I opened up my LiveJournal client to write about something else this afternoon and found this mostly finished post from a year ago, I think. I'm so out of practice on these Games I'd Like To-style posts anyway, rather than delete it or let it languish until such time as I get around to cleaning it up, I'mo just pull the trigger and post as is:

(Post title is, as is so often the case, an inside joke amusing only to me and maybe my older sister.)

( Five half-baked settings for kooky indie games! Or vice versa... )

Tags: corvette summer, gaming, gilts

In the old days, I would've held on to an idea like this for a while: polished it, come up with some extra riffs on it, built a whole GILT or two around it. But now I think I'll just toss it out there while it's amusing me. Remember Harry Smith, the eccentric artist/alchemist/derelict who assembled the Anthology of American Folk Music? And do you remember the anecdote I shared the very first time we mentioned Harry Smith in these pages?

Smith's parents were Theosophists, Smith's grandfather was a leading Mason, and his great-grandfather was one of many nineteenth-century mystics to refound the Knights Templar. Smith's mother sometimes claimed to be Anastasia, last of the Romanovs, and she told Smith that his true father was Aleister Crowley. On his twelfth birthday, Harry's father (or his step-father, if Harry's mother was telling the truth) presented him a complete blacksmith's shop and commanded that he turn lead into gold.

Twelfth birthday? Mysterious parentage? Lead into gold? I can't believe it took me four years to come up with the mash-up: Harry Smith and the Sorcerer's Stone.


Photo & caption by Allen Ginsberg: "Harry Smith, painter, archivist, anthropologist, film-maker & hermetic alchemist, his last week at Breslin Hotel Manhattan January 12, 1985, transforming milk into milk."

Tags: corvette summer, gilts, old weird america

So I recently read this book: The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, by Jason Colavito. Colavito is an alternative archaeology debunker - he writes articles and runs a website dedicated to discrediting/debunking von Daniken style theories of ancient astronauts and UFO cults and the like. More power to him--didn't I make von Daniken a baddie in my retro-pulp game?--though I'm not convinced that a few nutbars appearing on In Search Of in 1976 constitute "the demise of the Western rationalist idea itself."

Anyway, the argument of his book is this: that our man Lovecraft was the originator of the ancient astronauts meme. Not that H.P. believed in alien astronauts, just that Lovecraft's fiction is where the idea came from: that nobody else before him had floated the idea, in fiction or non, that alien astronauts visited Earth in the distant past and spawned myths of ancient gods. My first instinct was to call bullshit. Surely somebody, some Blavatsky-style Theosophist or Donnelly-style catastrophist or Moonbat-style hoaxer cooked this idea up before the 1920s? But I realized I don't actually know of any. Maybe he's right? If only I had some friends who knew a thing or two about Lovecraft, or old pulps and fantastic fiction, or just general weirdness... Any thoughts, folks?

Whether or not you buy that central argument, the book's a breezy enough history of ancient astronaut hokum. The main part that was unfamiliar to me was the French connection: Colavito pinpoints two French writer-fans, Louis Pauwles and Jacques Bergier, as the missing link between Lovecraft in the 1920s and the von Daniken types in the 1960s and 1970s, and also the point where the ancient astronaut meme jumped the rails from fiction to alleged non. I can't say it didn't make me want to run a game about French New Wave-style filmmakers in Paris 1959 delving into Les Choses Qu'On N'est Pas Censé Pour Savoir. Kind of a Jean-Luc Godard meets Jacques Cousteau thing: The Life Eldritch with Steve Zissou?

Tags: geek archaeology, gilts, help me my aquatic friends!, lovecraft, pseudoscience, ufos

In other news, yesterday I read George Pendle's Strange Angel, a fun biography of Jack Parsons. I'm assuming the Parsons fans on my Flist know about this book already (head58, I'm looking at you), but if not, high thee to a library. Parsons is a great character: rocket scientist, wife swapper, black magic cultist extraordinaire. When L. Ron Hubbard is calling you loopy and Aleister Superfreak Crowley writes you from England saying, "Uh, maybe you ought to lay off the black magic for a while for a while, Jack--you're weirding me out" it's time to at least consider a sabbatical. But no, Jack summoned the Scarlet Woman of Babylon, then blew himself up.

One random tidbit I'd never heard about Crowley, from a life made up of random tidbits: in 1913, the Great Beast led an all-female string septet called the "Ragged Ragtime Girls" on a disastrous tour of Russia. What do you suppose that was all about? Game ideas featuring Crowley in an insane Some Like It Hot / Road To Tunguska mashup involving some combination of Tony Curtis, Tsar Nicholas, Jack Lemmon, Lenin, Rasputin, and Marilyn Monroe are left as an exercise for the reader.

Tags: alt.history, books, gilts, movies

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for Lions on the Precipice, foreign_devilry's notional Dogs in the Vineyard expansion. I'm still waiting, but in the meantime, this emo snippet of alterna-reverse Dogs occurred to me. I started out by thinking about that gloriously stupid bit of early D&D laser-sharking, the Anti-Paladin. Then I found myself actually sympathizing with these guys. (Oh, but if you've heard me mumbling about my "Dogs heartbreaker" lately, this isn't it.)

( A Land of Thorns and Vice )

Tags: best of, gaming, gilts

Not a Route 96 post. Much much geekier. Mostly for mgrasso and head58, though gammafodder1 and sneech515 may be amused in spite of themselves.

So ever since Mike linked to that Star Trek reboot, and then started talking about running the old Dragonlance modules, and then news came out of the Dragonlance movie (Lex Luthor as Tanis! Jack Bauer as Raistlin! Xena as Goldmoon!), I've been threatening to write a big post on how one might revamp or reboot the Dragonlance series, scraping off some of the fromage and finding new hotness within. Battlestar Galactica is obviously the touchstone here, Exhibit A in how to resurrect, retool, and reimagine even the mustiest of old geek loves. (But see also many of Grant Morrison's superhero comics, and, if I may be immodest, my Starchildren game in a way).

But then Andy and the Story Games kids came along and stole this terrible, terrible idea right out of my head and made a thread of it, forcing my hand! (And probably saving me from mulling this over for another six months.) So I banged out my ideas in the thread. Here's my contribution (behind the LJ-cut) though if you're nerd enough to have made it this far, the whole thing is worth checking out: Dragonlance Gets Awesome-O-fied.

( Read more... )

(No, I'm not going to link to the Hotties of Dragonlance Gone Wild '05 thread.)

Tags: best of, gaming, gilts, nostalgia

I admit I've only skimmed the website, but White Wolf's Promethean doesn't look like my cup of tea. I never loved the WW systems, and I'm just not feeling the six flavors of sad-eyed Mexican Frankensteins. But mgrasso's posts on it, plus this book I was looking at, somehow planted this idea in my head yesterday. So here you go, Mike, this is my one stab at twagic twee.

Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don't have to share it with nobody else
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the world of self
--Warren Zevon, "Splendid Isolation"

My Life With Michael
A GILT for My Life With Master, Puppetland, or (if you insist) Promethean

It has been ten years since his trial. Ten years since Michael Jackson closed the golden gates of Neverland and sealed himself away from every human soul. Yet he is not alone. You are Michael's twisted menagerie--his creations, experiments, and pets. The delicate bubble boy, his T and B cells swapped for Michael's transplanted fears. The moonwalking clockwork robot, assembled from discarded toys once used to lure and bribe young guests. The wan fading pixie, trapped in half-life by Michael's flickering belief in her. The grinning clay tulpa, into which Michael pours all the urges and rages and blackness he cannot admit to in himself. And loyal long-suffering Bubbles the Chimp, desperate to keep his master's affection from straying to younger prettier things. Together you dwell inside the gates of Neverland with the dwindling Fisher King of Pop. He keeps you. He needs you. He knows you will never grow up, never leave him, never blame him, never tell.

Time elapsed since my last game: 1 year, 1 month, 14 days.

Tags: gaming, gilts, in which somebody steals somebody's bit

So how jealous am I of all you guys who have played or are playing in editswlonghair’s Caper game? Here’s a post (a bit long and kinda unedited) I started writing for the 20’ by 20’ Room (actually the first half of the post—it grew, like they always do) when head58 began talking up heist games a few weeks ago. (What happened to the “Bothans’ Eleven” idea, by the way?) I wanted to write this out before I actually sat down to reading John’s game, because it sounds like Caper works well enough to make much of my long-winded speculation on How A Heist Game Could Be Done kinda moot.

(John, let me know if it’s cool to post what follows, specifically the 3rd paragraph where I mention you and your game, on 20x20. If you want, I’ll take out the mention of Caper. Or I could just take out your name and the name of the game and say “a friend of mine.” My thinking is, it doesn’t hurt to mention your game, spread a little buzz, even if it’s not ready yet. I won’t include a link. But if you don’t want anything mentioned to the Teeming Dozens, that’s fine of course.)

( Yoink! )

Tags: gaming, gilts

"Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry..."
—"Mandelbrot Set"

"It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."
—"The Colour Out of Space"



Before he started kicking six kinds of Kryptonian ass this week with a series of Superman mythos posts, ezrael wrote something about "The Endless Black," a sci-fi horror game he'd like to run, in which humanity takes its first faltering steps into the endless dark of Lovecraftian outer space. princeofcairo floated a similar idea in an old ST column a few years back (I know ezrael loves it when I lump him together with princeofcairo, but hey, there's worse company to be lumped with): "Ships disappear, pilots go mad, colonies fall into dark worship on distant planets ... As the Earth's ossified systems splinter under madness and anarchy, the human colonies see themselves left alone in the dark." I dug Ken's take from the start, but Matt, who strikes me as just the fellow to GM a game where the universe is cruel and bleak and cold, added the crucial Catch-22: the very tools humankind must use to navigate the extra-cosmic gulfs of space—eldritch mathematics, Dune-like mentats and spice addicts, strange eons of cryogenic sleep—ineluctably corrode our humanity. Yeah, that's the stuff.

There's only one thing I need to make this G a G that I would truly LT, and that's comedy.

( Seriously. )

Tags: best of, gaming, gilts

Hey, what happened to all the game idea posts? There was a lovely harvest of them early this week and then nothing. Is it because arctic weather snapped back into effect?

There ought to be a name for that last blast of winter that comes after a week or so of premature warmth, just when you start to let yourself think that spring has arrived. It's like Indian Summer's evil twin. I've heard people call the sneaky warm period "Strawberry Spring", but I don't know if that's real or just from a Steven King story. I was thinking something more like "Fuck You Winter".

Yeah, you're probably going to say, where are my game idea posts? Good point, but I did just put up 1300 words on Superman, sex pulps, and the secret history of weightlifting. That ain't knockwurst! I do have a few new GILT ideas, or reworked old ones, but they don't seem to come as fastly and furiously when you're living in gamer exile. Actually, there was a period, about two months after leaving Boston, when I felt like I was generating scores of beautiful mad ideas a day. I think I was sweating them out of my system or something. But now, not so much. Maybe I need more structure to bounce things off of. If I started up something like bryant's old weekly idea mash-ups, would people play along?

You can always stroll down memory lane with my de.icio.us/robotnik/gilt tag. All of my old LJ games-I'd-like-to are there, and a number of yours, although I know I'm missing some goodies.

Tags: comics, gilts, old weird america, other blog

Modesty shall not prevent me from noting that my game design General Mud, which I whinged for validation on discreetly mentioned back in November, won the coveted "High Ronnie" for the last round of Ron Edwards' eponymous game designing contest. Here is the link to Ron's very flattering feedback.

Until about three-quarters through, I figured it was merely a dialogue-based homage to Animal Farm, but it's not. Can the Soviet survive? Is the General's ascendancy a long-term curse to its downfall? Are bourgeois notions, in moderation, compatible with a secure economy? This should be taught and played in history classes.

I was especially pleased by that final line.

(I'm going to get even more immodest now and assert that there are actually some parallels between General Mud and neelk's terrific-looking Court of the Empress. But Neel being Neel and me being me, his design is elegant, cruel, and sexy, while mine is convoluted, twitchy, and mostly about a pig.)

Tags: best of, gaming, general mud, gilts

Behold the Empire of Ten Thousand Years. The palace at the center of the city, the city at the center of the world. Beyond the Empire is the Wall of Peace, guarded by fierce warriors with fell weapons of mass destruction. Beyond the Wall, there is nothing—only barbarians, howling wastes, and the yellow gulfs of Hell.

( With apologies to Tsui Hark, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, Akira Kurosawa, anyone with any historical-cultural sensitivity, Chinese and Japanese history, and Jeff Wikstrom. )

Tags: battle without honor or humanity, best of, gaming, gilts