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The Dracula Test

Given that criticism is what I do here, I enjoy reading professional literary and film criticism from time to time. When I pick up a critic's work, though, if it involves Victorian literature, horror, monsters, or anything of that sort, I have one simple test: do they understand Dracula?

For a culture with a huge backlash against Freud (some of which is unfair, I might add,) we sure do love talking like him to dismiss things! Dracula presents a pretty easy target; it's Victorian, so of course it's about repression! The female vampires are hot, so of course it's about how slutty women deserve to die! The heroine fights to escape the villain, so of course it's about how the only good woman is one who has no sex drive! The heroes kill the villain, so of course it's about how men need to keep their wives in line from dangerous foreign influences!

I know the phrase "you're wrong" is frowned upon in literary criticism, so let me put it this way: if you say the above, you have nothing more to say to me about books. I will neither agree with you nor find your opinions interestingly different; you may be brilliant, but I am unlikely to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Notice I didn't say you have to like Dracula. You can think it's the most boring book in the world, that the letter format is cliched, that Bram Stoker couldn't write dialogue to save his life, or that it could have stood to lose a couple hundred pages. And if you do like it, your interpretation doesn't have to be the same as mine. You can obsess over aspects I find trivial, or focus on implications that I can't see at all.

What matters is that you didn't take the easy way out, and that you actually paid attention to what you read.

Jane Smiley passes this test. So does David J. Skal. My beloved Kate Beaton fails it, but then I go to her for humor rather than criticism. And honestly, this could have been The Maltese Falcon Test (can you watch film noir without dismissing it all as male chauvinist anxiety?), The Romeo and Juliet Test (can you read Shakespeare without dismissing love at first sight as him signalling that characters are stupid?) or even The Video Game Test (can you appreciate that a medium can produce art without dismissing all of it as murder simulation?) All of these tests would indicate that a critic gives some thought to what they write, and has opinions I can share or at least respect.

For now, though, I still think of it as The Dracula Test.

How Gaming Made Me Like Country Music

I've always liked to think that I'm flexible when it comes to musical, with a few genre exceptions. Country was one of them; maybe it was family vacations where the adults chose Garth Brooks CDs that did it for me, or maybe it was radio stations playing borderline racist Toby Keith songs. Sure, I liked bluegrass, but that was folk music, not country. I was a liberal middle-class city girl, and I knew I wasn't country's target audience. So be it- not all music works for all people.

And then it turned out I was wrong, thanks to a couple of supernatural western RPGs.

My groups have always liked to have a gaming soundtrack, put at low volume during the entire session or just climactic scenes; dragon-killing is even more fun with Nightwish on in the background. It's a common practice among roleplayers, and some game books even make suggestions as to what music you should listen to while playing. Such was the case with Dogs in the Vineyard.

I've mentioned this game before, but it's something of a noir-western where you play Mormon gunslingers battling demons of sin (who are either abstract concepts or physical monsters- our GM always chose the latter.) The book reccomended putting on some spirituals and murder ballads on while playing, with maybe a little Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. My group went through our music collections and contributed songs for the playlist; Johnny Cash was there, Ennio Morricone was there, the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack was prominent, and a few tracks came from Nick Cave's album of murder ballads.

Johnny Cash was better than I expected; after listening to God's Gonna Cut You Down, I understood why he had such a following. The game was lots of fun, the soundtrack was a hit, and when it came time to play Deadlands, I decided to look for things to make another monster-western soundtrack.

The Devil Went Down to Georgia...hey, that's a really good song! So are these Appalachian ballads. And so is some band called Sixteen Horsepower. This page says they fit in the goth-country subgenre; does that mean there's more like it?

I had discovered the worlds of traditional and alt-country, which were much more to my taste than Toby Keith or Garth Brooks. Just as I discovered when Lupe Fiasco broke my preconceptions about rap, the good stuff doesn't always end up on the radio.

I'm not the only one who likes alt-country better than its pop equivalent. Columnist Chuck Klosterman argued that such banjo-filled ballads are made primarily for hipsters, and that pop-country is "real" because it reflects the actual experiences and preferences of rural Americans. Triggerman from Saving Country Music argues the opposite, that pop-country isn't real country, but a dumbed-down mess that reflects the truth of no one's life, while alt and traditional tap into the rich musical traditions of genuine Americana.

I'm not really one to speak on this matter as an aforementioned city girl; my mother fled the South as soon as she could, and it's never been a strong part of my heritage. Still, perhaps the fact that bands like O'Death and the Carolina Chocolate Drops can reach my jaded city heart counts for something?

All I know is that just as bringing in outside sources such as soundtracks can give a greater appreciation for the gaming experience, it can also work the other way around.

Of Frankenstein and his Monster

As a youth, I had very definite feelings about Frankenstein, both in book form and in film. These feelings were those of a lonely child who felt a kinship with outcasts, who thought being a weird kid meant she was on the same level as a creature stitched together from cadavers, and whose first published writing (thank you, Teen Ink!) was an essay on the fundamental sadness of the classic monster movie plot. Hell, I even got into college on the strength of a different essay about the relationship between monster movies and Greek Tragedy, and on the exhaustive earful I gave the phone interviewer who asked me the follow-up questions. (After listening to my explanation of the American racial politics that allowed Frankenstein's creature to be portrayed more sympathetically than Fu Manchu, the interviewer's reply was something to the extent of "You must give movies a lot of thought!")

So imagine my surprise when I re-watched the films and reread the book this past year and finally noticed how many children my beloved monster murdered.

Let's back up a little here. For those lacking familiarity with the book and movies, Frankenstein tells the story of a scientist who revives a creature made of dead bodies and brains. The book has him immediately abandon his creature when it jolts to life and he sees how ugly it is, the movies have him pressured by his colleagues to destroy his creation after they realize he mistakenly gave it the damaged brain of a madman. In both cases, the creature escapes and wreaks havoc, especially when the doctor refuses to create a mate for him. In the book, he is a rational and sensitive being, well aware of how cruel his rejection is, taking a very deliberate revenge on a society that has no place for him. The movies have him as an unspeaking (except for a few lines in the second movie) brute whose primal loneliness turns to bestial rage when he finds nobody can look at him without fear. Bride of Frankenstein has the doctor finally cave to him (and a flamboyant fellow mad scientist a little too interested in the mating habits of monsters) and build a wife; this wife takes one look at her husband and screeches, leaving him even more abandoned than before.

How cruel the doctor was, I thought as a girl. How could a man build a child and then not love him? How wicked the townspeople were, rejecting him because of his looks! How heartless the bride was for doing the same! And how tragic was my poor monster, who could have been so much more.

And now a few facts from these same media: in the book, the monster knowingly murders Frankenstein's brother and wife for the crime of being connected to him, and may have framed an innocent woman for the former crime. In the films, he has probably the highest bodycount of all the Universal monsters (or not- I haven't seen all the Wolfman movies, so let's say the jury's still out.) Some are accidents, some are clearly not. And the Bride's first moments of life are to look around and have strange men pushing her to the arms of large, hulking man with desire in his eyes.

I still feel sorry for the creature, who was given no chance. And I still feel that Frankenstein himself was monstrously (haha) irresponsible towards the fate of his creation. But things are no longer quite as black and white as they once were.

Rereading the book, I felt a great deal of pity for the doctor, clearly brilliant but consumed by impulsivity and obsession that tip into madness (if he were real, I might label him as a sufferer of severe bipolar disorder.) What a waste his genius went to! If only someone could have told him he was heading in the wrong direction in his search for immortality and artificial life. "Nanotechnology, dear boy! That's the way to go!" He'd have to invent the Difference Engine first, but what a story that would make...

Furthermore, he had good reason not to build the poor creature a mate. She rejects him in the film, and can I really blame her? What would this creation think, forced to mate with a beast, knowing her own ugliness and inability to join society? What would she do, bound by a bargain she had no part of? Would she really be a loving and faithful companion to her husband's travels, or would she strike out at him as he did at his creator, blaming him for her miserable existence?

The monster is a pitiable figure (and as long as I'm handing out armchair diagnoses, probably suffers from PTSD or Borderline Personality Disorder caused by childhood abandonment.) His troubles make his villainy understandable and relatable, but they don't make it excusable. In a kind society, he would be given counselors and rehabilitation, but perhaps not exoneration. If he's a morally complex character, it's because he plays the aggressor in addition to the victim.

I'm not sure what we can take from all of this. Maybe it's that moral ambiguity is better understood when one is older, or a good book or movie can give you different things each time you come back to it. Or maybe the only lesson is that romantic ladies and gentlemen of all ages like to overthink our monster stories.

Happy Dracula Day! (Or: Vamps in RPGs)

On this day in 1931, Dracula was released in theaters. What better reason needed to talk about vampires in rpgs? In addition to that, Holly's Horrorland is hosting a collection of Valentine's Day vampire posts, and such things are a perfect excuse for me to get off my ass and actually blog.

So let's take a look at some of the ways roleplaying games have handled such a classic monster, starting with probably the most famous example- and let's see what entirely subjective thoughts I have to offer.

World of Darkness (Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Requiem, etc.)

In the World of Darkness games, the world around you is one filled with secrets. As Tom Waits once sang, "everything you can think of is true," or nearly everything- the supernatural lurks around every corner and in every shadow, hidden from mortal eyes but visible in the trail of mystery and bloodshed they leave behind. Vampires, werewolves, changelings, mages, ghosts, even mummies and demons in Old World of Darkness- all exist, all are playable, and all are part of the way the world works.

Vampires are one of the main attractions of the World of Darkness games, and it's not hard to see why. They are powerful and immortal, and come with a range of archetypes you can play with. Old World of Darkness especially emphasized this, with separate clans allowing players to take inspiration from any number of classic vampire images and characters, from Renfield (Malkavian,) to Lestat (Toreadore,) to Count Orlock (Nosferatu,) to Dracula himself (Tzmisce.) New World of Darkness simplified things and whittled the clans down from thirteen to five, making the archetypes less restrictive though perhaps less characterful. Which system was better can be argued all day, and I'll leave that to other blogs.

My central problem with World of Darkness games in general can be found in the Vampire games- namely, that politicking can take precedence over all else. This isn't true of all the games (especially not Mortal ones,) and I imagine good Storytellers can and have found ways to use the feuding clans as backdrops for personal stories, rather than making the players simply powerful bureaucrats- or has found a way to make the latter fun. In any case, I tend to go to World of Darkness books for writing inspiration rather than game basis; with the powerful archetypes they draw up (especially their Middle Ages supplement,) many an idea or new twist can come to light.

Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons is pretty broad when it comes to vampires. They can be an enemy species in third edition, a player class in fourth edition, and who knows what fifth edition will bring. But for my money, the best place to find D&D vampires is in Ravenloft.

I've talked about the Ravenloft setting (and board game) before, so I'll just quickly touch on a few things. Dark powers have entrapped the most evil men and women from various worlds in a dark and misty landscape, possible to stumble into but near-impossible to escape from. The innocent live lives of fear, the wicked live lives of mixed power and torment, and those who fight against them have a long and hard road to travel. The most interesting aspect for me about their monsters (including vampires, which they give as an example) is that they go back to an old and little-used bit of folklore for them- while bites and curses can turn you, what's more likely to make you a monster is your own sins.

The little evils that player characters commit add up in Ravenloft. Every time they commit one, they must make a Powers Test, rolling to see if the dark powers have taken notice. The chances are higher for crimes like torture than they are for telling lies, but if you fail the role, you take one step in the direction of the monstrous. Perhaps you gain the ability to see in the dark, but find that direct sunlight causes you pain. It might not seem like much- your teammates might not even notice. But the more Powers Checks you fail, the more changes you go through- your teeth turn to fangs, you can only eat raw and bloody meat, your reflection vanishes from surfaces. Commit enough crimes and fail enough checks, and there will be nothing left of your humanity. You are a fiend from legend, a living nightmare, and a non-player character; only the DM can control you now, and only as a villain. The player will have to roll a new character, but what a bang the last one went out with!

My Life With Master

And now, on to the indies! My Life With Master is a narrativistic game, and cares more about storytelling mechanics than about stats for individual monster species. Nevertheless, the game provides suggestions for vampiric Masters, and with a few tweaks, player characters could also fall into such roles.

As I believe I've mentioned before, the premise of My Life With Master is that the players are minions to an evil tyrant, living in a world that resembles the movie version of Eastern Europe (preferably in a castle.) Your Master has needs and desires, which they rely upon you to provide for them. You have your own desires, though, chief among which is love. Can you find acceptance and common cause with the Master's victims and rise up against him, or will you come to a tragic end appropriate for gothic horror?

The rulebook gives a few examples of vampire Masters, and what their desires and personas might be. Feeder-types would be concerned primarily with the exchange of blood, but this could be either a purely dietary practice (the authors conjure up an image of Bela Lugosi swabbing his victim's necks with alcohol to prevent any nasty germs getting in the way) or it can be a sensual sort of feeding, with the Master playing the role of seducer, interested in draining more than simply blood. Your Master could also be a Breeder (wanting to create vampiric brides and progeny, perhaps even to spread their curse across the world,) and it's not hard to imagine one who's a Collector (adding up thralls and brides as if keeping score of their own power.)

It's also not hard to imagine vampiric player characters. Each minion has More Than Human and Less Than Human traits, which the vampire archetype could probably fit into. "Impervious to weapons, except those blessed by a priest" and "must kill and drain humans of blood, unless the blood is given freely" might work, but it's ultimately limited only by the players' creativity. It's not a game to go into if you're out of ideas, but if there was ever a game to play around with classic monsters, this is the one.

Unknown Armies

Remember what I said about World of Darkness games? Well, they are to urban fantasy games what Anne Rice was to vampire novels- not every game has to copy them, but every game has to accept their existence and define themselves next to them. Unknown Armies had to define itself as an urban fantasy/cosmic horror game separate from both World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu, and one of the first things it did was scrap the concept of supernatural entities outside of humanity itself. Gods come from human imagination, magic comes from human madness, demons are dead humans with only their obsessions left in them, werewolves are attempts at possessing animals gone horribly wrong, and vampires? That's just a blood condition found in a few noble families from Eastern Europe.

But if Unknown Armies doesn't have any traditional vampires, it certainly keeps some of their basic concepts alive in some of its magic. Dipsomancers, magicians powered by drunkenness, can suck souls from unfortunate victims to keep themselves alive (an NPC novelist named Dirk Allen has been doing this to many of his unfortunate fans.) Epideromancers would certainly agree with Renfield that "the blood is the life"; they get power from ritualistic bleeding and self-harm, a hideous primal magic that tests the boundaries of life and death. Various spells exist for sapping the life or luck from a person, and to the mysterious Ordo Corpulentus, the difference between their "communion" and a vampire's would be small indeed.

Furthermore, think about this- vampires are popular right now. Girls like them, boys like complaining about how girls ruined them (a generalization, but that's how UA composite reality works.) Movie studios and booksellers are crazy for them, and subcultures exist that model themselves on them. With all that going on in the world, can the ascension of The Vampire be far off?

Food for thought!

Check out more vampire posts over here, and thanks to Holly's Horrorland for the theme!

What the Hell is a Nerd?

I tried to think of a more poetic title to use for this post, but that one sums it up the best. I first heard the word "nerd" when I was in elementary school, applied by another girl towards me; I wasn't sure what it meant, but knew it was bad. In the years since then, I've heard any number of meanings for it (or its close cousin, "geek") but am still fairly unsure. Moreover, I've found that casual use of the label, even towards oneself, comes with a whole host of baggage and problems.

One of my professors disapproves of using the word when children are nearby- adults may know it's not a bad thing, but children won't, and will fear being called those mean names if they show an interest in their schoolwork. I've heard others argue that nerd should remain an insult; that identity is all they had when they were younger, and it's infuriating when pretty girls or cool boys try to take that identity from them, wearing retro Nintendo t-shirts without knowing what it is to be picked on and excluded.

My initial problem with the word still stands- what the hell does it mean? Does it mean virginal scientists? Married Star Trek fans? Mensa members? Straight-A students? Boys who like Halo? Girls who like Harry Potter? Social rejects? Cute kids with glasses? Do you have to complete a long checklist that includes all of the above and more, or is it just a state of mind?

Labeling shouldn't be important, but all too often it is. Humans like forming tribes, and we like having ways to distinguish ourselves from others (or the other way around.) Expanding a label risks making it meaningless, and limiting it may mean kicking out people who "deserve" it just as much as we do (and is ultimately unenforceable in a court of law.) Given the unique range of characteristics in any given person, labels are generally incomplete to describe them (that Star Trek fan may have been a star football player in high school- does he still count as a nerd?) Labels can be insults applied to people we dislike, or they can be impossible standards we try to measure up to. (Jillian Venters, Headmistress of Gothic Charm School, has written about the folly of defining "how goth you are" by how you measure up to others.)

So what the hell is a nerd? I didn't know in first grade and I don't know now. I still use the word at times, but I've become much less confident about it. And I have learned, at the least, to be mindful of the company in which I say it.

Monster Movies to Check Out

I was going to make a Halloween blog post about the scariest movies I've seen, but all my favorite blogs have already done that. Besides, I haven't seen many classic slasher movies, so I might not be the best person to list scary movies. Instead, here are what I consider personal favorite interpretations of movie monsters. Some are scary, some are funny, some are just plain bizarre- maybe you'll find something among them!

Vampires



The fashions may not have aged well, but The Lost Boys is still one of my all-time favorite movies. Love the vampires (nasty and stylish,) love the slayers (tiny and nerdy,) love the music (especially the main theme.) I've seen this movie too many times for it to still scare me, but I did my share of screaming the first time around, and it's fun and witty enough to keep me coming back every time.

Werewolves



This movie isn't for everyone- it's more art house than proper horror, and the feminist fairy tale motif is layered on pretty thick. If that doesn't scare you off, though, track down a copy of this Red Riding Hood update, and enjoy a sensual, surreal nightmare of a movie. It's based on the work of Angela Carter (a writer I love,) and boasts the only werewolf transformation sequence to really send chills down my spine.

The Frankenstein Monster



The original Karloff movies are great, and I even like the Kenneth Branagh version, but Gene Wilder and Mel Brooks made what must be, in spirit, the truest movie to the original novel. The monster is lonely and frightened and desperate for love, and in this generation, he finally gets a Frankenstein who won't abandon him. It plays fair with monster movie tropes, and despite being a parody, it really feels like it could have been part of the Universal Studios Frankenstein series. And lest I forget, it's really, really funny.

Ghosts



Oh man, does this movie do a number on me. Guilliermo del Toro knows how to do beautiful, insidiously creepy ghost stories, terrifying me with nothing more than a child's laugh. The Orphanage also features surprisingly reasonable protagonists for a horror movie (my boyfriend and I cheered when the heroine actually- gasp!- called the police after finding evidence of foul play buried in the house.)

Mummies



When filmmakers try to make "romantic" Dracula adaptations, what they're actually doing is remaking this. An ancient monster rises from the grave to seek his reincarnated love, but in a welcome change of pace, she objects- she has a new life now, and he has no right to take it from her. The movie is sadly lacking in actual mummy action, but the first scene still stands as one of the all-time classic monster movie moments.

Aliens



Are they communists? Are they McCarthyists? Does it matter? Either way, the town of Santa Mira is being invaded by conformist aliens, and the increasingly futile struggle to escape is scary no matter what your political bent. They don't eat you or kidnap you, they just copy you and take away your personality- and sometimes, that's all aliens need to do to be frightening.

Zombies



I'm technically cheating here (the violent, mindless hordes in Pontypool aren't reanimated dead,) but I wanted to be able to plug this movie. I'm not usually a fan of zombie movies in general, but Pontypool takes the concept and twists it into something terrifyingly original. The very words we speak begin to get caught in our throats and drive us mad, and only a tiny Canadian radio station is safe- but for how long?

Bonus: Grab Bag



Silly, bloody and self-aware, this anthology film depicts the monsters faced in a small town on Halloween night. We've got ghosts, werewolves, pseudo-vampires, serial killers, and an adorably creepy child who might just be the spirit of ancient Samhain. If you can't make your mind up which monster you want to see the Halloween, put on this cult comedy-slasher and get 'em all in one package.

Sci-Fi with a Conscience?

What obligations does science fiction have?

This question occurred to me because of The Steampunk Bible. One of the essays contained therein was "Blowing Off Steam" by Catherynne M. Valente, and in it, she argued that a work must accurately portray the horrors of the Victorian era (unsafe factory conditions, terrifying societal change spurred on by technology) in order to be truly steampunk. "If you want Victoria in your coat pocket," she writes, "if you want the world that comes with her, all that possibility, all that terrible, arrogant, gorgeous technology, take it all, make it true, be honest and ruthless with it, or you're just gluing gears to your fingers and telling everyone you're a choo-choo train."

You can agree with her or not, but her objections to much of modern steampunk raise an important question. Steampunk might not exist without steam and children slaving away in dangerous factories, but by the same token, cyberpunk might not exist without futuristic sweatshops where people are paid pennies a day to make bionic implants. Pseudo-medieval fantasy can't exist without peasants and the feudal system. As we've known ever since Fritz Lang filmed Metropolis, Utopian societies generally require someone living in non-Utopian conditions to make them happen.

Is a writer of the fantastic under any obligation to portray this?

I've always disliked the idea that a writer "has" to write with a moral in mind- or that a writer "has" to do anything, for that matter. I don't think it's wrong to read or write escapist fiction, and to not want to be bothered by grim and dirty realities. I've also seen grittiness taken too far; one of my biggest problems with the Warhammer 40k universe is that the evils of all the factions are so exaggerated that it becomes hard for me to care about anyone winning at all. And I think we've all read enough preachy science fiction, or at least seen a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, to know how painful it can be trying to enjoy something that wants to lecture first, entertain second.

However, this doesn't mean I entirely disagree with the notion of sci-fi having a conscience. Harshly put as it was, Ms. Valente's point still stands; we can't fully appreciate the glamour of a setting unless we get a little bit of the grit. Any setting, whether historical or imaginary, can have the capacity for both horror and beauty, and the two often go hand in hand.

I don't think fiction has any obligations, but I do think that fiction is better when it is informed by the context in which it takes place. When the author knows what problems their characters will face in their day to day lives, and what problems go unseen by them on a regular basis, that provides for a much richer text. Discworld wouldn't be half as fun if the city of Ankh-Morpork wasn't a filthy mixture of medieval, Victorian, and modern urban blight, and the anachronistic blast that is Samurai Champloo wouldn't be as interesting to watch if one of the protagonists being an illiterate peasant never became an issue.

In short, I don't think you have to zero in on a society's problems in order to write a good story. But if you want to portray a rich and enveloping universe, you need to be aware that they exist.

Steampunk Ramblings

Another confession: I'm the sort of girl who wears bustle skirts and corsets in her everyday life- and judging from the internet, I'm not alone. Whether your interest is in neo-Victorian attire, old-fashioned pulp magazines, or retro-futuristic architecture, looking back to the past has become a popular "nerd" source of inspiration. Think of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and put the stress on the last word; most young nerds/hipsters/goths/whatever you want to call us are often less interested in faithful recreation than in taking bygone aesthetics and incorporating them into modern contexts. Perhaps the most famous form of this is the "steampunk" genre- a style of dress, literature, music and film that imagines a world somewhere between yesteryear and the distant future.

Source

To be less cryptic, "steampunk" is a subset of science fiction that imagines a Victorian era with futuristic technology (or sometimes a futuristic era with Victorian aesthetics and social conventions.) It was an offshoot of cyberpunk, a genre familiar to those who have read Snow Crash or watched The Matrix, but replaced the emphasis on computer power with an emphasis on steam power- a sky full of airships, coal-powered death rays, and brass goggles everywhere. The "punk" part of the name is somewhat misleading; it's a holdover from cyberpunk, rather than an indication that steampunk is about rebellion or grittiness (though it certainly can be.)

There are pitfalls of the genre, just as there are things about it I love. One of the most parodied aspects is a tendency to smother everything in gears, and it's never good when the story (or music, or gaming experience) takes second place to marveling at how cool the setting is. It has cliches and stereotypes, and outfits can be a real hassle to assemble, especially if you're no good at sewing.

Despite these problems, the steampunk genre holds a special place in my heart. I'm more glad than I can say that I live in an era of modern medicine and women's suffrage, but as an admitted romanticist, I can't help being drawn to a world of elegance and adventure, even one that never truly was. Looking to the past during visions of the future is more than understandable- it can be beautiful, creative, and lots of fun.

Interested? Try these...

Comics: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Honestly, I never liked this as much as I wanted to- I just couldn't stand what I felt it did to some of my favorite Victorian characters. But if you're more flexible regarding literature than I am, check out this much-loved spy thriller/dark adventure series, where secret agents from classic novels do battle to protect London from mad scientists, aliens, and more.

Novels: The Difference Engine pretty much started it all off, and The Diamond Age is a fun blurring of the boundaries between steampunk and cyberpunk. You can also go for romance novels with Soulless, and the other books in the Parasol Protectorate series.

Television: You can't talk about steampunk without mentioning Wild Wild West, where gentleman spies keep America safe with clever gadgets and dashing heroics. The campy film version bears almost no resemblance to the original, but is a guilty pleasure of mine.

Films: Disney's Treasure Planet goes the "future world with Victorian fashions" route, in an update of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. You can also check out Back to the Future Part III- where else will you find a flying, time traveling train that runs on steam power?

Music: Rasputina, one of my favorite bands, uses electric cellos to make nearly unclassifiable rock songs with Victorian overtones. For a list of similar music, check out the Sepiachord website.

Roleplaying Games: If you liked Wild Wild West, give Deadlands a try- the dead are rising and sleeping monsters are awakening in the old west, and you're just a bunch of cowboys and scientists armed with gatling guns powered by the souls of the damned. If you prefer a European flavor to your steam, try Castle Falkenstein or Baron Munchausen; the former casts you as a Burroughs-esq pulp hero, and the latter...well, who the hell knows what the latter will cast you as.

Fashion: Gentlemen's Emporium is one of the best places on the web to get frock coats and frilly dresses, should you so choose. Clockwork Couture is a little inconsistent with their stock, but when they have good stuff, it's always beautiful.

Got any more recommendation? Feel I've completely misrepresented the genre? Let me know in the comments!

Looking for Love(craft) in all the Wrong Places

"Lovecraftian" is a common label to slap on horror games, movies, books and comics, and like many labels, it is simultaneously helpful and limiting. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories about dark alien gods, expressing the terror he felt at the changing world and the intermixing of the foreign and the familiar. He created monsters that were at once aquatic and humanoid, masses of tentacles and mind-boggling angles, things that could drive a man mad to even contemplate. Lovecraftian horror is the fear that we are truly not alone in the universe; rather than inspiring religious devotion, Lovecraft used this feeling to suggest utter human insignificance.

Lovecraftian monsters such as Shoggoths, Deep Ones and even Great C'thlhu himself should be familiar to consumers of fantastical media. Whether in games (Call of C'thulhu, Trail of C'thulhu,) movies (The Dunwich Horror, Dagon) or in any of the many new stories set within the Lovecraft Mythos, new authors have worked to bring Lovecraft's visions to the modern age. Some of these products are quite good, but if I may offer my opinion, gamers and creators who want to truly tap into the Lovecraftian might want to venture off the path established by the man himself.

What do I mean by this? Well, C'thulhu and company were originally meant to be scary because they were strange and unfathomable. When you can buy plush toys of said monsters, that aura of the strange and unfathomable decreases significantly (not that I don't love some of those toys myself.) Lovecraft's stories were also full of rather dated (to put it kindly) anxieties that don't quite work for the modern horror afficianado; immigrants and their descendants have established that we're not going away any time soon, and tentacled monsters have become so commonplace in SF art that, far from boggling the mind, they inspire jokes about Japanese pornography.

There is still some terror and excitement to be had in traditional Lovecraftian fare, but if the above problems are too much for you, you can still enjoy media that take H.P.'s favorite concepts without using his specific creatures or stories. Consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In that television show, demons from other dimensions once ruled the earth, and their lines (and blood) mingled with those of humans to create vampires, humanoid abominations intent on reclaiming the Earth for their dark gods. That's almost a dead ringer for the plot of Shadow over Innsmouth, except that extraordinary humans such as Buffy and her friends are capable of fighting and defeating the monsters.

In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King stated that he considered Alien to be, at heart, a supernatural Lovecraftian film. In this case, humans travel the stars and find the ancient gods rather than the other way around, but the end results are the same. Alien even shares the Freudian sexual terror at the heart of many Lovecraft stories, albiet with phallic and toothy rather than vaginal and squishy monsters. At the end of the first movie, heroine Ripley is in much the same position as the heroic boat captain of Call of C'thulhu- she has used her ship to save herself from the alien, but can there ever be a true victory over such a creature, or is she only delaying the inevitable?

Lovecraftian creatures don't even have to be malevolent to be creepy. The ghoulish humor of the film The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Addams Family television show, and the game Monsters and Other Childish Things relies on the idea of aberrant entities being merely curious about humanity, and driving people mad with what they consider harmless fun or even attempts to help. If that sounds like legends of the Fair Folk, you'd be right; remember that the word "eldritch" originally meant "elvish", and you'll see the routes of Lovecraft's aliens even in fairy tales.

Especially interesting is when you find Lovecraftian elements in stories that aren't meant to be horror-related at all. Oscar Wilde's short story The Birthday of the Infanta shares exactly the same plot twist as Lovecraft's The Outsider, only with a different pre-reveal mood. The Indiana Jones films show godly artifacts that bend and distort reality, best kept away from humanity's use for fear of the damage they could cause. Moreover, one of the quintessential American heroes has a backstory that, with only a few tweaks, could describe Dunwich's Wilbur Whateley.

The child of a dead species from a distant planet, he passes as human but is fundamentally not. His small town knew he was strange, but never guessed what he truly was. This alien boy eventually traveled to the frozen north, where, buried in the ice, he found the legacy of his parentage, and brought it back with him when he came back to the world of humanity. Human scientists can slow him down, but they will never truly be able to destroy him, or even comprehend what he is.

Superman is Earth's champion, for which we are very lucky. Like horror itself, the Lovecraftian can be found almost anywhere, and it only takes a little bit of reframing to bring it out.

Good, Evil, and the Players

Confession time- I have a hard time being evil in games. Whether in RPGs or video games, my characters tend towards the saintly, even if I'm trying to portray them as roguish and chaotic. This says things about my escapist fantasies, but not much about me as a person- it's easy to be heroic and self-sacrificing in a game, when there are no consequences that will carry over into the real world. On the other hand, it's also easy and fun for some players to act evil and dickish, knowing they aren't hurting any flesh and blood people.

Still, the question remains- why? Why is it so hard for me to hear the phrase "your alignment has shifted towards evil," whereas for other players it's not only easy but expected?

One thing to remember is that for most RPGs, it's easier to run a "good" campaign than an "evil" one. In a typical campaign (especially in Dungeons and Dragons,) the Game Master motivates the players with promises of treasure, experience points, and the chance to pull off impressive heroics. The first two things can still be offered to evil characters, but "evil" campaigns are notoriously hard to run; if players go too over the top, it's hard to take it seriously as more than a comedy game, while if they play a straight game of manipulation and coercion, some players and Game Masters will grow uncomfortable. There was even a book released to help Dungeons and Dragons games handle evil (whether or not it was the players doing it,) and the fan reaction to it was mixed, to say the very least.

Playing an evil character in a "good" campaign is even harder, though I've played in a game where two players pulled it off (their characters were greedy and callous but not interested in screwing over the rest of the party.) It also can come down to the Game Master; some go in with no expectations, some portray the world as full of puppies and babies to be protected, and some can get downright sadistic about beating the idealism out of more traditionally heroic characters. Experience on the part of the players also comes into it- if you've played a knight in shining armor a hundred times before, it can be fun to throw aside morality for a game or two.

I know some of what motivates me to play heroes is my love of old movies and my desire to emulate them. I want to be a traditional hero, the kind they'd write epics about. Maybe my character can get a little cynical or jaded, but I want them to always do the right thing in the end. What the right thing is may differ from character to character, but I want them to leave a positive change on their world.

I'd like to hear other opinions on this, though. If you like playing evil characters, what aspects do you like? If you like being a hero, are your reasons different than mine? I'd love to hear from you!

High Noon and What Came After

I find it interesting that so many movies feel the need to ‘respond’ to High Noon. Well, maybe interesting is the wrong word- more like baffling. I read about the attacks when it came out, calling the hero unmanly for showing fear and appearing to almost cry, and my reaction is a stunned cry of "But it’s High Noon! How can anyone hate High Noon?"

Apparently, some people did- or even if they liked it, felt the need to make a movie showing what should have happened. Rio Bravo and High Plains Drifter are both in some ways responses to the movie, though the responses are not quite the same. Rio Bravo is the response of a swaggering father saying "Son, you should be ashamed of yourself- you don’t need to rely on the townsfolk! And don’t show no fear, neither!" High Plains Drifteris the response of a troubled younger brother going "No man, what you oughtta do is go back there and kill every last one of those ungrateful sons of bitches!"

Funnily enough, I love all three of these movies. Rio Bravo is a delightful ensemble adventure, and the romance between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson is appealing (even if it is cribbed almost line for line from the director’s earlier movie, To Have and Have Not.) High Plains Drifter is a banquet of the bizarre, an epic, nihilistic horror movie masquerading as a western. I don’t even mind the rape scene- it certainly isn’t the most evil thing Clint Eastwood does over the course of the movie, which acknowledges that all those mysterious men with no names are scary for a damn good reason.

In the middle sits little old High Noon, an allegory for the Red Scare or Korea or urbanization or whatever us modern viewers like to attribute to it. It would be irritated by Rio Bravo’s response and horrified by High Plains Drifter, and would generally try to stay out of the conversation.

Why is it this movie provokes such strong reactions? There are many controversial movies and many ideas to be rebelled against, but why does the simple story of a man abandoned who sticks to his principles simply because it’s something he has to do (while being broken up inside that no one else seems to see it that way) upset people?

I don’t know. All I know is, while John Wayne looks on disgusted and Clint Eastwood paints the town red, tired and scared old Gary Cooper must stand by himself.

For High Noon, it’s a rather fitting position.

The Gentleman Vampire

First, a disclaimer- this is not a Twilight review. Whether you love the books or hate them, you can already find a hundred online reviews that bear out your opinion. I would, however, like to talk about some cultural notions about vampires its criticism has brought up.

Some say that vampires should never be romantic or attractive, that they're monsters and should be portrayed as such. Others say that vampirism has always been about sex, and that it makes perfect sense to use them in romance novels. The former often argue that romantic vampires aren't "real" vampires, if such a thing exists. Beast or lover, predator or protector- which is it?

As you've probably guessed, the answer is complicated. The idea of the gentleman vampire has always been a strange one, but its roots go back far beyond Twilight. Let's take a look, shall we?

Picture a year without a summer, a young doctor cooped up with a bunch of temperamental poets and their female companions, all of them thinking up ghost stories to relieve their boredom. One of the female companions writes a story about a tragic monster, which she titles Frankenstein. The doctor looks across the room at Lord Byron, then writes a story about a Byronic monster, which he titles The Vampyre. It's not a very good story, and rumors will persist that he plagiarized it from Byron, but it becomes quite popular, and the image it presents of a handsome, seductive vampire will forever change how people think of the creature.

More vampire stories are written as the years go by. An Irishman writes a breathtakingly beautiful novella about a vampire named Carmilla and her romantic obsession with an innocent young girl. The amusingly titled Varney the Vampire: Or the Feast of Blood will also be published, showing a vampire who hates his condition and commits suicide by volcano. And then, the same year that a German doctor coins the term psychoanalysis, another Irishman writes Dracula and changes everything.

The title character is not a romantic, but he is a gentleman in the truest sense of the word- a man with wealth and a title. He enjoys beautiful women, but doesn't much care about their consent (his attack on Mina is written almost explicitly as a rape scene); he feeds on his peasants and their helpless children, literally sucking the lifeblood of the working class. He is everything evil and corrupt about the old world, and it takes enlightened science, American cowboys, and the "new woman" to destroy him.

When the movies came, Dracula came with them. When Max Shreck played him, he was a dried up corpse, his fingernails still growing, who spread plague and could barely pass for human. When Bela Lugosi played him, he was an off-putting but strangely fascinating foreigner whose eyes and voice hypnotized the unsuspecting. When Christopher Lee played him, it was the sixties, and Dracula was a suave British creature out to lower everyone's necklines and break up respectable relationships. When Gary Oldman played him, his relationship with Mina had gone from one of rapist and survivor to one of true love.

Somewhere along the line, the meaning of the word "gentleman" changed- it became something anyone could be, so long as they held the door for ladies and drank expensive wine. What once meant you trained as a soldier and were better than the lower classes now meant you were polite and good looking. Being pursued by a gentleman vampire didn't seem like such a bad thing after all.

Anne Rice popularized the conception of vampires as brooding and misunderstood, and while not every vampire author has followed suite, they have all had to respond to her. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had vampire love interests, but separated the times when they were romantic from the times when they were vampiric. Now we have Twilight, with a pro-abstinence gentleman vampire; many teenage girls swooned, and many nasty things were said on the internet about the intelligence of females.

With all that said and done, where does that leave us? Is the gentleman vampire the only way to go, and has the vampire in general been thoroughly domesticated?

Of course not. If you want bestial and ugly vampires, there are writers and directors who agree with you (Guillermo del Toro wrote a book with that in mind, and from what I hear it's quite good.) I don't think we should give up on the gentleman vampire, though; after all, the Victorians sanitizing stories about fairies hasn't stopped the Fair Folk from being used to chilling effect in modern fiction.

Maybe we need to go back to Dracula and Carmilla to understand it. Think of someone wealthier and more powerful than you, who still wants what little you have- your loved ones, your body, your blood. Think of a relic of the past that refuses to die, dragging bloody tradition into the civilized world. Think of something devouring you while dressed in fine clothes, all because they hunger and will never be sated- and as a lord or lady, they have every right to do so.

I don't know about you, but I think that sounds pretty damn scary.

But Why Would You Play That?

Many people have their own personal definitions of what a roleplaying game should be. To some it's improv theater, to other's it's an exercise in storytelling; some say it's art, and some say it's just a chance to bash a goblin in the face and take his stuff. Whatever desires and expectations you have of games, though, one thing is for sure: you want to have fun.

Right?

This would seem a simple question, until you take into account the sort of experiences some games produce. Gamers can decide to imagine themselves as Polish child soldiers during World War Two, or as helpless innocents battling the personifications of child abuse, or as chain-smoking teenage runaways. It's not just the indie games that offer these opportunities; look no farther than Vampire: The Requiem for characters often full of self-loathing and misery, or Call of Cthulhu for sessions that nearly always end in death and madness.

At this point, many non-gamers (and some actual gamers) are tempted to ask "But why would you play that?"

Aren't roleplaying games supposed to be about escapism? Why would you want to spend your free time indulging in someone else's misery? Above all, why wouldn't you want to have fun?

I've asked these questions before, both of other people and myself. And I suppose the answer must be that the word "fun" is something very hard to pin down. Sometimes people enjoy having bad things happen to their characters in and of itself (Call of Cthulhu is infamous for the fatalistic glee it inspires, with players taking bets as to whose character will hold out the longest.) Some people feel that rare happy endings are even more precious because of how hard they are to earn, and that it means more for a frightened child to conquer the darkness than a six foot armor-clad warrior. Some people find painful experiences cathartic, and some enjoy exploring characters in situations good or bad.

If these things sound strange to you, think of another medium that's supposed to be fun: movies.

Why should people watch gritty dramas or tragedies when there are escapist popcorn flicks aplenty? It could be for any of the reasons I've already mentioned, or it could be because art doesn't have to be warm and fuzzy to make us feel satisfied. The Manchurian Candidate, one of my favorite movies of all time, is nothing if not bleak, but I'm always so wrapped up in its world that it took my boyfriend to point out to me how depressing it was.

Are roleplaying games art? I'd say they can be, but that's a discussion for another time. Suffice it to say that they can provide moving experiences in the hands of good players and a good DM no matter what system you use. And to some, moving experiences aren't always bright and sunny ones.

Let me make one thing clear: just because more 'serious' art can provide deep experiences doesn't mean that other art is inferior. I hate movies where people die of slow, lingering diseases, and I'll probably never play Grey Ranks. I love a good action movie, and I love an escapist dragon-bashing dungeon crawl. Ideally, I like my games to have the best of both worlds; escapist fun and a deep story. That isn't always achievable, but it's a nice goal to set.

If my rambling has any sort of a point, it's this: every group has it's own desired light-to-dark ratio for maximum fun (if fun is even the desired product- some have said it's not.) If other people's ratios are different than ours, it may confuse us. But it shouldn't surprise us.

Field Guide to the Femme Fatale

Have you ever been trapped in a film noir? Of course you have. If you're a boy, you've probably thought to yourself, "There's a girl I like, but how do I know she's not out to screw me over?" If you're a girl, you may have thought, "Gee, I'd like to take a guy for all he's worth, but how do I know I have it in me?"

Wonder no more. For your education and safety, I now present the subcategories of femme fatale.

The Instigator

So there you are, minding your own business, when out of the blue some dame comes up and asks you to rob a bank with her. Normally you'd tell her to jump in a lake, but you've just never seen a girl with eyes so green or legs so long. What's a poor fellow to do?

I'd like to quote a first lady here and tell you to just say no, but I'm only human. I know how hard it is to say no to someone you love. And hey, you're actually relatively lucky if this is the femme fatale you're matched with; it's not in her best interests to screw you over, since you're in on the same scheme, and she may even really love you. What she says is something that's always manipulative, but which non-criminals have said since time immemorial: if you love me, you'll do it.

Related to the Black Widow (see below), but not always interchangeable. Lucky for you. Also related to the Damsel in Disguise (ditto,) but where that one pretends to be innocent, this one lets you know up front what you're in for. And you go for her anyway.

How to Spot: You know that woman in front of you, asking you to commit a crime? It's her.

How to Be One: If you must, target guys low on the intelligence scale. But really, think twice about being this variety; your boy toy's likely to kill you when he's had enough of your games.

As Seen In: Gun Crazy, Carmen Jones, Out of the Past

The Catalyst

I've tried to refrain from saying "It's your own fault" too much in this essay, but that's the case by definition with this lady. See, she may be a little promiscuous, a bit of a lush, prone to smoky eyeshadow, and maybe even have a mean streak, but you don't have to worry about her killing anyone. What you do have to worry about is how you act when you're around her. You get violently jealous, insanely posessive, and start scaring her with the depth of your "love." Problem is, so is ever other guy around her. And of course, you're sure it's all her fault.

Sometimes confused with Just Drawn That Way (see below,) but much less independent and much less happy.

How to Spot: If she's sleeping around and doesn't care if you know, this one is a good bet. Incidentally, ease up on the Othello impressions- if she's turned on by that, she's probably not the kind it's safe to be around.

How to Be One: Are you crazy? I know you want men around you paralyzed with love and lust, but you don't want Dennis Hopper or Glenn Ford stalking you. Trust me on this.

As Seen In: Gilda, Blue Velvet, The Blue Angel, Anatomy of a Murder

The Black Widow

This is probably what you think of when you hear the term 'femme fatale.' She's sexy as hell but stuck with a creep, and wants you to take said creep out. I can't say for sure she's screwing you over- sometimes the guy really is a creep and she really is in love with you. But remember, that creep she's with probably thought she was in love with him at one point. Some day that creep could be you.

Don't think you're safe if you're female, either. This type is known for ensnaring women just as easily as men. Particularly if said femme fatale is French.

How to Spot: You'll usually see her stuck in a small town diner or a huge and empty mansion, on the arm of a guy twice her age. Think real hard about how much you value your life before taking her up on anything.

How to Be One: Always have a backup plan. If things go wrong with your scheme or your sucker, be ready to bail and have a prepared way of doing so. Also, platinum blonde wigs seem to help.

As Seen In: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Body Heat, Les Diaboliques, Niagara- this is probably the most common subtype.

Just Drawn That Way

She's not a bad girl, not really. Is it a crime to wear slinky dresses and banter with private eyes? Of course not. She's just having some fun, and if she likes a guy and he gets in trouble, you can bet she'll be there to help bail him out.

You might call her the decoy femme fatale, but she's close enough that I consider her a subtype. She has all the trappings of trouble, but there isn't a predatory bone in her body. Some women can be sexy and fun loving without being evil- imagine that!

How to Spot: Banter is a good way to spot this one. If you're teasing her and she gives as good as she gets, you're in luck.

How to Be One: I know you've got a heart of gold, but try not to play too many games. The sooner you and the private eye start working together, the better for all concerned. Also, don't be afraid of slinky dresses.

As Seen In: The Big Sleep, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Pulp Fiction.

The Damsel in Disguise

While most femmes fatale tend to be rather blatant, this one isn't. At least, not to you. She's in trouble. She needs help. Some of it is her fault, but everyone makes mistakes. Those stories she tells you about how bad men have hurt her break your heart, and she's awfully keep on helping you solve that murder mystery. Well, you knew it was too good to be true...

This subtype can overlap with the Black Widow and can be mistaken for the Catalyst. She doesn't have to be the former and certainly isn't the latter; odds are she's a criminal mastermind, and you're a small pawn on a big chessboard.

How to Spot: Helping out girls in danger is perfectly admirable, but here's a tip- the more crimes she needs you to commit to save her, the more likely she's this.

How to Be One: You've got to be a good actress, and you've got to pick your targets. You want them loyal and not too curious- private eyes are tempting, but they ultimately ask too many questions.

As Seen In: The Maltese Falcon, Brick, The Killing (in one scene, anyway.)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

This is less of a review than a brief analysis of the movie's "moral" (stop reading now if you don't want spoilers!) Upon re-watching this old favorite of mine, I was struck by the detail put into scenes about prospecting, particularly one that shows the details of panning for gold. Such details contribute nothing to the plot but are still a nice touch, letting us learn along with the characters about the realities of their new work.

Moreover, whether or not it was intended (and with such a prestige production it may well have been), it serves as a metaphor for how the gold itself reveals the true nature of the protagonists. Just as the water reveals which identical nuggets of rocks are valuable, so too does the entire ordeal of prospecting, as Tim Holt nearly buckles under his greed but manages to keep himself mostly morally pure- unlike Bogart, his foil.

Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs is not a monster; he is just a man who does a worse job resisting temptation than he imagined he would. Before prospecting, he was a loveable rogue, his main flaw seeming to be a lack of ambition, who will fight a man for what he is owed but take no more than his due. By the end he is a paranoid would-be-murderer and chronic betrayer, seeing the treachery in his own heart reflected in the eyes of his former friends.

The novel upon which the film was based is said to have been written as an anti-capitalist tract about how money destroys men's souls. As the film holds up today, the message appears to be a bit different. After all, Walter Huston and Tim Holt come out basically decent; only Bogart could be said to be "destroyed" by it, and even that couldn't have happened if he didn't have the hidden potential to be destroyed.

In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, gold serves not as a device to corrupt men, but a means of revealing their true nature. Those who are pure will stay pure. Those who never had the opportunity to be corrupt before will be presented with a chance- and may, like Bogart, discover a nastiness they didn't know they had.

Castle Ravenloft

What second edition Dungeons and Dragons did well was settings, and my favorite of all time has to be Ravenloft. A strange land surrounded by mist, populated with gothic villains from Dracula to Hill House to the Alien Queen, where every town seems to belong in a Hammer Horror movie and every wicked deed leads you further down the path to becoming a monster yourself. Thanks to the evil god Vecna in-game (and a few changes of edition in the real world), the D&D universe has changed a great deal since those days. However, I'm happy to report that Ravenloft has managed to sneak into a fourth edition boardgame (or at least, one of its most iconic villains has!)

Castle Ravenloft is the boardgame I always wanted in my teenage years when I had no one to try out roleplaying games with (my third edition D&D boardgame still sits sadly unused.) Not only can you play it by yourself, but it's simple enough that it can be used to ease the uninitiated into the complicated world of D&D, or enjoyed for its own sake as a fun adventure game. I also appreciate the fact that its makers have taken into account problems in traditional dungeons games- you can no longer huddle on a single square, safe from monsters but refusing to advance the blot, or you'll trigger an Event Card, typically deadlier than most of the monsters themselves.

What plot the game has is as follows: You (and possibly your friends) are adventuring into the castle of the wicked vampire Strahd van Zarovich. There are several adventures with different goals to choose from: Kill the monsters. Talk down the golem. Save a boy from vampirism. Or even take down Strahd himself- and trust me, by the time you've wandered through his castle full of traps and pet zombies, your health points draining every time he appears from the shadows to hurl a fireball at you and then vanish, you'll want the guy dead too.

Possibly the most fun for my playgroup was the slow hatred we built up for Strahd. With each Encounter Card, his whole damn castle proved more and more intent on murdering us. Everything was out to get us, and when we finally managed to put down Strahd and his zombie dragon, it felt like a victory well earned.

And as a bonus, here's an Encounter Card we were expecting to pop up any second:

Marked By Strahd for Death
The player holds on to this card- not the character, the player. Keep it after the game is over. Strahd is waiting for you...

Mainstream and Indie Games, Part 2

Sorry for the long hiatus. For those of you interested, here is the long-awaited conclusion to my analysis of the gaming industry...

Mainstream Games

Streamlined and popular with plenty of supplements.

The Upside

If a game has lasted for over thirty years, through countless editions and company changeovers, it obviously has a fanbase supporting it, and you can bet they're fans for a reason. Why has Dungeons and Dragons kept going since it was just Gary Gygax and a couple friends in his basement? Because it's good. Sure, each of the editions has its own problems (which each subsequent edition tries to fix), but the basic idea of playing Conan-esq adventurers in a Tolkein-esq world has proved time and again to be fun. Dungeons and Dragons is mainstream for a damn good reason.

Another bonus mainstream games have is versatility. Much as I love indie games, they're usually designed to do one thing and one thing only. If you're playing My Life With Master and decide you want your character to abandon his vampiric overlord and lead a revolution in the next town over, guess what? It ain't gonna happen. On the other hand, games like D&D or GURPS can cope with it. They've got lots and lots of options, and can cover just about any sort of situation your characters can blunder into.

On the other hand, this leads to the major downside of the mainstream...

The Downside

If I were to make a broad and unfair generalization, I would say that a great indie game does one specific thing really well, while a great mainstream game does a bunch of things pretty well. The drawback to versatility is that without focus, all those wonderful options you've created can start seeming bland and same-y.

Mainstream games want to appeal to everyone and turn off as few people as possible. You want a game of espionage? Sure, we can do that! You want a game specifically about your spy dealing with her repressed memories? Sorry, that might bore too many customers. You want your hack and slash monster killing campaign to be psychologically complex but filled with dark humor? You'll have to rely on your players for that, because our main game books have to be a bit more broad.

Obviously, good players will add all the flavor you need for any sort of campaign. But if you want to push them in that flavorful direction, you might find it harder to do with mainstream games.

Mainstream and Indie Games, part 1

Let's say you and your friends want to try this roleplaying thing you've heard about. You're not in the mood for any particular genre- you'll play anything as long as it's good. You've even decided to see what the world of games has to offer outside of Dungeons and Dragons. So, what do you want and where should you look?

One important distinction in the world of RPGs is that of mainstream versus indie games. Mainstream games- Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness, GURPS- are published by large companies, have huge amounts of supplementary books, and are often available at good bookstores. Indie games- Dogs in the Vineyard, Unknown Armies, My Life With Master- are put out by smaller companies, sometimes consisting of only one or two people, and generally have to be purchased online or at a game-specific store.

As you'd expect, there are good things and bad things about both types of game. Let's take a look.

Indie Games
Artsy, quirky, offbeat and other such adjectives.

The Upside
In a word, innovation. Indie games are where you go when you're tired of the same old sword and sorcery you've played a million times and want something different. You want to be a Mormon gunslinger, the henchman to a mad scientist, an incompetant crook caught in a heist gone wrong, a lunatic whose magic is powered by obsession? Indie games have you covered. They've been designed to give you a unique experience you won't find anywhere else, and to make you think a little more about how you want to play. There's a reason most of my favorite games are indies- they tend to be the products of writers with a vision, not drones churning out by the book installments for corporations.

Sometimes the risks idie games take pay off and sometimes they don't, but they almost always offer an interesting experience. A writer can do literally whatever they want, and as generally happens in such cases, works of true beauty and art come out of the indie world.

The Downside (Warning: Not entirely worksafe)
Individual indie games may have problems such as pretentiousness, trying to ape a mainstream game or misery tourism (more on that in a later review, hopefully), but the one plagueing them all is the lack of quality control. Big companies like White Wolf or Wizards of the Coast can hire multiple editors to ferret out the typoes and project managers to decide when something's a good idea or not. Indie games don't have that luxury.

Along with this issue comes a problem I like to call Unscreened Craziness.

For example, let's say a young game designer has an idea he wants to put into practice. He takes his idea and marches into Wizards of the Coast with it.

"In the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons," he proclaims, "I think you should force female characters to be stupid and weak, give your players access to spells that let them rape corpses, and have weapons be able to impregnate people!"

Wizard of the Coast calls security and has our protagonist bodily ejected. Undaunted, he goes into the offices of White Wolf.

"In your next supplement about villains," he says, "you should devote lots of time to talking about how Jews, blacks, Asians and Italians are the scum of the earth."

"Nah," says the White Wolf executive. "The PC police already rammed us hard when we made up shit about gypsies. Not doing that again."

Disappointed but determined, he meanders over to Steve Jackson's GURPS headquarters.

"Your next game should be called GURPS: Rape. I know you like tables and charts, so you should have ones that give the option of a 152 inch penis that kills your victim upon penetration if they don't have the right anal circumference!"

Steve Jackson sighs heavily, and attempts to teach our hero a little bit about how the human body actually functions. When this fails, he stops talking to him altogether.

Disillusioned with the mainstream, the young gamer goes home. He will see his vision come to light, one way or another! He will make indie games, and publish whatever the hell he wants! And if he wants to make F.A.T.A.L., something which is now known as the worst RPG ever written, then by gum, the free press allows it!

Such is the danger of Unscreened Craziness.

Coming soon: the ups and downs of mainstream games!

Freaks

Exploitative. Progressive. A classic. A hack job. It's not often that you can agree with both sides of a controversy regarding a movie.

Its name is Freaks, and this oft-banned tale of revenge by deformed sideshow performers was director Tod Browning's follow-up to his earlier film, Dracula. As a former circus man himself, he decided he would terrify the world by showing them real live human oddities rather than mere movie monsters. Of course, he got exactly what he wished for in that regard, and not only did the movie flop, but it also ruined his career.

Declared a classic long after it would do anyone involved with it any good, Freaks is now known as part of the horror canon. But is it really a horror movie? It may well be a thriller, and it may well be unsettling to watch 'freaks' whom we know are not the product of special effects, and it was markteted in a way that suggested a monster movie. However, Freaks belongs in a category of its own, and I cannot think of any other film that falls under it.

Freaks is pehaps the only Reverse Monster Movie.

The classic structure of a monster movie is as follows: a creature is created or discovered, and is the only one of his kind among the 'normal' world. He possesses incredible power and strength, but either because of the humans' cruelty or his own derangement, he turns violent. The monster kidnaps a beautiful human girl, for reasons which are not always entirely clear. The humans come after him, torches and pitchforks in hand, and put an end to this monstrosity.

Strangely for a movie so early in the history of cinematic horror, Freaks takes this formula (which was still in the making- it was only 1932) and turns it on its head.

In this circus world, 'freaks' constitute a large percentage of the population, making the 'normal' people seem out of place. A strong man and a beautiful woman use their undeserved advantages against their abnormal coworkers, all of whom have been nothing but kind to them. The woman purpously seduces one of the freaks, attempting to lead him to his death. When such treachery is discovered, the mob comes after them bearing not torches and pitchforks, but knives held between their teeth...

The ending has caused many people to turn away from Freaks, as the titular characters are no longer portrayed as kindly and human but as monsters and killers. I would have to disagree on this point, though, and I feel the movie wouldn't have even a half of its power if it had ended any other way. We have watched these innocent people being mocked, cheated, humiliated and nearly killed by the villains, and these villains get just what they deserve from their own victims. It's not a pretty sight, but for at least this one viewer, it's a very satistfying one.

The weakest part of the film is easily the acting. The freaks were cast because they looked, well, freakish, and not because they could act. This fact shows, and at times it's hard not to laugh. The mere fact that the film was made to capitalise on the audiance's biases against the abnormal is also unpleasent, and make no mistake: Tod Browning may have been sympathetic toward his subjects, but what he had on his mind was the money coming from people they could scare, not on what a sensitive portrayal he could create of society's rejects.

As with Dracula, a simple truth must be faced about Tod Browning: he was a hack who happened to luck into great projects. You may say it's unfair to complain about directoral skills this early in the history of film, but if you look at what his contemporaries were making (such as the brilliant James Whale and his Frankenstein movies) this excuse falls apart. Browning never grasped that a movie is more than just a filmed play, nor did he care about anything except getting the punters to pay up, just as he had in his carnival days. He was not an artist, and his films suffer for it.

And yet, in a way Tod Browning was still a craftsman. He knew what worked on the most basic level, and he used it. And both of his major movies are still perfectly watchable, with Dracula saved by the performances of Bela Lugosi, Dwight Frye and Edward Van Sloan, and Freaks by its pure strangeness and surprisingly sympathetic approach, unintended as that may be. Freaks may not be a great movie, but it is an important one to any student of the macabre, for it teaches two lessons better than anything else I can think of.

Firstly, don't count on abnormalities to tell you who the monster is (preachy and trite as that message may sound in print.) And secondly, don't assume this first lesson will be a comfortable one for your viewers, or a profitable one for you.

Freaks still has the capacity to shock, and is undoubtedly not for everyone. But if you think you can take it, check it out for an update on that old Sesame Street song: the monster in the mirror just might be you.