quite melodic and peaceful. I went to sleep quite often listening to her singing either nonsense tunes or something that sweetly melodic and kind of familiar.



The bio-chamber I was in began fluxing in uncomfortable ways. And then shortly thereafter the water left, and I was forced to a conclusion I’d been lazily avoiding for the last five to ten naps. I was being born.



Babies are supposed to be sweet little tykes, so I spare you the litany of curse words that ran through my mind at the time.



I remembered what I’d heard of my own birth, and devoutly avoided being breach, and for the second, I prayed that it was not a Catholic hospital I was heading too, and for the third if it was that they were not idiots. Seems like me and Mom almost went Beyond because of some doc’s odd and hopefully eccentric scruples, and I would not mind that much this time being a verse, but my “nurse” had seemed pretty nice from what I could tell. I’d be ticked off on her behalf, for sure.



We had a normal birthing experience. What does that mean? Well, let’s see, for comparison, I’ve been tortured to death, and it hurt less. And “Mommy” had an amazing array of curse words.



But finally, I got to look into her face, and I could hardly make it out being mostly blind, but it set my little heart to thumping for joy.



The nurses giggled at my first fountain, and I think I blushed. I’m not used to being naked around four or five females. But I got used to it. I had to. We won’t go into that more except for just one word. Okay, two. Cloth diapers. Eeww.



We went home to a ultra-cute nursery room, and a crib, and I got to meet “Dad”. He seemed a very nice fellow if a lot too nervous about dropping me. And I noted that he wore a three piece suit which I vomited on. Sorry guy, really. But he took it mostly in stride.



I began testing some of my psi skils. About the only thing that worked was my perfect memory. I tried a little magic. A prayer for my upset stomach, and that my parents would get some rest instead of trying to super-clean the house.



I’d have told them “You never let me down anyways on the ground. What does a few specks of dirt matter. Go to sleep.” The prayer worked.



Later, I tested a theory I’ve heard that babies can see angels. My guardian angel showed up. Special dispensation he informed me, and often only once, and for me definitely only once.



I told him what I thought had happened. He did not disagree, and neither did he agree which I took as hopeful. Then we had a long adult conversation because I was just a little tired of “goochie-goochie-goo”. It’d been nine months plus since I’d had a real adult conversation.



Later, I saw the fairies that only very young children can see, but they did not want to talk to me since they considered me and adult.



My theory of what was happening was based on what Whisp, another experienced and martially very capable verser had encountered. He got seriously disintegrated by a tachyon grenade (they are nasty stuff. Rip all the neutrons in all the atomic nucleus in a target body into quarkial shreds if you catch the full brunt of it.), and the Multiverse lost track of him sort-of. So he was reborn as a baby.



I could see that applying to me. I’d been phase-shifted and a slowly shrinking tenous cloud of gas that kept dissipating. Maybe, I just slid under some threshold of existence, only to be restored (sort-of) by some hardline second layer of redundancy built into the Multiverse by the Creator.



I spent a minute thanking the Creator for that.



Thing is Whisp also had a Mother who was flaming insane. I should know, I’ve iced her twice. He told her he was a verser when he was a rugrat in her house. She went nuts. Now he has a nutter verser on his trail throughout all time and space.



I did not want to do this to the nice lady who brought me here. So sudden announcements of my adult status at the high chair once I got enough control of my muscles to talk were right out.



She and Dad would likely become versers after being exposed to my blood through childhood scrapes and what not. I’d deal with that later; hopefully in a way that kept everyone sane.



My vision began to improve, and so I listened intently when Edward Murrow came on the black and white TV to tell us the news, and most importantly the date.



May 14, 1952 was the date. Truman was President, and he was conducting the Korean Police Action. MacArthur was giving him grief. “Mommy” told me this was my one month birthday.



She celebrated by putting me in this atrocious outfit. And we went to lunch by Lake Michigan on LSD. Not the drug, Lake Shore Drive in the Windy City–Chicago.



Actually, much of my first year was very pleasant. We lived in a Levittown, and I got to see my lone grandma in an apartment in Chicago. She was great, even if she was suspicious of all this prosperity.



In ways, she and I were kindred souls. See, she’d been born of the Lost Generation, and I’d been born in the original world a Gen Xer. Both of us had seen a chill world, and gritted it out. Now, of course, I was born in a very different time. We were the children of the future. Our simple presence would make everything wondrous. I was a Baby Boomer.



But regardless of society, a baby is a baby, and a parent is a parent.



I was in many ways a very easy baby. I rarely complained about going to take a nap, or things that I felt were justified. But rather than pitch the stewed prunes across the room, I resorted to vomiting whenever I smelled them. It seemed a more effective technique to get what I wanted.



Their doc was a wise old guy, and he saw right through my trick, but he let me by telling me that if I hated them that much, it was okay, and he would not inform on me. I responded by shaking his hand which startled the chap quite a bit seeing as I was not yet one.



The natural baby tendency to obsessively examine and redo things was lent added force by my own decision to try to lay solid foundations of physical and mental abilities to build on later. I think it worried my parents to see me connect, disconnect, and reconnect Lincoln Logs until I could and did do it with my eyes close.



The second year approached, and I was considered a precocious, and rather intense child with a very good vocabulary. It was hard to limit it as much as I did.



Finally, we got out of cloth diapers, and I got “potty trained” in jig time. There were some things I just had to use my superior knowledge on. But still, it was surprising how much influence the body had, and my own natural reactions.



The next door neighbour dog scared me one day even though I knew it shouldn’t seeing as it was behind a fence. But the bulldog was more than twice my mass, and it could kill me with no sweat if it was unleashed physically and mentally.



The owner was a jerk as well as his dog. And “Dad” was close to punching him out which I knew might not go over good at the plant. So I toddled back inside. got the red pepper can, and tossed a grubby handful in the dog’s growling face. No more canine death threats from that pooch. He always kept to the far side of the lawn when I went outside.



My parents bit their lips, and told me I’d been bad, and then they left the room to collapse laughing. Me, I figured, I’d been nice. My real country grandma would have probably shot the dog as a matter of policy.



The Korean War ended. Dwight D. Eisenhower the Republican took over from Truman the Democrat. Everyone thought “Ike” was a dumbell, just like they later thought Reagan was. Strange how things seemed to work smoothly when Ike was in charge.



Of course, it helped that the team-oriented G.I. Joes were in charge of things. They’d whipped Nazis and Imperial Japan and now they pulled together as they had been trained to do, and built the American Century in the physical world largely ignoring the spiritual.



Although, we were recent residents like all our neighbours, and so everyone was desperate for some sense of social order in the Levitttown. So each street became a club. Our club was volleyball. Dad did not much like it, but Mom loved it. Dad shrugged and was a good sport because not only Mom, but everyone else expected it. And it gave Dad the social order that he needed even if he payed a bit more than others.



We were listening to Mickey Mouse Club “M-I-C-K-E-Y…”, and the adult swung much of the focus of their culture on our “wonderful selves”. It was pleasant, and it was suited to creating grand visions that were either delusions or wonders.



And we had the “advantage” of Dr. Spock. It was thought to be an antidote to the “authoritarian” personality which led toward fascism sure as apples make apple pie. The theory seemed highly doubtful to me. But I enjoyed the permissive atmosphere, and it had many benefits, and the defects largely did not touch me since I was already an adult.



I got reminded of “duck and cover” by seeing ads from the Ad Council on our new monstrous TV outlining this pitiful safety precaution. A million degree fireball is going to be stopped by a desk? Well it might save a few at the far edges or by a fluke, but it was mostly a propaganda exercise.



And this reminded me of something upcoming. The Cuban Missile Crisis was coming, and there was no guarantee that this world would survive it like my homeworld had.



I put considerable thought into the problem and the solving of it. In the end there seemed only one solution.



Anyways, I went off to kindergarten which was a new-fangled thing. This time school was far more fun than first time. I deliberately set out to absorb things I’d missed on the first time through.



So, I was a model student and popular with the kids, except that on fairly frequent occasions I disconcerted them by askng questions over my grade level, or by holding views they thought were downright wacky.



Somewhere around this time an intellectual was saying that there was no real American conservatism, it was only a collection of fringe movements and ill tempers, or words to that effect. I was a “conservative”. Of course, that intellecual was right in many ways. They might have had the same name as I, but we had a lot of disagreements.



Still, I wanted to make a point to visit Yale sometime, and meet the college boy who would “Stand athwart History and shout ‘Stop!’”, and reinvigorate the Right. William F. Buckley.



Still, in the first grade when some unreconstructed Stalinist teacher waxed rhapsodic about the dearly departed who survived a bit longer in this world than in my original world, I lost my cool. Red-faced, I stood and shouted at her in the first grade, mind you.



“Stalin is a monster. Do your glasses blind your brain as well, or is it simply not functioning?” Needless to say, I was soon sitting in the principal’s office. Then I was on three-day’s suspension.



My Dad had a serious talk with me. He told me that he agreed with me, but it was not a proper concern for a six-year-old, nor was rudeness to a teacher justified. And besides, he said with a hurtful sigh, the word had leaked out at the office, and people were wondering if he was one of them fanatic anti-communists. See in that day, it was considered worse of a threat to the Union to be an anti-Communists than to be a Communist.



So I shut my mouth and apologized for being so rude, but never for denouncing Stalin. And I got to work on my plan to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis.



I tried to make up to my Dad his problem at work by helping him with his speeches. At first he thought it a joke, but soon I had him convinced that I was a child prodigy. A natural born writer with a gift for the written word. Oh, if only it were true. What he saw was the end of a lot of practise, but I made it seem easy, and I made obvious mistakes for him to fix.



Soon he recovered his status, and I got to doing an hour a night on his stuff or on others young executives who couldn’t write a speech or a report to save their life. It would have been a lot easier with a word processor, but I had a manual typewriter that my Mom used and I dictated it to her.



We made a good bit of nice spare change off that hour each night, and it was a fun family time. And I got to know people. And I got my hands on a good bit of money for a kid. Which I used to hire private detectives.



Soon I had a rather large file on the misdeeds of the man who stole the election of 1960 from Richard Milhouse Nixon and gave it to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But not only of Mayor Daley but his closest compadres were all entangled in my web.



Nixon won the radio listeners, but he lost the TV viewers in the Kennedy-Nixon debate.



I showed up the day before election day with a scholar’s award that I had worked hard to get because it entitled one to meet the Mayor. I handed the Mayor a present in a box. The box contained a list of his crimes and solid proofs. He was a pretty good Mayor I think, but corrupt.



And it had a note explaining that I apologized for my actions which were solely of my own invention, but that I would have to insist that he ran an honest election.



I gave him several easy ways to ascertain that it was just me, and in the end he gave me a rueful smile. I don’t think he changed his ways. I think he just resolved to be a lot more clever about hiding it. But Nixon got what he deserved. He squeaked into office.



And I got to meet him because the Mayor was basically a decent fellow, and when Nixon came by for a visit to Chicago and expressed his surprise at the honest election, Mayor Daley showed him to me as the explanation.



I privately in a corner of an office took him off to the side, and dropped most of my kid look. I’m three hundred years old okay? There’s a decided difference of manner and speech for me than from some Baby Boomer good kid of 1960.



Nixon had no idea what he faced, but he was probably the smartest man to ever occupy the office. Not the wisest man to be sure, but the smartest.



I gave him a warning and some clues, and he slipped past the obvious “I don’t believe in fortune-tellers” to questions about who and what I was. The man had a steel-trap mind, and a ravenous curiousity. I ended up telling him more I think than I wanted to even if not in words, but I still thought my secret safe because it was so very outlandish. A multi-dimensional traveller reborn as a baby who is from the future, sort-of? Not even the National Enquirer would buy it.



Oh, no doubt you are curious as to JFK’s fate. He was a guy with a lot of problems, but he had guts, and he had charisma, and he had rumrunner money galore. He got the Senatorship which in my world went to Teddy Kennedy, and began to rapidly climb the Senatorial ladder. No one shot him, and his bracing anti-communism and tax cutting approach to the economy inspired the Scoop Jackson Democrats to fight against their expulsion from the Party a bit harder.



And Nixon tripped Khrushchev up very badly. There was no Cuban Missile Crisis, but there was an attempt a arming Cuba and Nixon used it to torment the Russian Premier. And JFK in the Senate led the fight to oppose the WIN(Whip Infation Now) price controls Nixon thought such a cool idea. I don’t think the economy roared quite as much as it had in my timeline, but that was a decent trade-off to make, I think.



Next we’ll enter the Sixties and head onward…



Tadeusz