Sunday, December 25, 2011

Well That's Going to Be a Bad Influence

Was stuck at the in-law's house yesterday for over 10 hours (and to think I used to dread the holidays when I'd be all alone... note to self: make sure the next wife is an orphan)... I take my notebook on these trips because, well, what the hell else am I going to do?

Didn't get much done because of course the TV had to be on, playing Christmas concert TV specials most of the time. Made me aggressive - but I bet being forced to watch Andrea Bocelli sing with the Muppets would do that for anyone. And remember the 90s when Nightwish was this absolutely bizarre idea? Now here's Tarja Turunen singing in a church in front of Finland's President. Nothing completely ruins a fun thing - retroactively, even - quite like respectability.

Damn yesterday was torture.

So the few notes I did take were all about some rather, ah, interesting monsters and spells. Of the "I did that that zombie attack picture from Grindhouse and I just published Carcosa so let's use those as a new normal baseline and explore where we can go from there," variety.

So that ends up with a bunch of "I can't really use any of this, can I?" stuff.

Oh, look, one of my Christmas presents was a copy of Alan Moore's Neonomicon. I really like Lovecraft and I really like everything I've read by Moore but I'd never even heard of this. How did my wife find it?

(looking around this morning, this is how Moore himself describes it, if you're unfamiliar: "Lovecraft was sexually squeamish; would only talk of ‘certain nameless rituals.’ Or he’d use some euphemism: ‘blasphemous rites.’ It was pretty obvious, given that a lot of his stories detailed the inhuman offspring of these ‘blasphemous rituals’ that sex was probably involved somewhere along the line. But that never used to feature in Lovecraft’s stories, except as a kind of suggested undercurrent. So I thought, let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in. Let’s come up with some genuinely ‘nameless rituals’: let’s give them a name.")

(also, check out this analysis of the book... I wonder if any of these ideas could work for RPG books?)

After reading Neonomicon most of that "I can't really use any of this, can I?" stuff in my notebook seems rather middle-class now.

Which leaves a couple things that still have potential, and some idea corridors I wasn't before considering are now open.

If you're familiar with Neonomicon, you're thinking the worst of this right now. Which is good, because that sense of dread is the coolest thing ever. But I do have limits, as there are certain things I'm not willing to play out in a game with other people, either at my home table or with random people at a convention, so I wouldn't ask you to do so. But hopefully this can instead be something else entirely that takes you by surprise. That will hopefully be good. And make you think "You can do that?" while looking at it.

(oh, I also received Dread: The First Book of Pandemonium RPG. Haven't read it yet and am not familiar with it at all, although I'm told it should be right up my alley. First thought after a quick page-through is this book has no business being 8.5x11 format and whoever decided that was a good size for RPGs in general, and this one in particular, needs a damn spanking)

4 comments:

  1. What is your preferred RPG book size in general?

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  2. I publish in A5, which isn't necessarily the best, but that A5/digest/maybe the size of trade paperback comics, whatever that size is that Nightshade uses for the CAS books...

    Something that comfortably handles while sitting back and reading and doesn't take a boatload of space when lying open at the table during actual play.

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  3. Warning: SPOILERS FOR NEONOMICON


    ...

    "But I do have limits, as there are certain things I'm not willing to play out in a game with other people, either at my home table or with random people at a convention, so I wouldn't ask you to do so."

    I imagine you're referring to gang rape, jerking the monster off, and impregnation through sexual violence? If so, good.

    I think body horror ala David Cronenberg (or the implicit sexual horror of Lovecraft) makes good fodder for roleplaying games, but rape and impregnation are beyond what I would consider acceptable.

    That said, you can imply some truly atrocious stuff, mention orgies and torture and the rest, but the threshold exists when it becomes "live" at the table, where PCs are victims or perpetrators. The very limit, in my estimation, would be the Delta Green scenario "Convergence", wherein:

    SPOILERS FOR CONVERGENCE

    ... one of the PCs may end up anally invaded by a gelatinous ooze, i.e. "semen monster". Many players will not be able to handle even that, but my group found it both funny and horrifying.

    Anyways, it is a fine line to walk. I wish you luck!

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  4. >>I imagine you're referring to gang rape, jerking the monster off, and impregnation through sexual violence? If so, good.

    Yeah, I mean I'd have no problem including such things in backstory that is later discovered by or related to PCs, or narrating what the PCs see happening to others (I know that would even be beyond most people's comfort zones), or for something like Carcosa where the rituals are already on the table and pre-defined so a PC performing one of those rituals (or, if very unlucky, being the victim) can be mentioned without going into detail ("I perform the ritual of blah blah" gets the message across well enough without having to repeat what's involved specifically).

    ... but actual back-and-forth active conflict of that nature (or even completely consensual sex play) played out in front of a group is just too much for me.

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