The Gaming Outpost

  From the title of this piece, you might expect this to be an article discussing the use of music in games.  I think that’s a laudable topic, and would be very interested in something on that line–but the truth is that I never use music in my games.  Part of it is that such music playback systems as I still have in working order (that is, not counting the recording equipment that is older than some of my readers and hasn’t worked for as long as they’ve been alive) is of an insufficient technology level to be effectively used for this.  Part of it is that I don’t care for distractions when I’m running games, and to me both the technical side of getting the music to play and the music playing in the background would be distractions.  (Remember, I was a disk jockey for a while; maybe I just overcomplicate it.)  Whatever the reason, I don’t use music at all in my games.  That’s probably all the better for you, as most of the music with which I’m familiar, whether it’s symphonic and choral music from Praetorius to Randall Thompson, contemporary Christian music from the early eighties, rock and pop hits from the sixties and seventies, or a few scraps of jazz, would be completely unknown to most of my readers.  My musical tastes are eclectic and obscure, I’m afraid, and if I did use music in my games, you probably wouldn’t benefit significantly from knowing what music I did use.  Since most of my gamers would be as unfamiliar with these as most of my readers, perhaps it is better that I don’t use it.  The fact is, for better or worse, I don’t.

  That fact is made the stranger by virtue of the incongruous fact that I am also a composer.  I was a composer long before I was a game designer, before I was an author.  I could go back to the late sixties and find pieces I’d written (none of them particularly good, but you have to start somewhere), and part of me still thinks of myself as a composer and musician above all else.  I never integrated music into my games because it never occurred to me to do so, and now I’m not certain how to add it.  Besides, we don’t have a stereo in the kitchen, and running music from the other room seems an unnecessary complication.

  The most common question asked universally of composers is this:  which do you write first, the words or the music?  The usual answer to this question is the extremely uninformative response, it depends.  Depends on what you ask?  Well, it just depends.  We can give you examples, but we can’t explain it.  I can think of many songs in which I had some neat lyric ideas in search of a melody; just as commonly, I can remember dabbing out an interesting chord progression or melodic line and looking for words to fill it.  There are even songs in which the words and melody, and sometimes the full orchestration, were birthed at once, as I started singing, or even singing and playing, the new idea.

  Game designers perhaps get asked fewer questions.  I suppose that composers have a mystique about them which game designers do not.  People wish they could do what composers do, but think they cannot; on the other hand, if they wish they could do what game designers do, they generally think it’s not that tough and jump into trying to do it.  That’s fine; I don’t mind people discovering that creating a game is not any easier than writing a song (and quite frankly is in some ways more difficult, given the same level of basic understanding).  Yet sometimes the questions are asked, and the common one seems to parallel that asked of composers:  what do you create first, the setting or the system?

  The answer to this is also eerily parallel:  again, it depends.  I’ve designed entire games from a setting idea, but equally from a system idea.  I’ve had games come together as setting and system simultaneously.  More to the point, given the more limited experience I’ve had as a game designer (I’ve already forgotten over a hundred of the songs I’ve written; I’ve not yet finished a dozen game designs), I see it in the work of others.  If you’ve got a great setting idea that needs its own system, then you start with the setting and build the system from it.  If you’ve got a neat mechanic that would work well as part of the core mechanics of a game, you build that and expand with the setting.

  And again, sometimes you find that the setting and the system spring to life together, each feeding from the other.

  This makes more sense than you might expect.  After all, for most composers of songs (the famous lyricist/composer teams may or may not be included in this), we’re not creating words set to music, or music with words attached, but a song.  The feeling that the words express must be consonant with the mood of the melody; the emotional dynamic of the progression must be conveyed and amplified by the lyrics.  We’re not writing two things that we put together; we’re writing one thing that has two distinguishable parts.  So, too, the game designer isn’t creating a setting and a system most times, but a game.

  If you’ll permit me to push the comparison further, those two distinguishable parts may be distinguishable in the analysis, but they are not as clearly distinct in the reality.  Frequently the structure of the lyric is part of the music–word phrases are written whose strong staccato pronunciations amplify the rhythms of the music, or music is written to draw out the flow of the words.  I have often said that nearly ever sentence can be teased into giving up its own melody; without too much difficulty, I could sing this article to you, improvising what the melody needs to do with each phrase, because the words and the music are inextricably tied together in a song.  The words are music, and the music words.

  So, too, setting and system are not as distinct as you may think.  I have noticed of Multiverser since it was published that the current world setting in which the character is playing becomes part of the rules that control play, even without altering any of the rules as we understand them.  Introducing a setting steeped in challenge will lead most players to play with a view to tactics, meeting the challenges, while a setting in which moral and ethical issues are a major part of the background often brings out strongly issue-oriented play, and yet another which is strange and peaceful calls for more explorative approaches.  Setting is system; it is that part of system that dictates location-dependent events and encounters.  System meanwhile is setting, that part of setting that controls what happens, how the world is altered.  Roleplaying game theorist Ron Edwards has said that system is the equivalent of time in the game:  it is the aspect of the game that controls change within the world.  Thus even fully generic and universal systems become fully integrated into their settings, as system and setting are parts of the same whole, not elements in a construction kit but definitions overlaid by distinctions we’ve made.  Anyone who has ever, after taking a bit of college level psychology, tried to figure out where their spirit ends and their body begins, understands this.  We can see that each has a clear place that is its own, but the edges between them are too fuzzy to identify.

  This all has a practical side as well.  As you’re writing a song, it is often the case that the emphasis will shift.  At this point, you need the lyrics to go a new direction, and that means that the music must change to support the lyrics; yet at another point it will be a need to do something different musically which demands a change in the words.  In the same way, sometimes in your game design efforts it will be evident that some necessary aspect of the setting requires mechanical support, and you need to make the system work for that element of setting; but sometimes it will be apparent that the implications of your system will drive the setting in a new direction which you must pursue.  You don’t do one or the other; you knit the two together even as you create them, each designed to work with the other.

  I suspect that the best songs and the best games are made this way.  At any rate, I have the most success when I don’t try to formulate how to do it, but just find the right starting point and move from there to whatever is needed next, until the work is complete.  It is the method I recommend.

  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.

The short grasps at breath from a cying Annalise stopped some time after seven, right around the same time they stopped their watch shifts and gave way to exhaustion. Almost predictably (I say almost because I half expected him to sleep, feeling that a leader might deserve such fringe benefits), Mr. Cavalier was seated at his old desk, feet propped quite proudly on its top and twiddling something between his fingers.

“So, if I am going to help you, you need to answer my questions, and you answer them straight or pack up and leave.”

“Demands? You wouldn’t have partnered with me if you didn’t need something. That much I know. So if you feel so entitled to answers, just remember that there may be limits to that.”

The youth of his eyes were severely disparate to face, craggy and worn as it was. Those eyes burned with everything contemptible about youth; arrogance, seething ambition, and sheer carelessness, all seen in a pupil and an iris surrounded by folds of skin.

“Nonetheless, I expected them, so ask, and maybe we’ll find some middle ground.”

And he had me promptly beat on that point, which pigeon-holed me way beyond where i was comfortable.

“Your past isn’t what I am so worried about, so lets leave that to the winds, shall we? I want to know about the plan you have to hit that regional office.”

“Fair enough.”

He moved with an obvious swagger, rolling his chair over to a metal file cabinet and withdrawing a three foot roll of papers secured by several rubber bands. He slid undid those and then rolled the papers out full length across his desk. It was all schematics, copiously hand drawn, not printed.

“It took ten years to scrape up this info and I have plans for three regional offices. The great thing is that these building were so heavily fortified that it becomes to expensive to remodel, so everything is just about the same now as it was when first built.

“Ok…um…lets see…design… Standard design is four stories. Outer perimeter walls are usually made of a ceramic-ferro composite concrete, about thirty feet thick, and reinforced and pre-stressed with heavy titanium-carbon composite pylons. Inner perimeter walls are carbon-spectra fiber composite blast resistant layers several inches thick with hydraulic membranes sandwiched in the middle.

Inside, the interior is structurally decoupled from the exterior, relying on it’s own framework. The same with each of the floors. Everything is over-engineered. The active and passive shock dampening was designed for a building more than twenty times its height, and there is so much of it that I am not sure the thing would even budge if the big one hit.
Utilities? You can count those out. Completely self contained. They could go on for years with what they have inside. The buildings themselves look like nondescript, perfectly innocent office buildings of bland design, occupied by a cover business. The Delta agents, a uniform one hundred, come and go through hidden entrances.

They even have offensive capability in the form of surface to air missile batteries and tactical nukes. Worse than that, they have null field generators.”

That last piece of information piqued my interest, but I declined to ask, fearing that he would ask questions in return and dig too deep. Besides, it was evident enough as to do what it did.

“So, in other words, it’s the epitome of overkill. Any direct siege would be suicide for even a moderately sized army. But there is one weakness…”

I simply remained silent in this one sided dance of a conversation, allowing him to show off.

“That would be their central network. It isn’t connected to any outside systems, but it controls everything. Unfortunately, the only info I haven’t been able to get is on their RF and EMP shielding, though it’s probably insanely tough. However, since you came, our fortunes have changed.”

I really didn’t know if his information was accurate or not, since it just as well could have been a more militant version of maps to the houses of Hollywood stars, but those eyes told me different. He had written extra notes on the map while prattling on with hos speech and it was the same handwriting as the map’s original notes. He had done this map himself and I had a feeling he didn’t mess around where his ego was concerned.

“You took out a professionally trained psi, a Primer no less. That means you have a good chance of getting inside somebody’s head.”

So he knew. I guess it was expected. Jigger and Cannonball were still out cold, but he probably had an extra set of eyes on the streets.

“Ok, but what about other psis? Part of my survival was luck.”

“Don’t be so modest, but if you are truly worried, just realize the psis are truly rare things among us Deltas and fewer still among the Primers.”

So, not only was he willing to bet a nearly suicidal operation on chance (even a good one), he was also not willing to take stock of what he truly need. I was liking him less and less. That got me to contemplate a risk of my own.




But I guess what sealed it was an awkward silence when neither of us had any more questions or demands. He then put the schematics away and while the drawer was open I caught a glimpse of something that was apparently personal to him. It was a black and white photograph, well worn, and obviously of someone who had lived probably before the turn of the century. The man possessed long and grayish, almost unkempt, wiry hair, paired with straight tree trunk of a beard.

The image took a minute to process in my mind. I don’t know why. I should have recognized it, but I kept trying to choose between the obvious choice and a civil war general. However, it clicked. Carl Marx.

That tipped the scales. I began slithering into his mind, or at least trying to. The first shock was the tangle of pathos and neurosis that he possessed. Hatred, insecurity, and unbridled ambition all competed for the spotlight. After taking a long hike through that hall of broken mirrors, I found his memories.

The Flow school of psi, at least in my opinion, is the safest way to use psi. It utilizes the natural strengths, leaves the quirks of psi as they are, and does everything not to work against it, while achieving the objective at hand, probably better than the Control school of psi. The best way I can describe it is riding a wave on a surf board. You go with the curl, following its flow and contours, but you are always moving toward the shore. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get pulled under.

So, instead of stringing out his experiences like photos in a wallet to be viewed at my leisure, they came in an onrush: Divorce. Marriage. Birth. Old age. Youth. Exile. Marines. Assassination attempt. Viet Cong. Delta abilities. Resistance. My tk went wild and I flew my chair, hitting the wall with a rather resounding and deep thud. He spun from the cabinet, staring at me with the first surprised expression I had seen on his face since I met him.

“What happened?! Dammit, another Primer assault?”

While he was staring at the walls with unhidden paranoia, everyone had awoken, including Annalise. They were following his gaze, breaking only to give a staring glance at me and then returning to their searching wait.

Then Cavalier turned with a smile, eyes fixed and boring into me. The smile was thin, curled at the corners, and bearing teeth as his lips were tightly stretched over them. It would have been a typical anger filled grin, if it wasn’t for a nauseating quality that spoke to wicked sadism.

His right arm liquefied into an amorphous mass and surged outward like a blast from a fire hydrant, stopping short of running me through and then circling my neck in a ring. He lifted into mid-air. Wrong move, for me and him.



My head still pounded and, both excited and stressed, fought to piece the the images dug from his mind together into something cohesive. Then my consciousness rather spontaneously spat out a name, Lee Harvey Oswald. The whole of my mind, being dragged behind, snapped back in to place. I finally comprehended the significance of the name. So it was that one lonely misfit in my world had shot another dead, changing history and adding a rather sorry staple to our culture. Ironically, in this one he had become more powerful, more skilled, more wise, and yet had accomplished, or perhaps demolished, far less.

But these thoughts didn’t help. He hit something under his desk and with a buzz the huge bulkhead of a door opened and we moved into the tunnel. Two of his lackeys had taken Annalise, keeping her in a choke hold. The others stayed plastered to the walls of their bolthole. Jigger and Cannonball stayed unconscious.

Oswald through me to the grimy pavement while my head was still splitting. His arm slithered back into its original silhouette, by quickly gurgled and stabilized into a thing and straight blade. The other arm did the same.

“You know, I never really needed you. I just wanted to give you a chance at greatness. Now you have betrayed me. Now you will will pay.”

Overly brooding and dramatic, I thought. I wondered if he had seen one too many crime dramas or action movies. Usually villains were much less wordy when they kill someone, excluding the occasional tirade of the self-justified ones.

“Get up! NOW!”

There goes that insecurity.

“Fight me. Show me that you could have been great…”

I got up, slowly, to really piss him off. And then I went into a drunken boxing position of sorts. I had abandoned the “drunken” part of the art, preferring instead to retain the mechanics and underlying philosophy. As Miyamoto Musashi said, “One thousand days of training to forge . . . ten thousand days to polish.” To add and then refine.

And he proved to have no knowledge of this principal. He moves were flashy, garnering attention more than any tactical advantage. I let him go first.

I won’t lie to you and say that he never touched a hair on me, or nearly so, because he did hit. Flashy or not, skill is skill, but I had developed true understanding, transcendent of memorized movements and bullet points in a training manual. One of those benefits was spacial awareness.

As much as he tried to strike a deadly blow, I kept him from getting closer than a moderate graze. His frustration rose and he fumbled and then it rose more and he fumbled harder. He let down his guard more and more, opening up wider and wider windows for me to strike. I just hoped the non-morphed parts of his body were normal.

As he arced one of his blades over to bring it down on my head, on my knees I struck a nerve in his thy, bringing him to eye level with me. He tried figuring where i was going to strike next, liquefying his head and neck. I just listened to his hear heart beat, thumped with in a key fifteen millisecond window, and he dropped to the ground dead, his limbs not morphing back.

His lackeys stood dumbfounded, loosening their grip on Annalise. She then promptly shocked the two of them to the ground and ran behind me, clutching my arm. I spoke to the assembled crowd.

“He thought nothing of you. All I want is to change things, and in that cause I will treat you as equals. Join me.”

It didn’t take anymore negotiation than that. The lot, most around Annalise’s age, lined up in an orderly column, and followed me in step out of that tunnel. However, I did leave a note for the four that would wake up that they had the place to themselves. I wished them luck.

Being in a fairly abandoned part of the city, we had a lot of freedom of movement, but in the more populated areas we stuck to the shadows to avoid fresh troops brought in, apparently searching for me. I found a good ‘ol deuce and a half army truck, punched out the driver, taking his uniform. I loaded up the back with the bunch, brought down the drop clot and got in. Annalise rode up front.

“Where are we going?”

“St. Paul.”

“But we won’t be able to take the regional office with these people.”

“I know, but we’ll finally have real help this time.”

  It was Memorial Day.  I was thinking that I should do a piece about remembering the dead, and I made a note of it.  It sat there since then, and as I came to need an article that looked back on the past quarter this idea seemed to come into focus for me.

  I am perhaps fortunate enough not to have been touched by the death of anyone particularly close to me.  My brothers and sister are all alive, as well as my parents, and my uncles and aunts, all elderly but still living, and all of the cousins whom I knew well.  I’ve lost some pets along the way, as I mentioned in Deceased when I talked very much on this issue of including the remembrance of the dead within the game, but that’s not the same thing, I think.

  Yet perhaps I am not so fortunate.  I am aware, when I think of it, that at least some classmates from high school whom I once knew are now dead, kids with whom I talked on a daily basis; but I didn’t know them well.  I’ve already mentioned that all four of my grandparents are dead, as well as my father in law, back in Living in the Past.  The fact that these deaths don’t touch me may say more about my own isolation from people I might have known better and loved more over the years than about any good fortune on my part.  In a sense, not to have been touched by the deaths of those close to me may say that I have not been close enough to enough people.

  I do not complain on that; I certainly don’t wish to lose the few people to whom I am close.  I note it for reference.  I also note that when we spoke of holidays back in Celebrations, many of those referenced (in the fictional holidays page which is now here) had to do with remembering the dead, in general as Halloween, more narrowly related to particular events as Memorial Day or Pearl Harbor Day, or specifically as Lincoln’s Birthday.  We seem to remember the dead quite a bit.  Sometimes we do so because those dead are connected to something greater; sometimes it is only that we feel obliged to respect those who went before us.

  Each quarter we look back at the twelve articles of the quarter that has passed; last quarter’s revue was entitled Diversification, and spoke of keeping your creative juices flowing by keeping several irons in the fire.  Here are the articles that complete this tenth quarter, as we remember and memorialize two and a half years of this column.

118. Laser Sharks asked when over the top was not too much, and surprisingly offered a solid answer for that.
119. Dungeons presented the notion that scenarios could be open or closed; that is, that adventures could be in places in which there are strictly limited possibilities for encounters, or in places wide open to more arrivals.
120. Moods considered what to do when you’re in a bad mood so that you don’t spoil everyone else’s fun at the game session.
121. Ghosts offered a different approach to the restless spirits that walk the earth, involving understanding why they are wherever they are.
122. Strangers approached the question of people who work together who don’t get along, an idea that seems fundamental to real world groups and could be incorporated in our adventuring parties as well.
123. Beliefs introduced several articles on alignment by suggesting that these concepts were the real fundamental religion of the characters in the game world.
124. Pyramids tossed around some ideas about building worlds.
125. Foliage set us at odds against the weather, a battle in which survival is the only victory for which we can truly hope.
126. Numerology revealed a few of my personal superstitions and how I got them, along with how you can make your players’ characters a bit superstitious themselves.
127. We offered something of a grab bag for Halloween in Treats, a collection of disjointed ideas that were not big enough to warrant their own individual articles.
128. The promised collection of pieces on alignment continued with Beneficence, considering two distinct kinds of good and how they can be used in games.
129. Invulnerable was really about people who aren’t, and how a single weakness can make an otherwise invincible character more interesting.

  I suddenly halt to ask myself where this is going, why I’m writing this article, and I realize that I’m not entirely certain.  Then I realize that I’m not entirely certain why we take the time to remember the dead.  Let the dead bury the dead, I think; put the past behind and press on toward the future.  Why do we stop to remember the dead?  What does it do for us?

  One thing may be that we identify something in ourselves that prompts us to remember those who have already died.  We want to be remembered after we die.  Even those of us who believe in a real immortality want also to believe that in our time on earth we will have such an impact that people will still speak of us in a generation, or a century.  We want to think that what we have done means something, that it has been appreciated; and one of the best tests for its worth is whether it stands the test of time, whether in the years to come some people will still know what we did, perhaps even who we were.  It seems then that if our own lives and works would be validated in some sense by others remembering us, that we owe it to those who are gone to remember them, their lives and works, and so to validate them, to declare that what they did for us was worthwhile and appreciated.

  Whether they can know it or not (and I think even if we are certain they continue beyond the grave, that is not the same as knowing that they know), it is good for them that we remember and appreciate, and good for us, too, that we remember and appreciate.  It connects us to them, and them to us, and perhaps in so doing connects all of us to those who follow.  It reminds us that we are where we are because of them, and that we did not bring ourselves to the starting gate, but began from what they gave us, helped along by what they did for us, building on what they founded.  That part is important.  As I get older, I find myself speaking to my children about their grandfather, even my grandfather, and what they did, and how that impacted who I became, and what they can learn and take from that into their lives ahead.  There are many lessons we can learn that are valuable to ourselves, and the more valuable for remembering who it was that taught them to us.

  So what has all this to do with game ideas?  Only this.  Reality is a rich tapestry with many threads.  As we weave our fiction, the more threads we include the more real our worlds become.  Worlds with a history, known and revered by those who live within them, feel the more like real worlds.  If we remember those who went before, even if they are fictional, we add dimension to the game world that enriches our play.

  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.

So there I was with a person in rags clinging to my back as I used some notoriously unreliable tk to keep us afloat. Not the best position to be in when you’re facing potential enemies and also true of potential allies…

The one taking his sweet time gliding beside us turned a meaty hand over, thumb jutting, vigorously bobbing toward the ground. I then asked him him why with a gesture of my hands and an awkward exchange of expressions and gestures ensued. This went on until frustration won over and me justifying the decision with the thought that anyone who would negotiate this long wasn’t out to get us.

A flurry of pointing and waving got us to an abandoned stretch of main drag in a warehouse district on the outside of Chicago. Annalise slid off my back and I had this strange feeling of being a pack mule…I digress. The bandanna-wearer stood a good six feet from us, towering. The building-vaulter hung behind him, wiry and keen. Of the two, I think you can guess who spoke first.

“What cell are you? And don’t give the silent treatment either. This region is our turf and you just messed up my op. If you don’t me a damn good answer I swear I will break you…”

Well, from the way he was talking I knew he saw what I did and he sure as heck didn’t look like a guy to make idle threats, which meant he something to back up the threat he just made…

“I waiting for an answer you little punk.”

Annalise gave me an expectant look and I was about to open my mouth, but I had a better answer for him, or at least a flashier one. I knew there was a fault line with in a few miles of here. Small and stable for the last few millennia, but it would do. I looked around and most of the street lamps were intact. I decided to pull some things out of my old tattered bag of tricks.

Reaching outward and feeling deep into the earth, I found the fissure and began to pull. Reaching back toward us, I found a power sub-station a few blocks away. The breaker was intact and I wouldn’t have to spend time throwing switches. I threw the electrons in the cables into oscillation and then into full cycles until I reached sixty hertz. The hard part was plugging all the alternate lines and not turning every point in the power grid into a small bomb. I was able to establish a crude series circuit with the street lamps in the loop.

The synchronization was close enough that the street lamps blazed with in a couple of seconds or so of the ground shaking. It was enough to throw Mr. Bandanna off balance while I walked forward and magnified the sound waves leaving my mouth.

“I don’t give a damn for you or your questions. I was there and I acted. You weren’t and you didn’t. It’s called first come, first serve, genius. That means I don’t need your permission and it also means I sure-as-hell don’t need any grief from you..”

I let everything die in one sharp freeze. Acting fast enough to prevent his eyes from adjusting to the light, I grabbed at his throat and squeezed until I sure he wouldn’t break my grip, if he was strong enough. His wiry side-kick took decided to jump feet first at my head. It was flashy and made natural use of his talents, but lacking any fragment of tactical thinking. I threw my head back with enough room for his heels to miss my nose by an inch and he landed quite gracefully, but was promptly knocked flat by an electric arc that left Annalise’s hand.

I turned back to my to Mr. Bandanna and gave him a simple command, “Tell me your name first and then tell me why you stopped me. In that order or I break you.”

I let go and Annalise pointed a hand toward him. Visibly shaken, he began slowly.

“They call me Jigger. The little guy you just laid low is called Cannon Ball. I ain’t tellin’ you our real names. Why were we there? We were tying to ambush the Primers. Took us six months to track that scum. You messed it up in one night…”

I heard enough and I could piece together the rest. “Take me to your leader. I want to speak with him. I think we could be allies, if you use your heads a bit more.”

He just about snapped after the last syllable left my mouth and let out a long string of explicative I won’t repeat, but the jest of it was that he wouldn’t give them up. Admirable, but not what I needed right then.

I could aggressively strip mine the information out of his head, but that would leave him with either severe shell shock or a drooling mass for several years. Also not something I wanted. Cannon Ball was still out cold. The information came out him easy.

With an axe hand strike I folded Jigger’s jugular vein for a split second and left him as unconscious as Cannon Ball. I through them over my shoulders and with a nod Annalise climbed back on. I could hear more sirens approaching and going airborne with tk was feeling less and less appealing. Rooftops.

I kept tk to a minimum, using it to keep Annalise on my back while I kept the other two from flopping down onto the street below. Where we were going would take some time, even with the good pace, so I decided to ask questions of Annalise when I had the breath.

“Ok, assume I have been living under a rock for the last fifty years. What happened here. Give me the shirt version.”

“Where do I start…The best place would probably be when your President Kennedy survived assassination by a loan and mentally unstable Delta. His wife had to suffer the tragic mistake of taking the energy blast meant for her husband. He—Kennedy I mean—suffered severe head trauma and a dozen or so broken bones in the back blast, from what I remember of my history lessons. It has been so long. Anyway, after treatment with the best healers in the country, he returned to office and announced the loan Delta, whose name they never did release, was not such a loan soul after all. He was part of a large network of anti-Capitalist anarchists who had been planning a highly synchronized uprising throughout the country.

Considering what followed, I am inclined to doubt such things, but he always stood by the story. After that, everything changed. The Delta Registration Act. The dissolution of your Congress. The declaration of martial law. And I guess that leads us to this point, you and I.”

She had a knack for conversation and made the time pass with startling speed. One jump from the second floor of a burned out building onto the street below and we arrived at the entrance of the dreaded Southern Illinois Cell of the American Defiance. Reputation didn’t always follow reality.

It was a subway terminal, left forebodingly decrepit and bleak. Clever tactic. Using a little active ultrasound I found the door behind the concrete slab of the rail tunnel wall. They had a camera trained on me with giving off enough heat from its circuitry to warm a house. I turned to it and spoke.

“You can either let me in or i can break, but either way you’re going to have to deal with me.” They took long enough to even wear my patience thin, but the slab opened with a slow and ponderous gate. Heavy construction. Also smart. Maybe they were slightly brighter than their comrades.

A single room held ten people of varying sizes and appearances, with one in the center sitting in an old office chair with a worn steel desk at his control. Radio gear of military vintage lined the walls, as well as mattresses.

I set Cannon Ball and Jigger down and waited for some response from the menagerie. Predictably, the one in the center spoke.

“I’ve never seen you before, but your new reputation precedes you. Two Delta Prime agents incapacitated. That is a feat, even for me. What do you and the girl with you call yourselves?”

“You can call us…Hunter and Black Widow.” Yeah, I know. Not the most creative, but codenames seemed the norm for these people and melodrama follows secret identities and the like with karmic quality.

“Ok, now let me ask another question. Why do this to my agents? You seem to want the same thing that we want, if I guess correctly.” He had stood from his eat, revealing the same type of torn and worn fatigues as Jigger’s, but with something like a cloak around his shoulders. Strange. Almost egotistical. Too little anger and too much curiosity. I didn’t trust him, but I just might have to deal with him.

“What do I call you?”

“You can call me Cavalier.”

And that began some rather long, but guarded explanations. We agreed that we had mutual interests and that we would go out on the next mission against the Delta Prime regional office. I got the idea that “Delta Prime” was the agency responsible for the enforcement of laws concerning Deltas (not hard to miss the connection), but any more questions probably would have set “Cavalier” on edge.

Sleeping in that hole was hard enough with sets of eyes trained on me in the darkness (they slept in shifts). I didn’t have to sleep, but despite Annalise’s calm beyond her years, I could see her hands shaking and could hear the little gasps leaving her mouth as she stifled a cry. There wasn’t much space for sleeping, so they put her near me, close enough to give her a apt on the back and to have some conversation to get her mind off of whatever was troubling her.


“Why do we have to go with these thugs…uh…Hunter?”

“We need into that regional office. I think I am here to end this all.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning this whole regime. This suffering that Kennedy has caused. Its going to stop.”

“But how does breaking into one Delta Prime office due that?”

“Information is the most powerful weapon of an army.”

“We don’t have an army, if you notice.”

“I know. Now get some sleep.”

  In the midst of a book known as Judges, there is a story of a man with incredible strength.  He would frequently stand alone against armies of his enemies, and kill them all.  On one occasion, he is said to have killed a lion in bare handed single combat.  In the end, he brought down the house, toppling the support pillars so that the roof would collapse on the enemies who had captured him.  His name, of course, is Samson.

  If you know the story of Samson, you probably know that his strength was in his hair.  Actually it wasn’t, really.  His strength came from the fact that he was dedicated to God, and that dedication was displayed by the fact that he had never cut his hair.  We have a long story in which the beautiful Delilah keeps nagging him for the secret of his strength, and he keeps inventing something, and she does that to him only to discover that that’s not it.  Finally he tells her that it’s because his hair has never been cut, so when he is asleep she shaves his head, and he has no more strength, and is easily captured by his enemies and made a prisoner and a spectacle until his hair grows back and he does his little demolition scene.

  Hold that thought.

  Greek mythology tells us of another man named Achilles.  According to this story, somehow mom found her way to the shore of the river that separates the dead from the living, known as the Styx, and she dipped her infant son into its waters.  She was very careful not to touch the waters herself, and so she had to hold him by some part that would not itself be immersed in the water.  She chose to hold him by his heels.  The consequence of having been dipped in this river, of having been that close to death and life at the same time at so young an age perhaps, was that Achilles was invulnerable.  No weapon could pierce his skin; no attack seemed able to harm him.  He became a great warrior.

  In the end, however, he was killed in battle.  Someone found his weak spot, his Achilles’ Heel, as it has been known since then.  An arrow pierced the one spot his mother had been unable to protect.

  We spoke of The Scottish Play back in the article on Prophecy, and how MacBeth thought himself invulnerable because no man of woman born could harm him, and the wood would never come to Dunsinane.  He most clearly illustrates my thought.  He believed himself invulnerable, and he acted like it.  Achilles, too, thought himself indestructible, and suffered the consequences of overconfidence.  I mentioned Samson first, because I can’t help thinking that he, too, thought himself undefeatable, someone who could always take all comers.  I’m not convinced he actually knew that he would lose his strength if Delilah cut his hair.  He had never been without his strength.  He probably said this to placate her, but did not realize he was selling himself to the Philistines.  The text tells us that when Delilah woke him and told him that his enemies were upon him, he charged into them as if he fully expected to defeat them once again.  Since it seems doubtful that someone who had never once in his life cut his hair didn’t notice that his head had been shaved while he was asleep, he must have thought that that thing about the hair was just another way to get the woman to be quiet and let him sleep.  His weakness was a complete surprise.

  From these three examples, at least, it would appear that people who believe themselves invulnerable will take greater risks.  As they do so, they uncover their vulnerability.  It is inevitable, in a sense.  If you think yourself indestructible, there is less reason for caution.  If there is a weakness of which you are unaware, eventually you will find it, or someone else will find it for you.

  I’d wager this has appeared at the gaming table of more than one of my readers.  It has at mine, and not just in Multiverser games.  Players who perceive that for one reason or another their characters aren’t going to die will often push the envelope, to see how far they can go and get away with it.  I have seen players send their characters on nonsensical quests, attack overwhelming adversaries, attempt impossible feats.  Some, like The Last Starfighter‘s Navigator First Class Grig, perhaps always wanted to fight a desperate battle against incredible odds.  There are those, however, who just want that feeling of invincibility afforded them by a quirk in the rules.

  Maybe that’s all right.  For some, it’s a viable way to play, a way to boost self-confidence through the illusion of success against the reality of the impossibility of failure.  Yet you might find it more interesting to give these characters Samson’s hair, MacBeth’s charm, Achilles’ heel–that something of which they are unaware that will bring them down abruptly and unexpectedly.

  Then just let it play out.

  In the movie Unbreakable, Samuel L. Jackson tells Bruce Willis that every superhero has a weakness.  It seems to hold true in the comics.  Kryptonite can kill Superman, and the Green Lantern is helpless against (of all the possible silly things) the color yellow.  It is not unreasonable for a powerful character to have a hidden weakness, nor even for that weakness to be unknown and even completely unsuspected by himself.

  This gives a wonderful plot up to the moment when someone stumbles on the weakness.  Of course, that might not be the end even so.  Achilles and MacBeth died when their weak points were uncovered; but Samson survived as prisoner long enough to recover his strength and take vengeance.  Superman has been exposed to kryptonite enough times that his arch nemesis Lex Luthor suffered radiation poisoning from handling it (for those who didn’t know, apparently it wasn’t entirely safe for humans as had so long been thought); yet each time he survived, escaped, and triumphed.  The character whose weakness is uncovered is in some ways the stronger character:  he now knows that he’s got a vulnerability, something he must protect, whether by keeping it secret or by defending it particularly or by some other means.  He is the not quite invulnerable character who has just enough fear to make him interesting.  He is the more interesting because he once thought himself invulnerable, and others may still believe it, but he has discovered that he is not and must deal with that fact.  Whether it is someone seeking his aid who doesn’t understand his reluctance to face a danger that doesn’t seem significant to someone so powerful, or someone trying to find a weapon to use against him, the secret becomes central to who he is.

  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.

From the flash of a solar flare I had versed into blackness. I thought it might be a black hole, but then my pupils adjusted and the dark receded. My night vision took hold and I could see that I sat in a decrepit room, wall paper peeling back into rolls and the floors forming small anthills and valleys where it had sagged. A lavender haze was biting at what was left of the night sky, meaning it was early morning. The stars were faint, but I could see Leo, Ursa Major, and Orion’s Belt. Looking at them, I knew I was in the lower Northern latitudes and right of center in the Western Hemisphere. I could think of the handful of cities where I could be, but the spelling of the graffiti on the wall was American. Chicago was the likeliest place.

I could hear voices on the lower floor. Hushed and clipped. The vibrations of shifting weight ungulated through the structural beams. They were directly below, but no footsteps and they weren’t in the halls. They were waiting and something was coming. I went into a battle stance, an instinctual point of battle etiquette taught to me by Hattori Hanzo, the famous ninja vassal of the Tokugawa Ieyasu, or “Hanzo the devil” to you, because for me he will always be my sensei, “Hanzo the ghost.”

I picked up my nap sack, home to all my worldly possessions. The rest had been liquidated into usable funds. As a verser I always seemed perpetually short on cash. However, I saw fit to keep a blade given to me by Miyamoto Musashi (you might know his little work, A Book of Five Rings). The plaster on the wall had too much water damage to cut away cleanly, but I opened a hole large enough for me to fit through and the space between the plaster and masonry could hold me comfortably. Seems divinely convenient (probably was) that some rotted curtains hid the hole from plain sight. If this sounds like something you’ve seen before, then you should know the idea wasn’t entirely original to the Wachowski brothers…

So climbed in and shimmied down to the ground floor where I knew the voices were coming from. I cut a small line where the the ceiling met the wall and put my eye to it. There were people huddled in rags and and aged hand-me-downs that looked to be from a homeless shelter. Then I saw it: lights swept back and forth from the front of the building. I could hear the boot steps, but no voices. They were using hand signals. I heard at least two weapons cocked, but the sound wasn’t from any automatic weapon I knew.

The door exploded with splinters and men with some variation on the U.S. all-purpose camouflage and light SAWs came rushed in screaming orders and dragging people in fours and fives through the entry way. They also had some type of rotary launcher strap to the side of their guns. Seemed silly to be so heavily armed for some smelly refugees. Seemed obvious they were looking for something more dangerous.

My question got answered, sorta. Two people came in wearing what looked like flight suits, prominently blue and red, and emblazoned over the right breast with a presidential eagle, holding lightening bolts, instead of the the arrows and olive branches. Their gate was that of trained officers; military, not civilian. They walked too regularly in step.

The crowd was thinned from thirty to about eight. The flight-suited female stepped forward and went to each person, staring at them intently for a minute or so and then going on the next. She was a psi and a skilled one. I knew the the M.O. of those academy trained types. Their professional ethics were usually some variation of the Prague Mentalist and Parapsychology Accords. Of course I didn’t know what type of wordline I was dealing with, so making guesses that far out was unwise.

She kept this up until she reached the second to the last person, a girl, probably about fifteen, mumbling and, for some strange reason, sitting very properly. The female officer got down on her level and raised her chin with a single finger, brushing away the hair gently. She stared for the longest time before speaking.

“Are you Annalise?”

“I am.” The girl with a calm that set me aback.

“Then you know what I have to do…Under Emergency Federal Code 1534c and the Diplomacy Act of 1973, I hereby commence summary judgment and execution.”

That didn’t sound right. I had gotten a hold of all the heat signatures of the people in the room and they glowed brightly against the blackbody of the background. I put up a tk shield around the girl just before one of the soldiers loosed his SAW. The bullets went straight through the upper floors, as I intended to keep anyone one from getting ventilated. The plaster gave way more like gravel and sand than any sort of cohesive building material. Glad I didn’t sneeze the wrong way before now.

The female was wide eyed and stepping back, but I could see her heart rate lowering, as did her male companion who had lifted off the ground and closed the six foot difference in the blink of an eye. He sent me back through the wall, through a neighboring alley, and through the masonry and beams of another building. My bones held. In fact they held so well that I nearly ended up in the building’s basement because I had snapped the floor joyce in two.

He came bearing down with a balled fist and an arm crooked for a flight augmented punch. I could feel my nerves crackle with speed and suddenly everything slowed. I lifted myself with tk , caught him by the arm, and swung him through the left wall out onto the street where he skidded along the asphalt into a lamp post. I followed him with my tk flight.

There was no talking or taunting. He just caught up and came at me again. I was ready to ram him with everything I had, someone through the switch on my psi. My head pounded with what seemed like white noise. The female was backing up her partner.

I fell fifteen feet onto the street with a nice thud and the flying guy bearing down on me. A ball of two fists came hammering toward my head and I caught it with the butt of my palm. I could feel the shock travel through my body into the street and then the small implosion of the asphalt beneath my feet.

Just to let you in on a little secret: Normal human or not, human beings were not designed to do this type of stuff. I could explain why, but the explanation would be longer than what I am writing here. Suffice to say, superhuman strength is a bit like shifting gears and it requires a lot of concentration. So, if someone offers to give you the ability to tear tanks in two, think twice about it. Anyway, I knew this jackboot and I were about even and it wasn’t going to get better. The female on the other hand…

She was good, don’t get me wrong, but all of her training was was based of the concept concentration and control. My training had been in the “flow” school of psi. Without that flexibility she had an uphill battle to fight. I feel her behind the static and I had just the tool to knock her out of the game.

It feels a little bit like being right next to fire bell. Letting it go I heard a faint scream from the building and the static ended. I then took Flying Man for a tk ride and sent him sailing over the top of the building behind him.

The soldiers opened fire on me. I could feel the bullets stop at the armor beneath my skin, but the grenades were a different matter. A blasts sent me into the air again. Advice: When your being shot at, don’t try psi. It isn’t reliable enough with automatic weapons and grenades trained on this carcass.

So I used my tk one last time and got myself to a ledge, opposite of where they were shooting. I sprang outward and with one long arc I crashed through a window of the opposite building. I took a swan dive from there and landed on the street below.

I have to compliment the soldiers, they knew have to fight. They knew not to ball their fists during punches and didn’t telegraph either. Strong kicks too. Didn’t help much…

The first one I sent into a wall and by the loud deep crack I knew he had found a structural beam. I played with the others. Got some good sparring out of it and I was able to get in some practice with my spinning and leaping kicks. The last two I just gave a sound strike to the head with the flat of my foot.

The girl was huddle against the corner of the wall and looking at me with that calm…

“Who are you? Honor Guard? One of my cousin’s agents? Have you come to kill me?”

“Uh…neither. I just figured you were in trouble and what they were saying didn’t sound American.”

“Oh, one of those. Can you tell me where your comrades are?”

“I operate alone. What about the people in the street. You with them?”

“I was just hiding with the crowds. Apparently this is one of their regular sleeping places.”

I looked out into the street and everyone was gone. The soldiers hadn’t been looking for them. We needed to get somewhere else fast.

“Can we get out of here and maybe talk there.”

“Yes, do you have somewhere?”

“We can look. Get on my back.”

She gave me the most severe glare I had seen in a while, but understood what I was getting at. She climbed on and I mean climbed. She wasn’t an inch over five foot. I took off with my tk. I could hear the the heavy pulse of helicopter blades a few miles away.

“You know this city better than I do…is it Annalise?”

“Yes, it is, but my full name is Annalise Charlotte Auguste Victoire Clémentine Josef. However, Annalise will suit the circumstances.”

She spoke such excellent English I hadn’t noticed her accent until now, and that lead to another question.

“Ok, so why did they want you? Those troops were a armed for something more than a girl.”

She was silent for a second and then began slowly, working up to something.

“I…You Americans, ever since you gave up your republic, have enacted laws that prevent anyone with official ties to any government to come into your country without permission, on threat of death. I am, or was, the crown princess of of Austria. The reason why they were so well armed is that I am a Delta, like you. They hate Deltas, as I am sure you know.”

Of course I didn’t know and I just gave a grunt. I needed to set down and get out of the air space. We were heading toward the edge of Chicago. If this world was similar enough, which I wasn’t completely sure of, there should be an unoccupied warehouse. But there was know Sears Tower, so I was getting worried…

Then I saw something out of the corner of my eye and suddenly there was a man with an American flag bandanna and torn green fatigues flying beside me and another person keeping up with us, making long jumps between the buildings below. For the first time that night I took a deep gulp and began sweating…

  Some years back when a now world-famous doctor was young and fresh in practice, he became aware of research into the use of a new wonder drug, and took an interest in this.  The drug was being used to assist in cases of addiction to pain medications, but it had some other very promising properties.  Because of its interaction with neurotransmitters in the brain, it tended to create clarity of thought, and was suspected of actually enhancing intelligence.  The doctor tested this on himself, and was so pleased with the results that he insisted that his fiance also try it.  However, it did not work out well.  The young doctor was Sigmund Freud, and the drug then being used to relieve morphine addiction was cocaine.  He and his fiance both became horribly addicted to it, and although he was able to break the addiction, it is not clear whether she ever fully recovered from the damage done by it.

  I tell this story because it very clearly delineates two distinct types of good actions.  When I tell it, I almost always also mention the Apostle Paul’s prayer for the Philippians, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, because it, too, distinguishes these two kinds of good acts.  You see, we can ask whether what Freud did in encouraging his bride to take cocaine was a good act or not, and we could argue about it at great length, precisely because by one definition it was a very good thing to do but by another it was horribly bad.  If we understand the difference between those two concepts, it can make our heroes more praiseworthy and our villains more horrifying.

  Freud certainly loved his beloved; that was the entire reason for sharing with her this wonderful discovery he had made, this wonder drug that was going to make their lives and the entire world so much better.  He had the best of intentions, the best of motivations, the best of reasons, for persuading her to try it.  What he lacked was real knowledge.  We can imagine him crying over the pain he had caused, the suffering he brought to the one person in all the world for whom he would have wished no suffering; we can hear him crying, I didn’t know.

  He didn’t know.  What he did was good, in the sense that he did it out of love.  However, the fact that you do something out of love does not mean it was the right thing to do.  It was, presumably, the best thing you knew to do at the time.  If it wasn’t the right thing, it can still cause more problems than it solves.  That doesn’t mean you were a bad person; it means you made a bad choice.

  I could go from here into an extensive lesson into the bad choices people make and the consequences that flow from them; but as profitable as that might be, it’s not the point of this column.  Rather, I note that most people miss this distinction, between the good motives and the good action, the good person and the good choice.  I think that we can enhance play significantly by bringing this to the forefront in our minds, by understanding different meanings of good.

  We could distinguish one sort of good by the word beneficent.  Freud was certainly beneficent; he tried to do the best he could for those he loved.  What he was not, perhaps (and at that time of his life), was wise.  He did not know the best thing to do, and his guess was horribly off.

  The interesting thing is that beneficent people can do absolutely horrific things.  They can exterminate entire races, enslave people they deem beneath them, kill babies, old people, and those with infirmities or handicaps, out of kindness and good will.  They can do terrible things to one person out of a desire to do good for another.  These are, at heart, good people.  They want to do what is best for others.  They are just so far off the mark as to what that is that those of us with some objective knowledge don’t understand how they can do that.  We call them wicked, because we think they should know better.

  The other aspect of this that is just as important is that selfish people can do absolutely wonderful things for totally selfish reasons.  It isn’t whether the man gave a million dollars to build the clinic; it’s whether he did so because he wanted to help people, or because he wanted to curry the favor of certain powerful individuals whose support he will need to succeed in his next scheme.  The decision which helps others is a good choice, but it might not tell us that we’re dealing with a good person.

  This opens a wealth of possibilities for creating villains.  It’s always good to have the villain who is entirely selfish, or the one who is truly dedicated to serving evil in some form.  Yet to be opposed by someone who is just completely wrong about everything and trying to do the best they can based on that wrong knowledge–and particularly when they are adamantly certain that they are right–adds new dimensions to play.

  I’m reminded that the Ghostbusters faced this sort of adversary probably as often as they faced the supernatural evils for which they were better prepared.  The EPA administrator who shut down the power on their ghost containment field certainly qualifies here, releasing the imprisoned ghosts when he stops what he thinks is an illegal toxic waste processor.  So does the judge who wanted to lock them away for preying on the superstitious with their con game; if ghosts don’t exist, anyone who charges money to help get rid of them must be doing something illegal.  The debate with the mayor was in essence this sort of conflict, over what the right thing to do would be.  You can always end up at odds with good people who only want the best for everyone, who disagree as to what is the best for everyone.  Those conflicts are in some ways the most difficult to resolve.

  You can also create far more credible villains by making them people who think they’re doing the right thing, who then view the heroes as the wicked interfering scoundrels who would stop them from saving the world.  Just because the villain wants to conquer the world doesn’t mean he’s a bad guy at heart; he just believes that everyone in the world would be better off if he were in charge.

  The popular (or, depending on who you ask, unpopular) alignment system of Dungeons & Dragons plays with this exact idea.  It suggests that in addition to whether they are good or evil, people might also be lawful or chaotic, by which they mean believing either that the society is more important than the individual or that the individual is more important than the society.  Under this scheme, good people who believe it is important to maintain order in society to bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number will be at odds with those who believe bringing the greatest benefit to the greatest number can only be achieved by freeing them from the strictures of rules.  The question becomes, what is the best way to help people?  The answer is not so clear, and so good people disagree, and work at cross purposes to each other.

  The good that knows the right thing to do and does it is of a higher order, perhaps.  It is a good that only hurts those for whom pain is necessary–the good that slaps toddler fingers before they reach the fire, or sends a few young men to die against a foe that left unchecked would kill all.  It is a good that ultimately benefits everyone it touches, even if it does so by thwarting desires which would cause harm like too much ice cream for the diabetic; or forcing the better good over the more desirable, vegetables instead of dessert, on a grander scale.  It knows when a war must be fought to prevent a yet greater evil.  It is, perhaps, a perfect and divine good.

  It is also more than we can achieve; we can only aspire to it, pray to find it, seek wisdom and guidance along the way.  Meanwhile, we have to be content with that lesser good in ourselves, that beneficence, the desire to be good to others, and hope that our knowledge isn’t fatally flawed, our discernment woefully inadequate.  That is the only good we can promise; even that is difficult for most of us, but at least it is something to which we could be held accountable.  It is beyond us always to know the best thing to do; it is not beyond us always to attempt to do what we believe to be the best thing for the greatest number, even if none of us ever do so.

  It is also what is meant by good in alignment:  actions intended to promote the greatest benefit to the greatest number.  Success in doing so is not required; in trying to decide whether you are playing a good character, we measure the heart, not the outcome.  There will be times when what you do as a good character will go horribly wrong, and the blame for it will fall on you; but we will know that you did not intend or expect any of that to happen.  You were only trying to help, and if it went wrong because there was something you didn’t know, that doesn’t taint your character, even if it spoils your reputation and hurts uncounted people.

  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.