The Gaming Outpost

I sat in a jail cell in an Earth-like, modern-day world charged with attempted murder, which any hour now might be changed to murder in the first degree. And then they would hang me.

And unlike my world, they do not allow the defendant to waive his right to a speedy trial. Three months maximum, and I was set for the noose is the way I figured it.

And I reflected despairingly, that while I did not exactly deserve it for guilt, I did for stupidity.

I’d seen a mass murderer about to kill another person in front of a dozen witnesses, so I tried to kill the murderer. Instead, as shown by my recent visitor, the actual mass murderer, the man I knifed and shot was a doppleganger of the villain, and seemingly quite innocent.

And now the villain had just told me he planned to take his doppleganger’s place in this reality. Killing an alternate of yourself, I can hardly imagine, but Dr. Chase Arronnette the verser (not the doppleganger) specialized in the unimaginable horrors that spewed from his demented mind.

I had to break out of prison since no one would believe me. I paced up and down the small cell, trying to think. Problem was, Arronnette no doubt planned on me doing just that. He was smart.

It was like in chess where you are forced to take an unfavorable move. Tails he won, heads I lose.

I flexed my hands, and titanium fingernails popped out from under my god-given fingernails. Then I started to chisel at the front plate of the cell lock.

It was wielded on. And worse, I had to be quiet. The incredibly tedious process was interrupted for lunch and exercise. Spit and dirt covered up my indentions.

The food was suitably disgusting, and the exercise yard was filled with the brutal scum of the Earth. Fortunately, they had nothing on the pirates I’d sailed with a few years back for stupid brutality.

I merely stalked over to the weight bench, took off my shirt to show off my scars, and started benching enough weights to impress the locals.

They kinda sneered at my amount, until I kept up doing a steady repetition. You can lift weights for bodybuilding and looking pretty by doing few reps, and high weights, or for strength training by doing lower weights and a lot of reps.

Besides, a verser usually needs endurance more than maximum one push strength. So I try to balance those two.

However, I checked in on my Lekostian Star Empire cyberware which the people in this time could not detect even with an MRI, or a CAT scan. A mental command, and it clicked on.

I started adding weigths as the other lifters stood about studying me. As I passed five hundred,they started to laugh. At seven hundred, the stopped. At nine hundred, they and most of the rest of the yard just stared. I stopped at a thousand.

And then I did ten reps. I’m glad for cyberware.

After that, I had no problems whatsoever from any of the inmates. In fact, they called me “Mr. Tad” since saying Tadeusz was hard for many of them.

In fact, they volunteered to make a distraction if I was breaking out.

It took another two hours, but the face plate came off, and I saw the lock and its alarm. The lock was easy, and the alarm a bit tricky since I lacked proper supplies, but it got done.

A guard came by pretty quick, and rattled my door. So, I had caused a bobble in the warning system.

After he left, I unlocked the door, and waited.

Eventually a guard came in at the end of the corridor, and two inmates down at the other end started fighting and yelling.

So the guard ran past me, and I stepped out behind him, and nerve striked him into unconsciousness.

Then I took the guard’s key card. The other prisoners wanted to escape as well, but that I could not allow. They were criminals.

“Sorry, guys, but no go.” A rising storm of protest got silenced to mutters by my one-handed tossing the guard to my shoulder. It reminded them of the weights.

“When I get out, I’ll reward you. My word on it. But I’m not a criminal, and you guys are. So sayonara.”

I left to a chorus of mockery, but it seemed like they took my attitude seriously.

Getting through two doors was easy. Now I was in the hallway just short of the regular prison. Problem was, a video monitor covered the hall.

They had it poorly positioned since it did not cover the door, or the first few feet of the hallway.

Probably a contractor got lazy, and did not want to extend some wiring.

I stripped the guard, and got into his uniform. And then walked out into the main prison.

A great cavernous chamber with four stories of prison cells, and two guards on the far side of the room, and my goal lay past the guards. A door with another door. Both steel barred, and as I gratefully noted without video cameras.

Maybe in this world, video cameras were expensive and bulky. Or maybe the prison was having contractor difficulties.

I sauntered across the room, and the prisoners noted that they had not seen me before which prompted cries of “Baaaaa” and the like which got the guards to notice me instead of noticing the suit.

Still I got within fifteen feet of one and twenty of the other before they began to reach for their weapons. I pulled my nightstick and flung it straight into the gut of the one furthest from me. And then sprinting and leaping to nail the other one. Then the other guard got finished by a sleeper hold as he gasped on the floor, out of breath.

The doors were a simple matter after that, and I dragged the two guards out of there since I did not want people tossing things on them from four stories up.

The general prisoners yelled and screamed, and an intercom blared. I had to move fast.

I ran down the hall, and as I passed a crowd of guards going to suppress the noise, I had my cap’s beak down, and I said that I had to go report to the Superintendent.

It worked. Phew.

Got to the front door, and a guard behind a glass window wanted me to sign out. Then he realized he did not recognize me.

So I knifed the bullet-proof glass with a fingertip strike taught me by Master Wau, and my cyberware, and my fingertip titanium claws, and I wrapped my hand in my cap to protect it from glass.

The poor inch-thick glass of the front door had no chance. I dove through my hole, and rolled to my feet a free man, except for a fifteen feet tall chain link fence. It did not even have razor wire on top, just barbed wire.

I scaled it, and started to snip the barbed wire, and then thought better of it since I no doubt had a guard behind me reaching for his pistol or shotgun.

A quick handstand rotate over the top and with a ripping and a scratching my weight tore me free of the barbs.

Ow.

My zig-zag run was aided by the two bullets sent my way.

A mad dash through a dollar store and out the back netted me a blaring alarm, and a new set of clothes. I used behind a dumpster a block over as my changing station, and then as police sirens blared nearby, I went for the roofs.

I figured I had a few minutes before the helicopter arrived, and I needed maximum distance in that time.

Plus, I had an advantage. With my cyberware’s strength and my martial arts training, I could leap alleys that no one else could.

Two and a half minutes later, I climbed down the side of a two story building using my claws yet again, and into an alley with a manhole cover.

And I fled into the sewers. I headed downhill, and eventually after a mile came to the river wich was blocked by a rusted grate which got removed rapidly.

And then a dive into the local river took me toward the edge of town.

I slipped out near a park just outside of the medium sized town I had been in. And I saw happily that it was a camping grounds.

So I snuck around looking for a lazy dad who had not unpacked the suitcases yet.

This prison break thing was turning me into a regular criminal.

A bit of fiddling with the lock, and presto, the door opened. A quick turning off of the car light, and then I waited to see if anyone noticed.

None did.

I ‘borrowed’ another set of clothes. Blue jeans, and a terry cloth pullover shirt, and a pair of penny loafers. My victim had decent taste, and good sense in clothing.

A bit of twine slice off served me a belt, and the shirt hung over that to disguise it.

I memorized the all alphabetical license plate “number”. It was a random jumble, I think. Different worlds do things, well, differently.

Looking fairly respectable, I checked and found a woman’s makeup case which I also borrowed.

I left a note.

“Sorry, I’ll try to pay you back.”

And with a radio newly liberated in hand, I set out for town again.

The radio, when I dared turn it on, confirmed my fears.

“This is a public service announcement. Please be on the lookout for a criminal named ‘Tadeusz’. Last seen, wearing…, and height…Armed and extremely dangerous. Do not approach.
Police have discovered his apartment, and found several bodies dismembered due to a suspicious and public-spirited citizen.”

Rage gripped me. ‘Public-spirited citizen!?!’ Arronnette, I’d kill you for this, and for those poor people you murdered. Such was my fury that I did not notice until too late, that my radio,my source of news was in chunks in my hands.

I threw it away into a ditch violently, and stalked onward determined to find an ending for the Merry Mauler. And quite willing for it to be painful.

Tadeusz

  In this column, we’re going to strip our role playing games completely naked, and then (if that image doesn’t bother you) flay the skin off them, so we can get to the bones, and see what is really happening in our games.

  If you’re still with me, that will be the worst of the imagery in this article; but this article is in a very basic sense about imagery, because it’s about what we do when we play a role playing game, beneath the mechanics, beyond the roles played, apart from the descriptions.  Further, it is about how we do that.

  It is also an article in which I’m going to include a few words that might be called jargon, terms that have risen to the forefront in some circles in which role playing theory is discussed and so have been given very particular meaning, because, as with all jargon, having a narrowly defined meaning for a term makes it considerably more useful in explaining things.  The words I’m going to use are credibility, authority, and system; watch for them.

  In the prototypical role playing game, a group of people sit down at a table, with papers and dice and maybe miniatures and maps, and start talking about what their characters are doing and what happens because of this.  That prototype has branched into many variant forms.  Many people eliminated the table, the maps, the miniatures, even the dice, and rarely even the papers, and still are playing role playing games.  Live Action Role Play has put the players in motion in the roles of their characters.  Multi-User Dungeons and Multi-User Shared Hallucinations have moved the interactions of the players to the computer.  Play By Mail, Play By E-Mail, and Play By Post (known around here as Forum Games, of which we’re rather fond) change the time factors significantly, and yet still remain role playing.  What is it that ties all these together?  What are we doing when we play?

  We are creating a shared imaginary space.  Each of us contributes to that space by making statements which we are permitted to make, such as describing a setting element or stating what our characters are going to do.  As we make those statements, they get processed by something called the system, and wind up in the shared imaginary space–that is, there is a way we determine what statements are true, and when that has been determined we all imagine the same thing (or close enough, as we probably are not all imagining exactly the same thing).  At its essence, a role playing game is about creating this shared imaginary space; this may be the one thing that distinguishes it from all other forms of art, play, or entertainment.

  How are we doing it?  Well, you might say that we’re following the rules in the book; but that’s not entirely true.  Quite a bit of what we are putting into our space has nothing to do with rules in the book.  It has rather to do with that system, the real rules, the social mechanisms which control our interaction as players (of whom the referee is one) in the process of deciding collectively what is there.  Some of that is not in the book, and in fact could not be in the book.  Some of what is in the book we’re not using, in all likelihood.  Yet we have a system, and the system is related to the book, but also to us.

  One of the critical things that the system does is tell us who has the right to define what is happening in that shared imaginary space, and to what degree.  For example, in most traditional games, the referee gets to say how many orcs are in the room, and whether the lights are on or off.  A player who said how many orcs were in the room wouldn’t make any difference at all, unless he was basing that statement on other facts that had already been determined.  For example, the referee could say that there were four orcs in the room, and the player could say his character is going to throw one of them out the window, and then he could roll the dice, recognize it as a success, and then declare that because he successfully threw one of the orcs out the window there now are only three in the room.  All of that has to do with credibility.  Credibility means, who has the right to say what is happening in the shared imaginary space, and to what degree?

  What the system does is apportion credibility; that is, if the system is working, everyone at the table knows the degree to which he is able to define what is happening in the shared imaginary space, and the degree to which he must accept what other individuals say is happening.  In our traditional games, the players other than the referee get to say what their characters are attempting to do–not necessarily what they are doing; in many games, those attempts do not become part of the shared imaginary space until the referee at least acquiesces to them, and there may be mechanics required to determine whether their attempts succeed.  For example, in many games, a player might say, “I hit the orc,” but he lacks the credibility to create that.  Rather, that is taken to mean, “I attempt to hit the orc” or “I want to hit the orc”.  The referee will then tell the player to roll particular dice, then will look at the result and announce whether in fact the character did or did not hit the orc.  The referee thus has the credibility to say whether those actions are successful.

  It is important to understand this for a number of reasons, but the most significant is this:  if we understand that credibility determines who gets to define what aspects of the shared imaginary space, and we further see that system apportions credibility amongst the participants in specific ways, we can change how that credibility is apportioned.

  Some guys who once played with me continued to play with another referee after I stopped running the game; they sometimes told me about their sessions.  There was one player who was, I’m afraid, a bit unusual.  He would be playing along, get in a conversation with a non-player character, and suddenly he would be doing both sides of the conversation.  “So then, he says to me, why’d you do that, anyway? And so I tells him, this was why.  Interestin’, he says.”  The players who cut their teeth on my rather more orthodox game sessions found this completely insane; referees run non-player characters, not players.  Yet the referee let this player run with his ideas, and the player never did anything inappropriate or unbalancing with it–he just created believable encounters.  He would also add details to rooms as he played (“So I pick up the book on the desk, and look at it.  It’s an interesting book, looks like a diary, but I’m not sure whether I should read it.”).

  This is system adjusting for the players; this player was taking credibility to himself, and the referee was ceding it to him.  There is nothing wrong with that as an approach to play, if the group finds it acceptable.

  There is probably a lot of confusion at this point about credibility and system, and what either of them have to do with those rule books.  There’s a fair amount of connection.  Do the rules have credibility?  Actually, they can’t, because they cannot speak into the shared imaginary space; they have to be interpreted into the shared imaginary space.  Thus the rules have authority, but not credibility.  Having authority, they are the place of appeal, like statutes and precedents in a court of law; a player, any player, can state that something must be so in the shared imaginary space because the rules state something.  However, the rules can only enter the shared imaginary space by being interpreted, and the question then becomes whose interpretation we believe.  The answer to that is that the system gives credibility in some fashion that enables us to recognize which person’s explanation of the meaning of a rule is determinative.  The rule itself means only what the credible person says it means.  That might mean that the rule means what the referee says; of course, credibility could be so established that the agreement of several players can override the credibility of the referee, or that someone at the table is recognized as having such a grasp on the rules that he can state the meaning of a rule.  Whether that statement is then part of the shared imaginary space in its effects then depends on whether the system says that book rules will be followed at all times, or there is some intervening level of credibility that enables someone to decide whether, when, and how book rules apply.  Book rules become part of the system if the person with credibility to define the rules makes them part of the system.

  At the same time, it is the system that decides who has that credibility; and that may well come from the book rules.  Although many games are terribly unclear about it, most make some attempt to apportion credibility in the pages of the rules, so that players can figure out who gets to decide what.

  So rules define system, system apportions credibility, credibility interprets the rules to define the system, and around and around and around it goes, and where does it all start anyway?

  It starts with a simple social contract.  Several people get together, and agree to play a game.  As they sit down to play, they usually agree that one person has the credibility to tell them what the rules mean, and if the game starts to work that one person lets the others know how much credibility each has.  In the end, each may have very little credibility, or the one who started with all the credibility might give it all away, but that’s how the system is created.  Through our interactions, we decide who has the credibility to say what, and so the game is born, and the shared imaginary space comes alive.

  Decades ago now I use to troubleshoot electronic audio equipment.  When I was first learning, I could only do the easy things–take tubes out to the tester and see if they’re good, look for burnt out components and broken connections.  Eventually, though, I started to understand how these machines worked.  That’s a critical step.  Once you see how something is supposed to work, when it doesn’t work, you can try to figure out why it isn’t working by looking at what it’s supposed to do in search of the failure.

  Now that we know how, at the most basic level, our roleplaying games work, we have a critical tool for figuring out why they don’t work on those occasions when things fall apart.  Knowing why they don’t work is usually the first step to fixing them (unless you just want remove each player in turn until you find the one that’s messing up your game).  Understanding what the system is, how it apportions credibility, and how credibility is used to define the shared imaginary space, is foundational to what makes games work, or not work, and how to keep them working.

  I should attach a footnote to this.  The concept of system as the means by which events in the shared imaginary space are determined is known as the Lumpley Principle, and is the insight of Vincent Baker.  Others have contributed to the concepts described here, although I certainly am one of the contributors, having made the significant distinction between authority and credibility elsewhere, and written something on credibility distribution.

  This has been close to the current cutting edge of role playing game theory; I hope I have made it both clear and practical.

  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 in jail on Death Row. Not from versing in, mind you, but from my actions after I arrived in this universe. Here let me tell you how it went down.

The warm sun on my face woke me quicker than I’m used to, and I wondered if I was going to eventually re-learn how to transition to a new world awake. The old oak trees, and the cheerful chatter of young girls walking by told me I was in an Earth-like world.

Sitting up, and gathering my stuff, I saw refined, and box-like buildings with students with books going in and out. The scene only lacked ivy; I had versed into the grounds of a major college.

Lets hope that ID checks and the like were not required to leave.

I scanned with my scriff sense, as I usually did upon arriving in a world. To my surprise, I spotted two different scriff sources. One mechanical, and the other was another such as I, a verser.

Walking a big “X” let me know that the both of them were quite close, and so I gathered my stuff, and headed toward both.

Happily, the Walker-Hastings Science Building did not have metal detectors on its front doors. My horse pistol, a sixteen-hundred’s era piece, or my plasma cannon given me by benevolent alien invaders from ten thousand lightyears from Earth, and my Irish knife, a sign of princehood from long ago, and much of my other stuff would have set it off.

Indeed, the only security I saw was a skinny guard sitting on a decayed couch and reading the Dartmouth Review while chuckling.

The faint aromas of slightly shabby offices gave way to the brighter stinks of chemistries which I amused myself by identifying as much as I could from the odors.

And then the senses merged together, the mechanical and the verser were in the same spot, or so close together as to be not resolvable with the poor quality of differentiation scriff sense gives you.

I quickened my pace wandering what was happening.

And thus I rounded a corner to see what I knew as a Skolby-Griggs Directed Teleporter. Don’t ask me how I knew, except I had a vague memory of seeing one used regularly as an Earth-to-Moon transport device. This was the source of the mechanical scriff signature, I felt certain.

It probably leaked scriff.

And below it waited a young fellow strapped down on a mobile rack that extended up to the elliptical iris of the teleporter lens, and he planned to become a hero of science unless I missed my guess. Mortals have such extraordinary courage.

Across the room, I saw a cluster of scientists waiting on the experiment, and then I saw in the midst of them my verser. The world slowed as I saw him raise a box with a big red button on it while he smiled a too familiar grin.

Nooooo!! I wanted to scream, for I knew that mixture of defiance of accepted rules, and nervousness, and self-encouragement all too well.

Chase Aronnette the Verser, the Merry Mauler, a wannabe Dr. Frankenstein with a glib line ‘mourning the tragic loss of life in his experiment’ and the total lack of heart that marked a pschyopath stood in front of me.

We had crossed before. I was not the first verser to kill him which granted him the blood of a verser since it had been a nasty struggle according to the Prince of Fire and his wife, Annie Oakley. Whisp, and Pirate’s Bane, and She Who is Gold had also dealt with him, as I had twice I seemed to recall.

Unfortunately, the same immortality that gives the good versers another life in another world to sow seeds of joy, also gives the dark versers their chance again. And unlike the prophesied four punks I met in the Central Plaza of some long-dead world, I had not been gifted with a means of neutralizing him.

I hear tell, one of the versers who has been around even more than me keeps one such in a pocket dimension in his briefcase.

So I saw ‘that grin’ and knew with a gut-wrenching fear that Dr. Oopsie as we good versers mocked him was about to murder another subject, and in plain view of everyone. If I protested, he would pretend not to understand, and push. If I ran over there, there was not enough time.

Besides, Dr. Oopsie was a very tough combatant. I neglected to mention that he had versed me out one time by strangling me with his bare hands which trust me, is not easily accomplished.

I drew my knife, and flung it across the laboratory to skewer his wrist that held the ignition device, the murderer’s signal box. Gasping in pain, he dropped the box, and began to crumple while reaching out with the other hand for the box.

It was as I expected. The black-souled creep was never one to give up easily. My horse pistol was already in my hand, and the ignition pan was sputtering. If I had no shot, I would have put a ball into the roof, but the other scientists either dodged away, or cowered in place.

So as the doctor fell to the ground still reaching for the box, I put a steel ball into his chest with a six foot long blast of flame, and a great gust of smoke to fill the laboratory.

He hit the ground, and so did the box, and I did not see it, but he must have managed to hit the button anyway for the teleporter started to rapidly wind up. The great spinning ellipse in its vacuum cage began to throw disjointed sparks across the room. Already things began to be unfixed in location.

I tore across the room, and found myself on the opposite side of the sacrificial victim without jumping over his cart. I started to try to free him, and the first thing he did once his arms were unstrapped was to punch me dead on the nose with enough force that I almost passed out.

I stumbled back, and fell sprawled over cables and floor mounts, and the victim was suddenly impelled into the nascent teleport gate. To my surprise, a shower of blood did not drench the room.

And then a half-dozen scientists demonstrated why they reigned supreme in the Faculty Tackle Football Saturday Game.

While an ambulance came for Dr. Oopsie, the police came for me. I merely recommended they search his room, and his computer for incriminating stuff like body parts since the ‘good doctor’ still entertained visions of making the dead walk.

I was not very popular, and they took my suggestion not very seriously, and things got markedly more heated when they opened my backpack with all the way-too-interesting items brought from various worlds.

So after five hours of being yelled at they threw me in a cell with two big guys. I disabused them of the notion that I was their newest play toy. The guards who came by a little later were not amused to see the two sleeping off their exercise.

The next day, in my new cell I woke on Death Row. Evidently, my gold is ‘evidence’, and so therefore I have no money, and I must rely on the Public Defender. He acquainted me with the situation. I had put on the critical list a beloved local professor who the students loved, and the local business interests loved as well, although for different reasons. Respectively, he taught well, and he made some really profitable inventions.

I snorted at the last. Its easy to look brilliant in one world if you copy the inventions you saw in another. I’d done it myself numerous times.

So, unless I pled guilty, I was a lock for the noose. And even then, the prosecutor might not accept the plea bargain.

Then they interviewed me on local news. “Understanding the Monster.” was the piece’s title. I made my case as well as I could without telling much of anything about alternate dimensions.

That got the cops to at least check out my target’s house. Meanwhile, they told me that Arronette might not pull through; in fact, he probably would not.

I was given a cake with a noose made of frosting on top.

And the cops told me they found nothing as they expected. And I thought for sure, that they had not really tried. He could easily have built a secret wall, or something, and these cops were just going through the motions to please the media.

And I woke the next day to see that I had visitors. The news media, and a half-dozen police officers, and my inexperienced and timid lawyer. They chained me in five chains without explanation, and took me to the hospital.

I got to walk into the ICU, and see my target. I looked on him with a hate-filled heart while he affected bewilderment.

“Why?” He asked plaintively after a nurse removed his oxygen mask. I noted that their medicine seemed a touch primitive, and I was gladdened.
“You know, Arronnette.”
He stared at me, and I refused to speak since I knew he would deny everything.

Finally, he told everyone to leave him since maybe I would talk in private. That did not go over well, but after a bit of arguement they chained me to a radiator by both my feet and my hands, and uncomfortably put me into a chair.

Then they walked to the other end of the room about forty feet away with both of us in clear view.

“Why? You say I am some monster? Why me?”

“You know, Arronnette.” I repeated myself until he begged me to explain.

“Dr. Chase Arronnette, wanted in over fifteen universes for capital crimes…” And here I recited a long list of his crimes. It would have taken me nearly five minutes as he grew paler, but he interrupted to claim I was mad.

“You can’t fool me. I’m a verser. I’ve killed you twice already, and you me once. Too bad, I haven’t got a way to finish you permanently.”

His further protestations I met with scorn, and a dissertation on his teleport device, and branched from that into some mathematical proofs of alternate realities. He stopped arguing and dismissing me, and listened with that keen mind of his.

“I’m sorry.” He said with tears in his eyes.

“You ought to be. Someday I’ll finish you.”

“No, I believe you, but I’m not this man you seek.” He then started to cough badly with blood coming up. The doctor’s ran scrambling up, and I got roughly dragged away while with sinking feeling I searched him for scriff.

There was none. He was a doppleganger of the Merry Mauler. And from his manner, he might well be a good man.

Grief and horror collapsed me so that I did not struggle as I went back to the cell that I had earned.

I resolved to go to the gallows with as much grace as I could muster, and I prepared an apology in my head for my last speech on this world.

But then events intervened. A chaplain came in to talk to me, and after he was alone with my chained self, he flicked something in his pocket, and the lights in the room bobbled.

“You really are a stupid little man, aren’t you, Tadeusz?” And then Dr. Chase Arronnette tilted up his wide-brimmed and black hat to look gleefully into my eyes.

“I’d like to thank you. I have a list of people who need improving, and I figure I can ‘get you to admit’ where you hid the bodies thus providing me a perfect alibi.”

He looked a bit different. A change of hair, and cybernetics I think.

“I spoiled your plan to kill your dop, and take his place, didn’t I?”

“Just set it back some. He’s going to die, and I am going to make a miraculous recovery while the bodies of your other victims are going to set you swinging.”

Tadeusz

  Many problems in Dungeons & Dragons™ play arise from misunderstanding the meanings of the alignments; this stain has carried over to other games, as the grandfather of the hobby has definitely passed many of its traits to its progeny.  Chaos is an excellent example of this problem.

  A lot of people think that a chaotic alignment, and particularly a chaotic neutral alignment, means I can do any crazy thing that I want to do, whenever I want, because there aren’t any rules that apply to me.  It really doesn’t mean that.  Like the other aspects of alignment, chaos is a belief, a core value which the chaotic character holds, either above all others or in balance with his other values.  In this case, that value is freedom–not just his own freedom; everyone’s freedom.  Give me liberty or give me death is the war cry of the chaotic; but it goes beyond the selfish desire to have freedom to a belief that freedom must reach to everyone.  To be Selfish, after all, is the hallmark of evil; characters who do whatever they want whenever they want are not exemplifying the virtues of chaos, but those of evil.

  I played a game in which I was the very lawful party leader of a very disjointed and nearly dysfunctional party.  On the way back from a difficult and dangerous mission, resources nearly depleted, we came upon a slave caravan traveling the other direction.  The slaves themselves were of little interest to us–fifty goblins, two female drow, and a giant–but the issue of slavery within that world suddenly came into sharp relief.  I was lawful good; and the chaos of that world and of that party had pushed me strongly toward the law side of that alignment.  I believed that order and discipline were necessary to the happiness of the greatest number.  That country had legalized slavery, and (this was the gut-wrenching kicker for me) I had no reason to oppose it.  I had no knowledge that the lives of these slaves would be better if they were free; I had every reason to think that upsetting the lawful order of the world, even for what seemed a good reason, would result in more harm than good.  Society needs its rules, its structures, its systems, in order to function in a way that brings its benefits to people.  If that structure included that some would be slaves (which might not be a bad life, with the right masters, particularly for creatures who left to their own devices would only cause great harm to others in their efforts to survive, creatures who ultimately would be hunted and killed to stop them without this place in society in which they could live productive lives), that was something I had to support, because to do otherwise would be to become a lawbreaker and an enemy of the very fabric of society.

  However, the chaotic neutral member of our contingent did not see it that way.  As I attempted to maneuver my people to a safe defensive position which would allow the slavers to pass without risk to us, he broke ranks and attacked them, getting pelted with arrows, and collapsing.

  Tactically, it was a very stupid move.  It was also the most intelligent and principled action I had ever seen that player take in any game, and ranks among the most meaningful moments in any game I’ve ever played.  He knew that slavery was absolutely inimical to the value he held, that of individual freedom, and he could not permit it to pass unchallenged.  It didn’t matter what harm these creatures might do if freed; it didn’t matter whether they were able to care for themselves on their own.  Better that they should starve to death or be killed for thieving than that they should live comfortable lives as slaves, he reasoned.  If by his death he could spur us to action and free those creatures, he died nobly in the name of his creed.

  He didn’t die, and we did act; it’s actually a lot more complicated than that, but here ends the anecdote.  We have time for another.

  A certain anti-paladin, who in that particular game had to be lawful evil, was charged with some criminal offense.  I was playing an attorney, and he brought his problem to me.  I then proceeded to work out what the options were, and how to get him declared not guilty.  The details of how that was done are not essential, beyond that it was an interesting and complicated process, and I think the referee pretty much made it up as he responded to my questions.  The accused character walked away clean.  The player commented in passing that the attorney character must have been very lawful; not at all, I said–his alignment was chaotic neutral.  He firmly believed that everyone should be free to do whatever he chose to do, as long as he did not prevent anyone else from being free to do what he in turn chose to do, and the state should stay out of it.  If Malacon the Shining Legacy wished to devote his life to some strict code of discipline and conduct that constituted the life of an anti-paladin, he was perfectly free to do so and his right was to be protected–as long as he didn’t insist that anyone else had to do the same thing.  Every individual should be allowed to pick his own path in life, and no individual should be permitted to take that right away from any other.

  These are the values of chaos, the intention that everyone should be free, whether or not they wish to be, even if it kills them, to pick their own course in life unhindered by anyone else.  Some say that your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins; but my attorney character would have insisted that that is exactly where it ends, and not an inch further.  You, and everyone else, must be free; that is the thing that matters.

  I felt some of this in reading Eric “Tadeusz” Ashley’s World a Week:  Jaxons.  To bring it back to your mind, he came to a mid twentieth century earth that was overrun by benevolent conquering aliens.  They were intent on raising humanity to a world of peace.  Among the humans there were resistors who were willing to commit the most heinous of atrocities to drive the aliens from earth, take their advanced technologies, and destroy them.  It didn’t matter that the aliens were giving humanity wonderful medicines, advanced technologies, better environmental conditions, and happier lives.  The only thing that mattered was that humanity wasn’t free, and these men would not stand for that, even if they had to destroy the entire planet (earth, that is) to prevent humanity from being anything less than completely free.

  Sure, anarchy is part of that.  You really can’t set everyone free to do what he wants without some of that.  Yet the problem with most players’ anarchic chaos is that it is too one-sided.  I didn’t understand what it was that bothered me about chaos as anarchy until I saw the bumper sticker:  Perform random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.  If good and evil don’t matter to the chaotic neutral, why do so many who play that alignment do so much evil and so little good?  Where is the random kindness, the senseless beauty?  Chaos is anarchistic, but it is not destructively anarchistic, at least not by definition.  It is the exaltation of the individual above all else; every individual, all exalted individually.  If what results is anarchistic, that’s fine; as long as people are free, the world is a better place.

  Maybe these particular ideas about chaos are too difficult for the typical high school and younger kids who tried to grapple with the games; maybe they formed their warped ideas of the meaning of chaos when they couldn’t understand the nature, the value, the danger of individual freedom, and they never looked back to straighten it out.  Ours is a chaotic society, in the main; we value freedom, sometimes perhaps too highly.  It is sometimes more difficult to understand the values you hold than those you admire–most of us think that law and good are the virtuous sides of the alignment grid, but perhaps we should awaken to the fact that the values of American society and perhaps those of ourselves are closer to those of chaos and evil.  Capitalism and Democracy are, after all, on the evil and chaos sides of the alignment grid, respectively.  That’s not necessarily entirely bad, particularly in relation to chaos, as freedom is an important value (Adam Smith can defend selfishness without my help).  It may help our games if we can come to grips with our own values, and see them in the light of the alignment system.

  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.

On this day do I, Aelia, dedicate myself to the service of the god Arete as a paladin of the holy order. To this end, I will devote my whole heart and all my strength. To those in need, I will offer whatever aid I may. I will stand against all the forces of evil, in whatever shape I may encounter them. I will strive to be pure in thought, pure in word, and pure in deed. I will speak the truth, and I will deal justly with all whom I encounter.

“I will speak the truth,” I say aloud as I sit alone in my room, letting the day’s events replay in my mind. For the first time since I can remember, I’ve behaved dishonestly. I’ve been praying for the past three hours, and though I can feel the comforting warmth of my god’s presence, I have no idea whether he approves or disapproves of what I’ve done. I suppose he’s leaving me to figure this one out on my own.

The reason I came to the city of Brindenford in the first place was in the hopes that Kristia might be here. It’s the closest city of any size to the place where we used to live, and it at least seemed like a place to start. Myrddin and Amin were kind enough to accompany me, and on our way here, we met a young man named Theodore, who was also headed to Brindenford. He explained to us that he came at the request of a friend of his, who had sent him a mysterious letter. The letter sounded as though it had been written by someone not in their right mind. He spoke of a speaker in dreams and a doorway to other worlds, and Theodore was on his way to make sure his friend was all right.

When we reached the city gates, we realized that it wasn’t just him who had gone crazy. The whole town was in a state of heavy alert, though no one could say why or what the threat was. It took us perhaps an hour to enter the city, since guards at the gates were checking the huge crowd of people in one at a time, searching people seemingly at random. There was some fair in town, and I wondered if that was part of the reason for the extra precations. There were certainly more halflings about than normal, and everyone was watching their pockets.

The guards were requiring everyone to peace tie their weapons. That was understandable, although Myrddin grumbled about it.

“If you didn’t carry every blade you ever owned on your person,” I said, “it wouldn’t be a problem,” but he didn’t appreciate the humor.

I only carry one sword, the one he gave me, but I also heard people around me saying that the guards were confiscating wizards’ wands and spellbooks. Then, I read the notice tacked to the gates: “Because of the increase in violence in our fair city, all weapons must be peace-tied or deposited with the city guards. All artifacts of magic, including wands, components, spell books, and holy symbols, must be turned in to the guards. These items will be returned to you upon exiting Brindenford. No magic of any type may be performed within the city limits, nor will any violence be permitted.”

“Holy symbols?” I whispered to Amin. “Why in the name of the gods would they be confiscating holy symbols?” My hand went instinctively to the small silver talisman that hung from a chain around my neck.

“I don’t know,” he replied, shaking his head. He gave me a little smile and put his hand on my shoulder.

“I would think,” I muttered angrily, “that if the city is having problems, that handicapping clerics and paladins would be the *last* thing they would want to do.”

As I wrapped my hand around my symbol, I could feel its power flow through me. Never in the three years I’ve been a paladin had I taken it off, even for a moment. If it were just a piece of jewelry, I could willingly part with it, but this had been blessed by devoted clerics of my order, and strengthened by my own prayers. How could I be asked to take it off?

We moved forward in line, and I stepped back behind Myrddin. While the guards were busily dealing with his large assortment of bladed objects, I slipped my symbol into an inside pocket of my cloak. A soft blue glow shimmered across its surface as I touched it, and I prayed that no one would notice.

We entered the city without incident and found a place to stay. Now, here we are.

I have too many questions tonight, and no answers. I have always believed that laws exist for a reason, that there has to be order, or all would suffer. But how can anyone ask me to give up the symbol that means so much to me? Not just remove it, but hand it to a stranger, with no real assurance that I’ll ever get it back. And prohibiting all magic? If I see someone injured, should I not heal them? How can men presume to take away what the gods have given? And yet, I still believe in the value of law, of order.

While I was still in training as a paladin, another initiate asked one of our teachers what we should do if we found ourselves in a place where the laws were evil. Should we obey or should we break those laws in the name of good? He responded that it would depend on the situation, but that we should attempt to steer clear of such places if we could. That answer is no help to me now.

I want to speak with Myrddin and Amin, but I know what they’ll say. Myrddin will laugh at the ide a that I would even concern myself with something so trivial. And Amin will tell me that I did the right thing.

I sit here for a long while, staring into the fire. Right or wrong, I suppose I’ve made my choice. Until I know if my sister is here, I’ll stay, and that means violating their law if I must. It seems that my life can’t ever be simple, but I guess that if I were destined for a simple life, I’d never have been called to be a paladin.

I woke from transition, and saw Cicero blinking his eyes in front of me.

He wore more than a dozen handguns of high caliber, and had been my smuggling Libertarian guide, until we confronted the being responsible for the Prime which had been his and after a bit, mine enemy.

This godling had invented socialism, and caused billions of deaths across at least five universes with it, and he thought the only problem with his doctrine was it was being misapplied. He needed another universe to experiment on.

Well I think I wanted to and maybe did break my rule against being rude to gods.

Anyways, I was in a new universe, and evidently I had an associate.

“Back when we faced that thing, I remember hoping if you got blasted out of there, that I would go with you. Since I’d be certain to be next.” Cicero said, and I nodded. It sounded like an ‘opportunistic association’ which is not bad. The other type is an ‘affection association’ in which deep feelings for the other cause one to desire to leave a world if only to travel with the beloved.

Since, I and Cicero were decent buddies, but not that close, the first made sense.

“Let’s find out where we are.” I said as he tried his scriff sense for the first time. He began to chuckle.

“Too cool. I can sense you, my gear, and something over that way.” He pointed to a hill covered by northern temperate zone oaks, and laden with autumn leaves.

If I judged right, in a few hours it would be dark, and I could check the stars. So far this looked like an Earth-like world.

I followed Cicero over the hill, and experimented with my psionic skills. I could Perfectly Remember things, and make a penny float in my hand, and summon a squirrel to eat a Cheerio(r)circle, but pyrokinesis slipped my mind.

At the bottom of the next valley, about seventy feet down, a Hummer mounted with a dual fifty caliber machine-gun turret on its roof waited.

Cicero laughed.

“All right. All my most important stuff was in it. I’d hoped the whole thing came.”

So I rather incredulously asked him if the Hummer with the machine-guns were his, and he replied in the affirmative with the point that it was his Monday morning commute.

The Hummer was rather stoutly equiped with survival gear. It seemed Cicero liked to take a break from camping out on dangerous foreign dimensions, by going camping in his own reality in a terribly remote piece of the Rocky Mountains he rented.

Then he started to unpack, and check the weaponry. I’m all for weapons, but I started to gawk when he pulled out the anti-air missile, and I dropped my jaw when he proudly showed me his semi-automatic land mine dispenser with four hundred micro-mines.

“Um, isn’t this a bit much? You were just going camping.”

“Ever hear of the First Amendment? The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not be Infringed Upon so that they may if need occasions, rise up and strike down a tyrant.”

“In my world, that was the Second. The First was speech. And although that was the point of the Second, we did not make quite so firm a point about it.”

“There’s your problem. Government officials are like cockroaches. You gotta squish them, tar and feather, or even do like my granpop did and engage in a little rebellion to remind them occasionally to remind them who is the boss. And how are you going to remind them, if you don’t have the weapons to do it?”

In a way, he made perfect sense, but looking at his untroubled face, I could not help thinking it was more complicated than that. I had to admit that a radical individualist like my friend here might adjust best to versing. There’s a tale of a verser who is a samurai who found his life in his clan, and then he versed out. No clan, and utter loneliness.

We hopped into the Hummer, and he unhappily confessed that his robotics including the robomule of his did not seem to be working. A bit of jiggering under the hood, and we got the engine going.

For a verser, high-tech turn-on systems like computers are generally not a good idea for a lower tech device. You might find yourself in a world where the device works, but unable to turn it on because the ignition does not.

We drove down a creek, following the current, hoping to find a larger creek, and eventually civilization that way.

Instead what we found was a bridge of stone over our small vale, and a dozen archers pointing bows at us, at the command of two men behind them on horseback.

Something about them, their wiry strength, and beauty of form reminded me, and I cranked my eye muscles to turn my eyes into binoculars.

Pointed ears. Elves.

“They are elves.” I told Cicero.

“How do they like hot lead? Or does it have to be cold-rolled steel?”

I looked surprised at my literal minded friends knowledge. He shrugged, explaining that a fellow had traded him a story for some food in another world. It had been a bad trade, full of magic and other unreal stuff.

Watch this, I thought, and flipped down his eye shield to find the mirror I sought. A peering at it, and mentally through it, and suddenly I slumped with my astral form standing on the bridge.

“What is the problem?”

“You trespass. Break our laws, and damage our sacred forrests with that vile machine.”

I relayed this to Cicero who replied that he would pay a reasonable fine. That did not go over well.

They were in charge. They were representatives of the High King of the House of Isildur, and this was the Last Wizard, Radagast the Brown, and we were to surrender at once, or face elven justice.

Something about those names seemed familiar, but I slid it aside while I relayed the demand in a mumble to Cicero.

“Tell them this. They can have my guns, when they pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.”

I phrased it more politely, but the elflord ordered the crew of bowmen to fire down upon the ‘strange and monstrous creation of the treasonous fey.’

A jammed button, and metal plates dropped over windows, and a joystick popped out of the dashboard.

Ratttatatatatttaatatta!

A stream of fifty caliber bullets dented the rock wall of the bridge in a horizontal line right below the archers’ feet. Watching them dive for cover crazily was quite amusing, I’ll admit.

Elves can be a bit annoying with their ‘God’s gift to creation attitude.’ that so many have.

“You dare!?!” Radagast said, and he raised his rod which sparkled with light that threw Cicero into a trance. I reached out with my telekinesis and stripped it out of his hand.

“So, know this human traitor, you have declared war on the High King and all his lesser kings, and upon the Elves of the Wood, and the Last Wizard. Such an alliance threw down Sauron, and even your foul machine will not save you, nor your unholy magics.”

They turned and left the bridge rapidly. I had little doubt that though we had won this conflict, they would be back.

I relayed the data to Cicero. We had started a war with a continent full of good people. I think this was the Fourth Age of Middle-Earth.

He nodded.

“Kings?” He asked, and I nodded back.

“So where’s this Gondor city thing?” He asked purposefully.

“Why?”

“Sounds like a bunch of statists. Hamiltonians. We go there, and we set the people free.”

Oh, dear, war with a continent, and my only companion a madman.

Tadeusz

  Most of you are aware that at one time I spent half a decade on a small Christian radio station, spinning records, running pre-recorded programs, doing interviews, reading news, and talking to an audience of unknown size.  The pay was substandard, certainly low for a young man with a wife, hopes of a family, and a college education; but it was work in the field I had hoped to pursue (music, not broadcasting), and although it didn’t always pay the bills it kept us alive.

  My reasons for staying there were far too complicated to explain here now, and not terribly relevant to the focus of this article.  Yet while I was there I first heard an expression that I have remembered ever since.  It was said that radio on-air personalities are paid in prestige.  The salaries are rarely all that good, particularly on smaller or less popular stations, but the individuals who take the jobs are in our own way stars, known to vast dozens of fans who imagine our appearances, pay attention to our preferences, and hope to meet us.  In fact, local businesses sometimes paid the radio station to have us appear at their facilities, in the expectation that our presence would bring people to them (something which we also hoped would happen, as those appearances often paid the station bills and demonstrated to us and to the advertisers that we really did have listeners).  Sometimes part of the compensation we receive for a job is the prestige that is attached to it, the respect and admiration others show to someone who does that, whatever it is.

  This was brought back to me by the second book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and by the movie made from it.  In the book there is a character named Gilderoy Lockhart (wonderfully brought to life on the screen by Kenneth Branaugh), who takes the job of Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Harry’s rather prestigious and important wizarding school.  Lockhart has written a dozen books about his exploits against the supernatural powers of evil around the world, and he’s making good money selling them, with his smiling attractive face on the covers, to impressed witch and wizard fans.  He holds the Order of Merlin (Third Class), is an Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defense League, and five-time winner of Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile award.  He’s come to teach Hogwarts students how he stands against the terrible evils in the world.  The problem is that he’s a complete fraud.  He has never stood against any evils anywhere.  What he has done is visited with people who have, collected their stories in great detail, then used a bit of magic to make them forget that they did it, so he can make himself famous by publishing other people’s stories as his successes.  He has no more skill at facing evil forces than Colin Creavy, first year student and Harry Potter fan.

  So why does he do it?  Why does he take the job?  There’s such a risk that he’ll be discovered, his deception revealed, as he tries to teach budding wizards a subject in which he has little experience and no skill.  It’s doubtful that it would be for the money–his books are selling enormously well, and every time he appears at signings he winds up getting free promotion as photographers and reporters cover them for various wizard publications.  A professorship at a school, even an important school such as Hogwarts, can’t pay much compared to that.

  The answer is that he does it for the prestige.  He wants to expand his credentials to include that he is Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry.  Perhaps also he wants the prestige of having other professors at the school refer to him as their colleague, and to respect and admire what he considers his wide-ranging abilities (he actually proves to be inept at just about everything beyond stealing credit, generating publicity, and mugging for cameras).  He has a compelling desire to be Someone, and this position is his chance to move forward in that direction.

  It is that desire to be Someone that should be considered.  For those who have it, it is a compelling character motivation which is rarely sated.  Order of Merlin Third Class, Honorary Member of the Dark Arts Defense League, and five-time winner of Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award, along with best seller sales levels of his books, fans thronging his signings, and women getting silly around his pictures, are not enough for him.  It is not clear what, if anything, ever would be sufficient; but the chance to add this to his resume is something he can’t let pass.  It is prestige, calling his name.

  There are people like this, people whose entire lives are motivated by the desire to have you notice them, who want adoring fans and will do whatever it takes to acquire them.  There are people less driven than that who still want to be seen as important, respected in their field, their names recognized by people they’ve never met.  Since there are people for whom this is a real motivation, it makes sense that our characters will often be driven by this as well.

Fame!
I’m gonna live for ever,
I’m gonna learn how to fly,
High!
I feel it coming together,
People will see me and cry,
Fame!
I’m gonna make it to heaven,
Light up the sky like a flame
Fame!
Ahh, I’m gonna live forever,
Baby remember my name….

Fame
Michael Gore & Dean Pitchford

  So many real-life adventurers seem to have had this as the driving force in their lives, whether they climbed mountains, searched for the source of the Nile, attempted to reach the poles, or flew solo across an ocean.  Would they have done any of these things, were it not certain that others would notice and remember them?

  I should add as a caveat that this motivation does not appeal to everyone.  One of my sons (and wouldn’t it be the height of impropriety at this moment to say which one) wants to blend into the background, to go through his world unnoticed.  He has always been this way, being the only toddler I’ve ever known who vociferously demanded that others stop looking at him.  Not everyone wants to be noticed.

  However, to one degree or another a lot of people want that recognition, and incorporating it into our characters can make them believable even when they do the unbelievable.  Why did he climb the impassible peak?  He wanted to be remembered as the one who passed it.  What made him go against the dragon alone?  He knew that success would make him a hero to the villagers.  What madness drove him to travel into uncharted uninhabited space?  He was going to make a name for himself.  These factors are all about prestige.

  Our fictional adventurers will in many cases be seeking the same thrill, the attentions and adoration of fans impressed by their successes.  As players, we can focus on this desire as part of what they do; as referees, we can include this reward in the game.  Have your player character heroes ever been treated to a tickertape parade, or whatever the equivalent might be in your game world?  Has anyone ever asked for an autograph, or wanted to be with them in a photograph, or suggested erecting a statue or a monument to them?  Prestige is what is sought; it can be insatiable, it can be fickle, it can be daunting.  Yet it can be obtained, and as such can be icing on the cake, particularly for those of us who consider cake that dry stuff that holds icing together and makes it culturally appropriate to eat it.

  Adventurers and heroes, like radio announcers, authors, professors, and yes, even game designers, are to some degree paid in prestige.  They do what they do in part to earn the respect and admiration of others.  Work that into your game, and you’ve made it that much more believable.

  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 walked from gate to nearby geographically connected gate between similar human universes with a smuggler, code named Cicero, as my guide. His enemy was a repressive, totalitarian government known as the Prime.

The Prime had gate control technology which it used to invade realities, and bring them to its version of utopia. Its birthworld held Stone Age tribes struggling to survive amidst the ruins of skyscrapers, and the next world to meet its benevolence had artists and engineers being toted off in cattle cars, and then a madhouse jungle where dozens of heavily armed factions tried to exterminate each other and the unlucky unarmed groups, and then a dying world of old people who had forgotten that in order to have someone to mow their lawn they needed to have children.

I was starting to dislike the Prime in a serious way.

A green whorl of light hanging in the air deposited Cicero, and me, Tadeusz ( a sorta immortal verser) in the next world shaking from transition sickness.

A cache hole near the extradimensional gate yielded costumes. We soon looked bizarre. I had thick glasses, and a wig that flaked dandruff, and a tube of cream smeared acne upon my face. And that was only the head.

My companion looked equally sad. We shuffled on our way to a tavern which boldly announced they supported equality and would serve anybody without discrimination. That sounded admirable until I saw the nine-year-olds drinking hard liquor who were slumped on bar stools.

The female? population turned the stomach, and I turned away only to be accosted by a woman? who spun me around.

“You saying we don’t meet your standards?”

I bit my lip not wanting to hurt these poor creatures feelings, but one at a nearby table jumped up gleefully with a scanner in her hand.

“I got a definite reading, misters, misses, and differently gendered! We got ourselves a lawsuit.”

The whole bar started chanting “Class action, class action.”

My friend slipped away from me, and made contact with someone while I got five pounds, at least, of legal paper stuffed in my pockets from different claimants.

Good thing I was leaving. We left the dingy bar, and the crummy looking city with its garbage strewn streets and its uniformly ugly citizens behind.

“What did you sell the guy in the bar?”

“Seeds.”

My mouth opened a bit.

“Yeah, carnations, and roses, and asters. They are more beautiful than plants like ragweed, so they had to be redesigned to be ugly. Equality of result, see? They killed their roses by trying to force equality.”

We walked out into the woods, and found a gate by a waterfall that had been deliberately mangled to make it equally attractive as the rest of the stream.

The next world brought us to a woods that reeked with an acidic scent.

“Keep moving, don’t touch anything you don’t have to. Wear these plastic booties over your shoes.” Cicero told me as he donned his pair. Then we set off at a rapid pace that only paused to dodge weird growths on pine trees, or bubbling pools of yellow and pink that gave off choking odors.

The woods led us to a river which burned in spots.

Cicero paused to check it with a meter.

“Only low-level radiation. Its fordable if you have proper shields built into your pants.” He paused. “Like I do.”

That was fine for him, but how was I too cross?

“Get on my shoulders.”

I did worrying if he could hold it all. I’m a big man with cybergear inside, and I have a large backpack.

He gasped at the weight, and I prepared to get off again, but he popped a pill. And then he started to cross.

We wobbled halfway through, and I considered what swimming in a mixture of human waste and water and toxic combinants would do to a verser.

But he popped another pill, and got to the edge.

“You’re a lot heavier than you look. What, 350 pounds?” I nodded as he gasped with his head between his knees on the far shore of the small river.

“Yeah, I owe you Cicero. About a hundred pounds is various forms of cybergear, or biological devices.” Thin, I weigh about 200, and add about fifty pounds of muscle from my various trainings, and well, those pills of his must be some serious juice.

We set out, and the woods got a little better, and then we came to a rusted fence horizontal to our path.

“Fifteen minutes is all we wait. There is a gate a hundred feet to our left.”

“Good.” I replied. My breathing came difficult, and I think I had three different types of rashes.

“Y’know in ways I just want to let these protected compounders die. Because they were the ones that polluted their world. The nomenklatura, the elite class, needed to run the economy in accord with all the brilliant plans, and when things did not match the plans, they lied to protect their position. It started on the other side of the world at some place called Chernobyl, but eventually the tide of incompetence and lying swamped them all.”

With cold faces we traded, anti-fungal cream designs with self-important fools who told us of their great progress in cleaning the land according to the Prime’s delegate’s Five Year Plan. They stood on the edge of the Abyss, and still they lied.

The gate brought us to fresh air, and a quiet field filled with natural flowers. It was a great relief to me, and to my lungs which despite their modifications had been feeling the strain.

We first found a pond, and a pool with a solar powered water cleaner and a mirror incinerator. The protective gear went into the incinerator, and one at a time, we scrubbed up. Then we cleaned the water for my friend had a strong enviromental ethic.

Refreshed, we stopped for a meal of rabbit which we shot, and wild mushrooms we picked, and a couple packets of gravy from another universe. Purified creek water delighted the palate, and with a smile on my face, we set out again.

We came to a road, the People’s Highway, according to a sign. It was vast and wide, and overgrown with grass. Following it for two days took us to a settlement with a motte and bailey castle astride the road.

We walked into sight, and then hiked back a few hundred yards into the woods to a clearing with rough-hewn wood tables, and a couple huge trees as supports for a branch supported rain cover.

Inside an hour, dozens of happy-go-lucky people dressed in tan woolens with an occasional red scarf to brighten things showed up in small groups. The crowd came out, and started chatting with each other while my friend showed them his boxes of vitamins, and packets of diamond dust that the smith could work into the axes to make them much more effective.

All of it small, high-value items that also had a bit of panache or flash to them. For this was a people deprived of color, while the old folk who came on slower talked of the spectacles of television and such.

While great bartering in a fair-like atmosphere went on, I sought out the story of the Prime and this land. An old grandmother, and her son, the Duke of the Keep, told me the most.

“We were mighty, and rich, and we had bases on the Moon, and the Prime, they come to us, and tell us with our wealth, that we should not have poor anymore. It all should belong to everyone. Now, everyone have no reason to take care of it. Only a man who sees his own gain will get out of bed on a cold morning, especially when he sees other men not doing so.”

“So, as my grandmother said, we starve. Then they tell us this is the vengeance of the planet, and our Western way of thinking is corrupiting us. We need to free our minds from the dead hand of the past, and be progressive.”

“Yes, we, my family, we cheat, and the dumb Pure Thoughters never catch us. So now my son is a mighty man. He is the ruler of the village of Denver.”

“How many?” I asked choking. The Duke of Denver, that small motte and bailey castle with a village and a palisade wall understood.

“Three billion. Starvation followed by plague, then war, then more starvation. It looked like it was going into a freefall to the bottom, but we stabilized at a sorta Dark Ages level of technology and population. I’d guesstimate there is a half-billion humans left alive on the planet.”

We had a feast of ‘protected deer’ in the forrest that night which was illegal, but these people wanted to live. Laws made in ivory towers had little effect on their consciences.

The next morning, we got up, and took the road another half-day through the ruins of Denver. My companion made sure to point out the signs of cannibalism on certain bones.

The gate took us to another world. And when I got up, I saw guns pointed at me, and men with sunglasses holding them from atop armoured personel carriers. Alongside the APC’s the words, “The Prime: Friend to All Worlds. Kindness is Mandatory.”

“The Prime would like a word with you both, before you are executed as traitors to the people.”

If it had just been me, I would have tried to take as many of them with me as I could, but Cicero was not a verser like me. He’d die, and that would be the end of his mortal journey.

Our ostentatious chains clanked in the back of the APC as the young troopers looked at us with undisguised loathing.

“Greedheads! You are mean-spirited.” One announced with spittle flying from his lip. I wondered where I had seen the look in his eye, and then it came to me. A picture in a book of a Spanish Inquisitor about to roast a heretic.

“Before you blast me, punk, why don’t you check out the worlds behind you that you so messed up? And I’m not the one spitting, so whose the big meanie here?”

A fist came up, and started to descend. I ducked it, and came back in a move called the Snapping Turtle. My teeth bit down on his thumb.

He raised his pistol to hit me, and I grunted something which Cicero translated with a smirk.

“He says, and I quote ‘You’re an idiot, and unless you want to lose your thumb, you’ll apologize. And don’t even try it, you are not fast enough.”

It took about five minutes of hemming and hawing, but he apologized, and I let him go. Immediately the little whiner started saying he had not meant it while he and the rest of the group began beating me unconscious.

Still, it had been useful data. Real soldiers would never have done that, or been caught so easily. These were half-trained drips.

When I woke up, I might be able to do something about that.

Aching in most of my body, I woke on a hard floor shiny from generations of cleaning. Cicero looked up at me.

“I thought you were a goner.”

“You ever see a pile of dust where I was, then yeah. Otherwise, I’m still here.”

An hour later, the door opened to let in two very competent looking people into the antebellum attic space converted to prison.

In walked Cicero in some very fine duds. And the two stared at each other in shock.

“You support them?” was their initial reaction. Utter disgust tinged their words.

To gain the time for self-control and to exhibit mastery, the Cicero Dop introduced himself to me and Cicero.

“I am the Maximum Prime.”

Then he went on to outline some of the problems they were facng in this world. To me, it sounded obvious. A technologically advanced culture invades a land of wizards. Much of the really cool tech does not work. In this world, the invaders were getting kicked around.

Max Prime pulled out my diary after asking me this question.

“Very interesting reading, Tadeusz. You claim to be a magic worker. So cast a spell. Summon their leader here.”

Nothing would do, but that I would try. I designed the spell so that it was easily reversed, and then I sat out to cast it.

And suddenly two figures were within my casting circle. Both glowed with a brilliant light that froze everone in the room, but me into place.

“Tadeusz, what do you think of the worlds you’ve seen with Cicero?”

“They are horrible.”

The second figure said with asperity.

“Well sure there were some mistakes, but in general the principal or correctly designing freedom is sound.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” I replied to the entity defending the Prime.

“No, of course not. What you would call Socialism, and Total Egalitarianism has not been really tried. I have confidence that this time will do the trick. We need to keep experimenting. Not being a primitive carbon-based creation I am tolerant and open-minded and non-judgmental.”

“Just how many times must it fail, before you admit the idea is just wrong? You take freedom from people because they have poor taste, or they like Dead White Male Literature, and you expect a committee of politicians to know better than a Petroleum Engineer what is wrong. How many more millions must you murder out of a sense of ‘kindness’?”

My question stung, as I wanted it too. And the defender of the Prime raised bcck his arm to shatter me. And the other just wiggled a quick eyebrow, and zapped me out of existence in that world, to protect me from the other’s activities.

And I think I might have taken Cicero with me to another world.

Tadeusz

  Way back in Empiricism I talked about pictures of monsters; I said then (among other things) that those of us who couldn’t render the images in our imaginations to paper would have to make due with a thousand words.  Returning to that thought, it occurs to me that it’s worth considering those times when a picture can be very useful, as well as those times when not having one might be better.

  Decades ago when I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons, I was the only person in our group who had a copy of the Monster Manual, and thus the person most familiar with its contents.  My wife read it, and sometimes other players browsed it, but they didn’t have the kind of familiarity with the contents which enabled them to recognize a monster from the picture the instant it appeared.  This made the pictures in the book quite useful, from my perspective.  If their characters saw a creature, I could try to describe it, but sometimes I would just cover up as much of the page as necessary and let them see the drawing that appeared in the book.  “You see something that looks like this,” I would say, and that saved a lot of game time, because I didn’t have to go into my thousand words, once they saw the picture.  It is such a useful technique that I recommend having pictures to show to your players of things–not monsters only, but all kinds of objects they are likely to encounter during play, so that one look will give them all the information their characters could acquire with one look.

  There will be times, however, when you don’t want to show them the picture.

  Obviously, as I may just have implied, if your players know all the pictures and you think their characters wouldn’t recognize them, showing the pictures might be the last thing you want to do.  If you can do your own drawings, and do them such that they are reasonably accurate without being too revealing (or too like those in the book), that might work for you.  If, though, you want them to guess what it is, a picture that they will immediately recognize doesn’t do the job terribly well–or rather, it does it too well.

  Similarly, in the kinds of adventure situations our characters have, it’s often the case that they can’t see what they see so very well.  There is a creature lurking in the dark; it seems to be about this size, roughly this sort of shape, maybe this kind of coloring, but difficult to make out in any detail.  You could try drawing pictures of creatures that are hard to see, but that requires a particularly skilled artist to accomplish.  Similarly, what do you do with fleeting glimpses?  Do you say, “It looks like this,” flash the book to the right page and close it, and hope that the players were paying as much attention as the characters?  Again, in this situation, a description of what the characters saw, and what they thought they might have seen, works much better than a picture of what they didn’t see. 

For another example of situations in which the picture tells too much, sometimes the angle from which the character views the creature is less than revealing.  If you’ve ever seen those drawings from odd angles, such as the Mexican in the sombrero riding a bicycle as seen from above, you’ve got some idea of this.  Can you tell one humanoid from another, an alien from a human, a dwarf from a giant, if you’re looking down from a hundred yards in the air?  A lot of creatures are harder to distinguish if you’re looking at their backsides than their faces; probably horse, mule, donkey, hippogriff, pegasus, and unicorn all look pretty similar from that angle, but which it is might be important.  In all these situations, a picture tells too much.

  There is another way in which a picture tells too much.  It is often what we don’t know or can’t see that inspires the strongest emotional reactions in us.  One of the strengths of role playing games is that they trigger our imaginations, as we see in our minds things we could not see with our eyes.  Descriptions often manage to stimulate these ideas without providing uniform images.

  The movie Alien understood this.  Every effort was made to keep H. R. Giger’s monster design under wraps before the debut; in the film, we get glimpses of something moving too rapidly to see, impressions of something hiding in the dark, fragments of something that has just escaped our view–we don’t see the monster for a very long time, precisely because through not seeing it we are more frightened than we ever would be by seeing it.  We filled in the blanks with our own fears; those were far more frightening than any picture could be.

  Similarly, in another movie, the young boy Bastion is finally persuaded to give a name to the princess of The Never-Ending Story.  He has chosen the name; it is the name of his deceased mother.  He has told us that she had a beautiful name.  He opens the window and shouts the name into the howling storm–and we never hear it.  We know that his mother had the most beautiful name, and that he gave this name to the princess, and that is enough for us.  If the name was Melissa, or Jennifer, or Laurelyn, some would think that the most beautiful name, others that it was pretty enough, and others that it was a common dirty name.  That we never know the name means we never have to consider whether we think it was all that pretty.

  So in describing that which the characters encounter in their game worlds, we can use the lack of pictures to our advantage.  We can talk about the most beautiful woman in the world, and each of our players will have a different image of what that means, but all will see a very beautiful woman.  The terrifying monster will be terrifying to each person who imagines it as terrifying, even if it has a very different appearance in the details.  These are times when pictures get in the way.  You may be old enough to remember when Christie Brinkley was the world’s first supermodel, and you might still see in her the beauty that she was; to the sixteen-year-old girlfriend of one of my sons, she’s a funny looking old lady who couldn’t possibly have ever been of any interest to anyone.  I can’t say I blame her; I could never understand why anyone thought Elizabeth Taylor at all attractive until I saw her in National Velvet, and although Audrey Hepburn managed to stay pretty well into her career that was a lot easier to appreciate in films like Sabrina and My Fair Lady.  We all have a concept of beauty, but if you want your players to imagine something or someone beautiful, the more you leave to the imagination the more successful your efforts will be.

  The same applies to so many ideas which describe our reactions and responses more than the thing itself.  Sexy and seductive; repulsive and revolting; terrifying; hysterical; disfigured; mad; dim-witted–these are all about our emotional reactions, not about the things or people themselves, and thus descriptions which sketch an outline to be filled in by the hearer work better than pictures.

  This is also quite useful in capturing the reactions of the characters when they wouldn’t fit those of the player.  What is the appearance of a beautiful dwarf maiden?  Is her beard neatly trimmed and braided?  I once played a Yazirian, a sort of six-foot-something monkey/flying squirrel cross, who was a cadet in a space academy falling in love with a member of his own people.  I’m sure that drawings of the girl of his dreams would not have appealed to me in the least; but descriptions of her as lovely, demure, coy, intelligent, sweet, and beautiful certainly did.  The same thing works with our fears and hatreds.  With the right description of the horrifying, drooling fanged furred beast I can probably make you feel fear for a bunny.  I probably couldn’t get a picture that would do the same thing.  I’ll mention Multiverser‘s popular gather world, NagaWorld for this.  Along one horizon is something which is always called “the industrial complex” to any player who doesn’t know what it is.  It looks like an industrial complex, with lots of machines, flashing lights, and other high-tech equipment.  It’s actually a battlefield; but from fifty miles away, you can’t tell that.  Thus the description is both accurate and misleading, as it should be.  A picture of this always proves difficult–it either looks too much like an industrial complex, or too much like a battlefield, or not enough like either.

  Yet I’ve stated that pictures are valuable, and I maintain that they are.  They really can save a great deal of time during play, as players can see in an instant that which might take several minutes to describe.  Sometimes the picture can convey what really matters:  this is dangerous, and for these reasons; this has this shape and probably these functions.  If you have pictures, you should use them when there’s no reason not to do so.

  There is yet another use for pictures, one that is near and dear to my heart.  Pictures can be a wonderful tool for misdirection.  In this regard, there is a supplement that has been in this hobby longer than I have which did this marvelously well.  It is an old Dungeons & Dragons module entitled Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and in the middle of it was a gallery of pictures, drawings of everything from small devices to entire rooms, intended as visual aids to the players.  Some of these pictures were completely informative; if you looked at the picture, you could guess what it was quite reliably.  However, many of the images were of a sort designed to mislead the modern gamer into thinking he knew what the thing was, such that he would have his character do things with it that were very dangerous.  I recall specifically that one of the objects which looked most like a handgun was actually a translator, and that one of the most dangerous weapons fired a flash of destructive heat from the part that looked like a small view screen.  Since this particular adventure was about swords and sorcery characters exploring a crashed spaceship, it was an ideal way of maintaining high levels of uncertainty:  even with your advanced understanding of technology, the drawings of these things would mislead you; consequently, even when you knew exactly what it was your character saw, you couldn’t give him technical knowledge that he didn’t have.  The module did this with devices, and also with creatures, in which many that looked dangerous were benign and some that looked benign were quite dangerous.  Of course, such pictures cannot always be completely misleading, or players will quickly fall into disregarding them.  There have to be some pictures for which the gut reaction is correct, or the idea ceases to work.

  Another aspect of the use of pictures which this module illustrates is that it’s very difficult sometimes to describe something without suggesting a conclusion.  That’s fine if you can suggest a conclusion the character would and should reach; it’s not fine if you’re caught between telling the player what it is and giving him completely wrong information.  That aforementioned weapon is an excellent example.  Do you tell the player that part of it looks like a small video screen, thus in essence giving him false information about it, or do you elaborately describe it in a way that lets him know it’s not a video screen at all, thus providing him with important information unavailable to his character?  At times problems can be avoided by showing pictures.  If you describe part of an object as “a handle”, you’ve defined its function, not its appearance; but there are many times in which the temptation is to describe things by their functions, and the challenge of describing them by their appearance may be daunting.  Try describing a raygun without referring to the barrel, stock, or trigger, and you’ll see the problem.  It is difficult to be adequately descriptive without being definitive.  Enough information for the player to visualize the object often contains details related more to function than to form, as it is difficult to completely describe how something appears without telling what it is.  A picture can solve this quite readily.

  Thus we have pictures, something to use when they are useful, and not to use when they are problematic.  Hopefully we have some idea of when for each case.

  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 good German (not an oxymoron) middle-class farmers had done me, and my foeman, a crazed ubermensch in. So I travelled as a verser does, by passing near the realms of Thanatos, and from thence on to a new world.

And I woke in my new world, on a purple tinged sagebrush hill, to see a very nervous man draped in a large array of weaponry who had two empty holsters among a dozen that were filled.

The holsters were empty so he could point large caliber handguns at me. One at my face, and the other at my chest as he crouched by a disarrayed campfire.

My legs felt uncomfortable, and I looked down toward them, and at the signs in the dust between the scrub grasses. I’d landed in the fellow’s campfire. Now, he felt freaked out by my sudden appearance, I’d guess.

“Er, I come in peace.”

He uncocked one gun, a seventy something caliber I guestimated from my glance at it. Wonder what he was hunting? Large bears? Water buffalo? Panballi’s Skinx?

“You owe me, for destroying my fire.” From his manner it seemed a test.

“I guess so.” I said very tentatively since it truly was an accident. Versers with my level of skill have no control over where they land. I’ve landed in the midst of a battlefield before while one battleline charged another. Never to my knowledge in a campfire, but I do have that great gaping hole in my memory that only slowly improves.

He cocked his head to the side puzzled.

“Do you work for the Prime?”

I started to understand. He thought I was some sort of enemy agent, maybe. I’d fallen into the middle of someone else’s war.

“No, I’m an independent.”

That perked him up, and he put up his other gun.

“Like some fried bacon to go with the fried legs, I mean eggs.” He grinned slightly, and I laughed a bit as I fished some burn cream out of my backpack. Nice to have a companion with a sense of humor.

So after a while, I shared bacon and reconstituted eggs, and I contributed my morning plate of pastries that I had been planning to give out to my officemates in the last world, but still, when shot, I had considered them mine.

That made us even by his lights since he said, it had been nearly six months since he had eaten a half-decent Danish, and these were fresh, and made by happy cows (truly, they were well-treated beasts in that other world).

He introduced himself by a code name. Cicero.

And he and I talked about my arrival, and the Prime, and his mission.

He was a member of the Smuggler’s Brotherhood, and he and others like him brought freedom and needed supplies to alternate dimensions oppressed by statists, Hamiltonians, Nazi’s, and other godless folk. He carried a dimension key that allowed him to utilize the gates on a particular world. These gates were situated near weak spots in the world walls.

They only knew how to make one weak spot go from one world to another world, but the researchers at a tech company he held stock in were promising multi-world gates within two years.

I found it fascinating that the Native American spirit had a mound and a gate near this location in the other world and probably a network of moundgates (and by the stars I saw I had not hardly moved physically), and this Smugglers’ Brotherhood also utilized gates in the area.

It reminded me of some speculation about multiversal strains and tears in the fabric of many worlds near each other. What could cause such damage?
And also, I remember studying theories of echoes of things in various worlds. These gates seemed to be a technological echo of the spirits magic gates.

Perhaps that meant that this Brotherhood was the moral echo of the goodness of that spirit?

But the proper students of such theories are fellows like the Martian Terraformer, and other geniuses. I’m just not smart enough. Sigh.

I found that the Prime had agents that sought out the smugglers and others and killed them. Even if the Prime’s gates were inferior technologically, they were still a serious threat.

But I still was not sure the Prime was bad, and my skepticism showed through. After all, killing smugglers is not exactly a horrible blemish on a government.

My attitude confused my host. I seemed to be much like him, but he thought killing smugglers was murder. Indeed anti-smuggling laws were sufficient reason to tar and feather law enforcement–for the first offense. Second offense, and just shoot them.

Exasperated and perplexed, he waited until a secret satellite rose over the horizon. And then he hooked in, and gave me control of the camera.

I saw, with count the hairs precision, a world of Stone Age tribalism in the midst of the ruins of a high-technology society.

“What happened?” I asked even though I thought I knew the answer. My evangelist surprised me a bit.

“This is the homeworld of the Prime. Then they left, and started setting up new utopias in the nearby worlds. Eventually, their armies knocked on the door of my planet. It took a while, but we barred the door. Now, me and the others are in their backyard stirring up trouble, and making some cool boullion.”

Then he told me he was heading home, and from the way he described it with clean rivers, and delightful fields it seemed fine indeed. He was like a fur trader, a mountain man, but instead of a mule load of furs, he had a robo-mule loaded down with contracts to be auctioned off back home. Then he or his agent would return the goods.

He used paper because the Prime had taught people not to trust computers.

So, I consented to go with him.

He cleaned up the campsite with my help very nicely leaving no trace he had been here, and then flicked on a smooth black rod. And I saw a flickering green whorl appear in the air.

“You appeared about there, a little to the left, and fell right into the fire, feet first. You were stone cold, and I thought you were dead first until you began to mutter ‘must get home’ and then ‘stop pulling on my nose, Mickey Mouse, I’m awake.’ ”

I smiled remembering the weird transition dream I’d had about Snow White and me going bobsledding off a cliff, and my cracking my head on a rock until Mickey tried to wake me up. Its par for the course for transition to a new world, being a verser.

I wondered what this would feel like.

Terrible it was. I thought I had been turned inside out, for a long s..e..c..o..n..d.. that seemed to stretch unnaturally while still being the same time unit.

Puking out my guts, I arrived on my hands and knees in another world.

“Keep it down, willya’? You may be an immortal verser, but I’m strictly of the one life to a customer variety.” My friend Cicero said crouching by me. I considered vomiting on his shoes, but could not muster the strength.

We hid between some Army style hovercrafts parked in a gridwork. Not a place I wanted to verse or d-jump into, an Army base.

By stealth, and inattentive guards, we made our way out of the parking lot, and to a barbed wire fence twenty feet tall, where he bent the seventeenth barb on the fifth strand back.

Then he found a prepared hidey hole about fifty feet away, and still on the Army base, and he took out some ghillie suits. We camped out under some brush about fifty feet above the hidey hole on a hillside with a clear view of the bit of barbed wire fence he had messed with.

We waited for two days, until suddenly he pointed to a tag of paper strung like trash on the fence on the fourth row.

We went down to the hidey hole, took off our ghillie suits, and he dropped a package into the hole while retrieving a small bag that contained gold dust. He insisted on paying me a teaspoonful for my help. I think he would have broken up the partnership if I had not accepted.

I looked in the hole, and saw smart bullets. These bullets can turn a ‘never-used’ into a sniper in about five minutes.

Face grim, he and I walked on. The guard at the gate accepted a gift of chocolates ‘for his girl’, and we walked out. The robomule with most of his guns, and my backpack climbed the fence in an obscure location, and met us outside the Army base.

We walked on down the road while the mule did its considerable best to look animal, and so scawny and diseased that it was about to die.

My companion told me what I did not need to be told as I passed hollow-cheeked civilians and proud, strutting officers.

The Army would steal the mule for transport if it was any good, and the people would turn it into soup if they got it. So it looked pathetic, and really sick, and still some of the people studied it for usable soup bones with a disturbing longing.

Then we passed the yard where even scrawnier humans were kept like cattle.

“They were rich at one time. Brilliant artists, and some of the best engineers for their tech level this world ever produced. Now, these, the shining light of their world…” He trembled with rage.

We walked on without stop into the night for I wanted to shake the spiritual pollution of this world from me.

In the night, we heard a faint pop-slieee and that was all before the sirens began wailing. We were running already for we were out after curfew.

But thankfully, we were near another gate.

“That was one of our bullets. And one more officer, or so-called capitalists who makes deals with the remants of the Prime rather than face honest competition is dead. We figure another ten thousand bullets should do the trick.”

He grinned savagely and activated the gate.

It was as bad, if not worse.

This time, he slammed me face first into the dirt. The sound of weaponry filled the night. We were in the middle of one of the most chaotic sounding firefights I’ve ever heard.

Meanwhile my companion kept my face down in the wet, steamy muck and rain pattered on my back. And he counted.

“One..two, of course,..three.four…five…six..seven…eight,nine..that’s it. Nine sides to this conflict. They are really going at it tonight. Look, verser, we just have to make a hundred yards across the killing fields to the next gate. So time to run like a madman.”

He paused letting me up.

“Now!”

And we sprinted through the swampy sawgrass toward an invisible safety while tracers and other terrors chewed up the grass behind and before us.

I prayed remembering that God goes before and after his chosen ones. And we arrived in one piece to the gate area which already glimmered, and we both dove through.

It hurt worse, a lot worse. Cicero let me retch for nearly five minutes.

“You hit a gate at speed, and the gate tries to rip you apart.” He explained apologetically.

I looked around the tiny park with its browning grass, and tired swingsets that looked unused, and I felt grateful no one was shooting at us.

“Is this world dangerous?”

“No.” And he looked sad.

“What was that last place?”

“We call it the Killing Fields. The people there are not as bad as the people in the first world. They don’t know any better.
The Prime took a bunch of tribes and spun fantasies for them. And we don’t have much hope for fixing their world anytime soon. We do a little bit, but mostly its just going to fester until all the modern tech the Prime gave them is used up. Then we can teach them to respect others property, and that lying and stealing are not ways to gain honor.”

He looked tired. He showed me to a Peaceful Pastures hotel, and the white-haired clerk at the front desk made me sign a dozen pieces of paper before I could get a room. Thankfully, my companion had excellent fake identity cards (five cards for each of us.)

We were still in the Northern Hemisphere, but looking at the mountains in the distance, I thought they looked more like a worn-down version of the Alps.

I looked up some history on a free terminal. The local internet was a cranky thing with slow computers, and abundant areas blocked off as ‘unseemly interest displayed. Please modify your behavior citizen. By order of the Ruling Council.’

Eventually, I discovered that the mountains out at the horizon were the Alps. In 1975, German expansion got going again in the wake of the failure of the Reconstruction of Europe after World War Two. Germany and Russia again went at it. Or more precisely, the Germanic Alliance (most of Europe) and Russia fought WWIII in a matter of minutes.

Very few people spoke Russian anymore, and the Alps (where much of the Alliance’s forces had been hidden in vast caves) were now radioactive for the next ten thousand years.

Most of the links to the data site were lamentations and remorse expressed by the survivors of the Short War.

I had noticed something strange as a stream of retirees came by to check in to the hotel. Nearly everyone gave me a nice smile, or a bow. It was a very friendly place, and I responded by trying to be charming.

Several people asked me if I had children which I suppose is normal for grandparent types to do. I did, but back in another universe very far away. Still I intended to get back there which reminded me, I really wanted one of Cicero’s gate keys. It might hold vital clues.

Getting tired of sitting there by the front window in the lobby of the hotel, I went walking. The people seemed friendly, and no one objected to my English.

But I gradually noted that it must be a retiremetn community since I saw about two other people my age, and about five children in a two hour stroll around downtown. And all the workers were old, even the ones doing hard physical labor were old.

So I made my way back to my hotel, and asked over dinner to my recovered companion about this retirement community and what he thought of it.

He laughed.

“Its the whole world.”

After dinner, he showed me on their net, world population figures. In 1990, they’d been six billion, and in 2000, seven billion, and seven in 2005, and six in 2010.

The average age of Europeans was sixty-five, and Americans were little better at sixty, and others were down at fifty or fifty-five.

I looked into the matter more. People had been afraid of overpopulation when they should have feared underpopulation. Children were not being born to young women in the Nineties because the women went out to find careers.

And with the high taxes ranging up to seventy percent and higher, both spouses needed to work to keep house over head.

Now I saw the barren fruit of their choice. Anyone in 2050 willing to have three children could have a free house, nanny, and enough money to recompense them twice over for any childhood expenses up to and including college.

Maybe they could pull it out, and not have a whole society of dying old people fetching each other bedpans, but it looked rough.

As night fell, I saw a line of women entering the lobby, and diffidently in their fine clothes and pearls approach my friend.

“You have the Sarah drug?” They whispered.

“Gold or other valuables?” He replied. With a sniff or a glad smile they traded in their pearls for a chance at a technological marvel built in my friend’s world.

Some complained that the drug should be free, but they got a harsh lecture on ‘theft by government’ and ‘tanstafaal’, and few of the old women who needed help were willing to face up to a young man’s fiery activism.

Finally, he began to take orders saying he had finished his supply.

We got to bed, and the next day, we took a taxi ride past suspicious, but powerless because over-encumbered in rules and because they could not have captured us if they tried police to the next hidden gate. The old man driver wished us luck.

“Bless you. I held my firstborn last week.” He told us as we jumped through to another world.

Tadeusz