A Review: Lacuna by Jared Sorensen

Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City is an experimental roleplaying game...and you’re part of the experiment, whether you realize it or not.

This is how Lacuna begins and the “experimental” nature of the game is soon born out by everything from the character sheets to the page layout. It is the strangest role playing game I have yet come across. Not only is the setting bizarre and deliberately obscure, the production of the book compliments this with blacked out lines of text and double printing which gets worse as the book goes on. I have seen other game books present themselves as if they are agent handbooks from within the setting, but this one really captures the confusion and bewilderment which the setting also conveys.

More about the setting, but not too much because it’s in part about that secret of the Lacuna. There is a lot to say about the setting – but I don’t want to say too much because the game is set up to progressively discover the setting through play. I often think of movies when I think of role playing settings and this one strikes me as sharing elements with The Matrix, Men in Black and Inception. The player characters are agents who use drugs and dreaming to enter the strange world of Blue City where they chase down Hostile Personalities and banish them to the Lacuna with the assistance of their tenuous connection to Control. The City is seemingly infinite, always night, and full of Personalities who go about their business; appearing and disappearing as in fog. I feel playing into all the obvious noir elements of the setting is best.

In addition to the setting, I am also intrigued by the mechanisms of Lacuna. The central resolution mechanism is rolling D6 equal to attributes, usually two to four, hoping to roll eleven or more. After every roll, succeed or fail, the result is added to your character’s heart’s Beats Per Minute. Characters enter Blue City with their PBM at their Resting Heart Rate. After a few rolls, BPM gets up to Target Heart Rate and while in the target range, you can roll as many D6 as you want. As many as you want. This almost guarantees success on your roll, but your result still adds to your BPM. Once you push yourself beyond your Maximum Heart Rate, failing a roll will cause damage in the form of reduced attributes.

I have only played Lacuna in the form of a one shot. I’m not sure how all the mystery and the feeling of bewilderment would be sustained over a longer term. It would be a challenge for the GM to deal out the secrets slowly and for the players to acclimate to each new threshold of discovery. There’s plenty of stuff this brief review doesn’t mention just because I want you to discover it all for yourself. Reading the game is an experience in itself so it’s worth reading even if you never play it. It is fun to play, though, so I highly recommended you play it. Lacuna is a unique game and very affordable; get it and read it and try out this experiment in role playing for yourself.

Sherlock's Restless World

In 2012 I made it a goal to read the all Sherlock Holmes stories. I have now finished reading the four novels and 54 stories and I want to mark the occasion by saying something about them. This will not be a comprehensive review. That has already been done, and I am sure done better then I ever could. Other than the obvious things about the stories being influential on the crime drama, I really only have one observation. I kept noticing throughout the stories the way they seem to paper over a deep discomfort with the global aspect of the British Empire. As much as the Holmes stories are set so squarely in London in particular, and in Britain more generally, I can’t help but notice the source of the “adventure” in almost every case comes from without.

In the very first story, A Study in Scarlet, it is bad blood between some Americans which has led to a murder in London. There is a similar undertone of “foreigners are the trouble” in so many other stories. In “The Yellow Face” and “The Greek Interpretor” social issues of American and Greek immigrants respectively create mystery in England. The main antagonist in “The Speckled Band” was driven somewhat mad by service in India and in “The Solitary Cyclist” it was South Africa where the antagonist learned to be a brute. “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “The Naval Treaty”, “The Six Napoleons”, and “The Creeping Man” all turn on criminals, or unsavory characters from Europe making trouble in England. Less problematic, but still focused on the dangers of the world, are “The Blanched Soldier” about a tropical disease and “The Lion’s Mane” which is – almost comically – about an animal which isn’t usually found in England. Those are the ones which spring to my mind. I am sure there are other examples and probably counter-examples as well.

Problems come from outside. I don’t know nearly enough about the issues involved to know why this undercurrent exists. Is there an anti-Imperialist or anti-capitalist strain in Doyle’s politics which led him to publish stories showing the dark side of men who got rich in the colonies? Was Watson, as a wounded war veteran, framing Holmes’ exploits in terms of reveling the emotional damage of the Empire upon its citizens? Was Holmes himself simply a Englishman’s Englishman who took cases which seemed to smack of foreign interference? I can’t even be sure why the stories constantly return to the theme. Is it pro-Imperialist by suggesting Italians and Greeks can’t run their own affairs. It is anti-Imperialist by suggesting trying to conquer Asia will corrupt the average Englishman.

Whatever it means, it’s such a consistent theme, it can’t be in the stories by accident. Or can it? I am reminded of a series from the British Museum I heard about the same time I started reading the Holmes oeuvre: Shakespeare’s Restless World. Using objects like John Dee’s “magic” mirror, an oyster fork and a map of the world, the podcast identified the ways in which the rapid cultural, economic and scientific changes brought on by the European age of exploration found their way into Shakespeare’s work. It should come as no surprise Caesar bestrides the “narrow” world or that Prospero’s island refuge is hinted to be in the Americas. The New World and the horizons global navigation opened were on everyone’s mind. No one could avoid thinking about the implications. I think something similar going on with the Sherlock Holmes stories. Soldiers coming back from India with friendships they can’t really explain to society, people making fortunes and enemies in South Africa, the newest in scientific research leading to new poisons – all of these show up in the Sherlock stories and they all can be seen as expressions of another round of new horizons which British colonization projects and the increasing speed and ease of global travel were putting in the minds of Londoners.

I can’t help but think also think about Brexit and the America First rhetoric of my own country. Globalism has been upsetting since the 1590s, at least. I guess there is no reason I should expect it to be different today. I often say I like to look at how British culture has dealt both with empire and loss of empire because I live in country which has had its own time in the sun and is experiencing its own loss of global significance. Are there similar expressions in current American culture? Maybe Rouge One: A Star Wars Story, Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians, and the conversations surrounding them are an expression of Hollywood’s Restless World?

Liberating Edits

All month long I have been doing some heavy lifting to get our document for Wild Skies: Liberating Strife ready to send to our editor. As much as getting the first book turned around required growing pains, this follow up almost seems to involve more. My writing partner and I had never put together a book by ourselves before. Now, even though we have done that, we have never put together a book from other people’s writing before. There are five total writers for this book and getting everyone’s pieces in hand and stitched together took more work than I expected. Also working with an editor is new to me. Growing pains.

Thankfully, my work is now complete enough that I can shift the project to someone else for a while. I am looking forward a few lighter weeks. There are, of course, a few more pieces to actually write and we don’t have all the final art in yet. Then we have to look at the edits and apply the advice. There is still a good bit of runway before this thing takes off, but we are moving forward. There will be a lot of good information and really nice hooks to hang adventures on when this book is finally done. Keep up with all the updates here.

A Review: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis

Tell us, Baron, the story of...

...How you circumnavigated the world without leaving your house.
...How a portrait of Henry VIII saved you from being attacked by lions.
...Why every fifth child born in Brussels is named after you.
...How you became the first man to descend Mount Blanc, before any man had climbed it.

This is certainly not a traditional roleplaying game. In fact, I would say it is barely a roleplaying game at all. Yet, Baron Munchausen is one of the most enjoyable roleplaying game books I have ever read. In this “paperless” age of digital game books, I plan to add the “dead tree format” of this book to my shelf.

At its core, it is a very simple game. It is really a story-telling activity in which players interrupt each other to comic result. Less briefly; players take the role of nobility, telling of their adventures at a tavern or house party. The character creation process is limited to developing a noble name and title. The process of play is for four or more players to take a turn telling a five-minute story of their own entirely truthful adventures during the Eighteenth Century. Each tale must attempt to out-do the previous tale and begins with a prompt like those given above, asked by the nobleperson on the teller’s left. Both the game and the roleplay aspects come in during each tale as each player has a purse of tokens equal to the number of total players. Each player is allowed to interrupt each teller once by offering them a token and asking for clarification about an element of the tale, pointing out an inconsistency, asserting the story may have happened differently, or otherwise trying to trip up the storyteller with comic or challenging suggestions. The current tale-teller may simply accept the token and the addition and work this new detail into their tale; or they may add their own coin to the stake and offer an insult to the interrupter to put them in their place. Likewise, the interrupter may take the stake and accept their rebuke; or add a third coin to the stake, offer their own insult and insist the teller acknowledge their original suggestion. This back-and-forth may continue until one player exhausts their purse and must admit their error. If they are still unwilling, a duel may be initiated (decided by best of three rounds of rock-paper-scissor) with the loser forced to submit and take the stake. If, during the insults and raising, either insults the other’s noble rank, proud parentage or outright calls them a liar, a duel may begin immediately. When each tale concludes the teller prompts the player on their right to tell the next tale. When all tales have been told, players each pass their entire purse (converting it to a bounty) to the person whose tale was the most extraordinary. Thus the winner of round is the player with the largest bounty, and now being flush with cash as well as honor, is compelled to “buy the next round” and offers the prompt for the first tale of the next round.

In the book, these rules are summarized in two pages and there are eight pages of sample prompts. However, what makes the book a joy is the comic style in which it is written. James Wallis, who is a veteran game designer, has channelled the spirit of the original Baron Munchausen material. It is presented as a dictation by the Baron himself to various members of the Wallis family line and as such is filled with the Baron’s own stories of himself, his opinions, and numerous digressions from the through line of actually explaining the game. The book also presents a number of variations on the game, from one in which interrupting means the interrupter becomes the teller with the object being to be the first actually finish your story, to a variation for younger players, to a whole list of suggested genre implementations of the game such as cavemen, vampires and supervillains.

I have played this game twice and as is true of anything dependent on social interactions it flows better if players are willing to submit to the premise of the game. Those with better comic timing, more inventive or quick-thinking minds and larger vocabularies of “old timey” words will be more likely to tell the most extraordinary stories, but it is not a guarantee of success. It seems the best moments come out of the unexpected way a teller incorporates their interaction with the interrupter. In one game the winner did not know the rest of the players as well and his story took on a hyperbolic nature while the rest of us relied more on our shared history. In the other game the winner had been called a liar, escalated the interruption to a duel, but then lost and so chose to completely capitulate and when back through their story renouncing each aspect and telling how what really happened was far less impressive. This idiosyncratic interpretation of the standard rules was singularly comical and so unexpected it won the round.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is not a game for everyone and certainly not for anyone all the time. It is not the sort of game to play a campaign with, or even to play very often. However, as a pallet cleanser between other games or as a one-off event at a game night or convention, this is a great option. Whether you ever play it or not, it is worth a read as a light piece of pseudo-historical comic writing. I enjoyed it very much.

200 Word RPG Challenge

This summer I made a commitment to play more games with the local RPG scene. There is fortnightly game event called Slur Your Role put on by Nerd Louisville at a bar not far from my house. I have been volunteering to run games there. The event is pretty Dungeons and Dragons focused because that game is so popular (no shade), but I have been trying to bring alternatives to the table. So far I have run CAPERS from NerdBurger Games, Lacuna by Momento Mori Theatricks and a couple weeks ago I ran three of the games from this year’s 200 Word RPG Challenge.

I heard about 200 Word RPG last year and when the competition went live this year, I not only submitted a game, I applied to be a reader. I read about 60 submissions and recommended my favorites to the actual judges. Some of the ones I selected were, indeed, among the finalists. The whole process was enjoyable and being part of it made me feel all the more like I am part of this industry. I wanted to promote the Challenge and bring this brand new games to the table. Titles of the games are links to the 200 Word RPG site. Do go read the games, as they are all only 200 words!

Of the three winners we did not play Sidewalkia! owing to it being a game for outside voices and it being one of the hottest weeks of the year. Instead, we played PSYCHIC CHILDREN ON THE RUN FROM DANGER. This was one of the games I’d read and picked to be a finalist. I liked it because of the resolution mechanism. To use their psychic power players guess the next card which will be drawn from a standard deck of cards. If they are exactly right they have complete control, if they are less right they have less or no control. It worked great with five players at the table watching each other’s card draws and really playing up the theme. One thing I was looking for in the games I selected was the possibility to play the game over several sessions. This one delivered on that idea. No one was ready to stop after an hour, but I had to move on.

For Dear Elizabeth… I brought the required paper, pens and prompts (things like “death,” “courtship,” “visitor”). It’s a two-player game, but we simply paired off writing letters only to our partner. I was least sure about this one. All my players where modern guys in their 30s so playing a young 18th century woman wasn’t exactly what they might have come to a game night for. Once I explained it and handed out the materials and once they were sitting in their corners drawing their prompts and responding to the letters they got from their partners, they all took to it. More than one person said it was much more enjoyable than they thought it would be. When we summarized the letters at the end I was happy no one had brought in aliens or zombies. It was all decidedly 18th century issues.

Our last game of the night was #WinterIntoSpring. It was, I assume, intended to descend into a bit of a mess and take on elements of farce. Maybe not, but that’s what happened for us. The idea is to splint into two factions and roleplay fashion vloggers before and after a revolution with one faction replacing the other as the dominate faction between the two rounds. Magazines are cut up and made into paper dolls to represent the changing fashions. The group decided our factions would be “machine overlord sympathizers and human freedom fighters.” Then I revealed the two magazines I had brought along were a bridal magazine and a fly fishing magazine. Silly mash-ups and hyperbolic descriptions of the fight against the machines ensued. What more could one want?

I’ve loved being the one to bring the not-at-all-D&D to the scene this summer. I think playing games with more strangers has made we a better game master. I certainly feel stretched by the experience. Add to that the additional stretch of putting a few different 200-word games on the table in one night and I feel very pleased my table seemed to enjoy themselves. I plan to participate in the 200 Word RPG Challenge again, and I hope I can also bring next year’s winners to an audience.

Am I Dieselpunk?

In support of Wild Skies: Liberating Strife, Brandon and I have been recording a few podcast appearances. Most recently we were on The RPG Brewery. Since we’ve called Wild Skies a dieselpunk game, we also appear on the newest episode of The Dieselpunk Podcast. They asked a question they ask of all their guests; “When did you know you were dieselpunk?” My honest answer to the question is: “Only when you told me I was”.

To step back a little bit: while Brandon and I were developing Wild Skies we always said we wanted it to be dieselpunk. The game was always set the 1930s and took inspiration from the ’20s and ’40s as well. To us, it was about staying in the technological brackets of “after airplanes” and “before jets”. The “punk” comes in with the idea “all problems can be solved by adding a bigger engine”. With these ideas set, I don’t feel we had to work that hard to make our game dieselpunk. We looked to the political, cultural and technological elements of those decades for our inspiration and naturally remixed them as we saw fit.

John and Eric of the Dieselpunk Podcast use the definition “retro futurism of the 1920s through the 1950s” when they talk about what dieselpunk is to them. I first encountered that definition last fall when John interviewed Brandon about the release of Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. By that definition, some of my favorite pop culture is dieselpunk even though I never called it that before: The Rocketeer, Batman: The Animated Series, Dark City and Nausicaä Princess of the Valley of the Wind. If I push the definition a little more to include what was actually produced in the ’20s-’50s, virtually all of my favorites are dieselpunk: Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, noir films like A Touch of Evil and the aesthetics of Soviet propaganda posters. I’m dieselpunk. Who knew?

Being on the show was great. I listen to a bunch of podcasts, but that was only the second time I have been on one. Brandon and I know what we like about our Wild Skies setting and about role playing while our hosts know about trends in dieselpunk, but almost nothing about role playing games. There was a lot of room for us all to learn from each other.

One idea mentioned in passing on the show which I want to weigh in on is the question: is dieselpunk about the particular technology or about the aesthetics of a setting? For me it’s all about the aesthetics and the attitude of remix culture. It’s what I call the blender. It what you put in the blender comes from the dieselpunk era, what you get out of the blender is dieselpunk. As with steampunk and cyberpunk “genres” before it, so much more fits under the umbrella of the name than just the technology of the time in question.

I have an important point about this. The remix is needed because the pop culture of so much of the past was so one dimensional; that is, white male heroes. For me, remixing the past in a “punk” way allows women, people of color, homosexuals and anyone else who tended not to be in focus, or allowed to be heroic of escape from stereotypes to become the center of action on their own terms. Again, steampunk led the way and it’s one of the things I appreciate about it.

I think dieselpunk – at least what I want it to be – should do the same thing. As a creator I need to open up the playing field so anyone can have adventures in the textures of this period. We’ve tried to make the right steps with Wild Skies: Europa Tempest. We present women in our NPC crew and in leadership positions. Our supplements include gender non-conforming and gay characters as well. As we assemble Liberating Strife, I realize there is still room to grow as my own awareness of the importance of representation grows. As a person who can so easily see myself in the pop culture I love, I feel an extra pressure to present my remix in a way where other people can see themselves as well.

A Review: Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943

5 of 5 stars.

For a while one of my “grail books” has been David Levinthal and Garry Trudeau’s Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943. When I walked into a bookstore recently and spotted it on an endcap from across the room, I had to buy it. It is a reprint copy, but I am not a collector looking for first printings; I just want to look at the art.

I first encountered David Levinthal’s work as an art student. His work focuses on toys or models shot with dramatic light and in soft focus to create a kind of emotional verisimilitude. I once saw an exhibition of his Modern Romance series and I smile whenever I see his work on the covers of Sarah Vowell’s books. Garry Trudeau is well known as a cartoonist. I was interested to see what these two cooked up together about the Second World War.

The collaboration is described by Trudeau in the beginning of the book. He was trying to find the right historic photographs to illustrate a fictional story we wanted to tell about a Russian solder on the Eastern Front. Levinthal was working on a series of photos capturing the lifelike horrors of war without necessarily making realistic looking photos. They combined their efforts and rather than using real photos to illustrate a fictional story, they manufactured photos to illustrate the real history. There are real quotes and a few real photographs to round out the project. It becomes, as the title says, a graphic chronicle of the Eastern Front.

One thing that has stuck with me is Trudeau calling what they made a “paper movie”. It is such an odd phrase to read today when comics have triumphed as a medium and “graphic novels” can be of any genre and regularly make it onto bestsellers lists. I suppose in the mid-seventies when they were working on Hitler Moves East the concept of a “graphic novel” didn’t really exist. That was even before the “serious” comics revival of the mid eighties. Even though Trudeau went on to make comics himself, he couldn’t have called this project comics, it was a more serious work than than name implied.

As a long time comics reader and someone who loves “sequential art storytelling”, I think Hitler Moves East works. There are Trudeau’s words to tell you what happened at each stage of Operation Barbarossa and the selection of ephemera such as identification cards and propaganda posters lend their own authenticity. Then there are Levinthal’s washed out, or grainy, or almost over-exposed photographs of figures dashing through train yards, or hunkered in pill boxes, or laying cold and still in the snow. Much of the narrative impact is conveyed by the photos. The whole is surprisingly effective in giving the reader a hint of the ravages of war. It is a book one does not read so much as experience. That is what art does.

Just to be clear, though it has a similar name to another book about the Eastern Front, it does not share that book’s apologetics of the Wehrmacht.