Highmoon's Ponderings

It’s not Spring Break yet so no new design posts from me. However, I think you should take a look at the posts I am linking to below.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, especially not creative endeavors, and since I both send links to my design posts to Twitter, as well as “think out loud” there, it is inevitable that a network of influences would eventually emerge. Take for example last week: I’m not sure how it started, but for some reason, my Twitter feed last week was awash in a number of conversations about the World of Darkness, both old and new. Over the five days of the work week, there was not one day when at least a handful of World of Darkness-related tweets flew by, sparking conversations and blog posts.

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I did this last year and had lots of fun, so I’m bringing it back for an encore.

From March 1-17, 2010, I’ll be hosting the a St. Patrick’s Day RPG Blog Carnival.

• Who: Open to any and all RPG/Hobby Gaming blogs (RPG-related content preferred).
• What: Write a post on anything dealing with RPGs/gaming and all things Irish. As long as your post is about Ireland/Irish stuff and gaming, it’s cool.
• When: Your post must be published on or before Wednesday, March 17, 2010.  As soon as you publish, leave a link to it in the comments of this post. Feel free to use the graphic provided on your posts as well.

I will collect all the posts and publish a round-up on Wednesday, March 17 (though if I have at least 3 posts by St Patty’s morning, I’ll publish the round-up and update as I can during the day).

You can see the post roundup for last year’s St. Patrick’s Day.

I hope you’ll join me and celebrate the Emerald Isle. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments section.

Heading back to Ierne for another glimpse.

It was a terrible sight to behold, and I could not turn away. Fomorian heads and limbs flew in every direction, making me doubt those creatures had the same number of extremities as I did. Blood pooled at the feet of the giant a few feet away from me; hacked carcasses littered the field around us as far as I could throw a stone, yet the Fomorians did not relent. In groups of twos and threes they approached, frothing mad, evil incarnate, wicked blades flashing – only to be annihilated by the thing that only I knew to be my foster brother Bran.

I knew the stories of Cúchulainn, I knew about the ríastradh—the warp spasm—but I had never witnessed it myself. When, after fending the devils off for an hour, a Fomorian spear pierced my leg, Bran’s rage surged unchecked. His mouth foamed as he tore the shirt from his back, and as he rushed forward to meet the mass of Sea Devils attacking us, he started to grow, taller than a house, wider than three bulls. His skin bubbled from within like tar bursting from the earth, and his muscles stretched into shapes unnatural to humans. His right arm grew to the size of a thick oak tree trunk, and with every swing of the sword which now seemed like a toy in his mutated hand he slashed three Fomori in half. His hair stood on end like a halo of spikes, and from each tip burst a mist of blood and pure rage that choked any who came too close to him. His legs twisted around in their sockets, his knees now at the back, and he was able to leap high into the air and rain death as he came down. And just like the hero Cúchulainn, one eye sunk deep into his head, while the other almost popped out of its socket, and it was the last thing a Fomorian saw before being shred to pieces.

One hundred Fomorian died that afternoon at the hands of Bran, the warped one, hero of An Daingean, and I was never able to look at my foster brother the same way again.

—From the journal of Amergin Ó Míl

Ok, so I cheated a little here. This was originally published back in 2006 as the introduction to Bardic Lore: Ristradh, my D&D 3.5-compatible product introducing the warp spasms of Celtic myth. I did revise the above version, cleaned it up a bit, but it is essentially the same scene. The reason I brought it into the present, and into this Ierne series of vignettes, is that I need the warp spasm to be present in what I’m planning to do with Ierne in its early stages, and I saw no reason to write another scene when that one was very much to my liking.

To address something that came up in the comments to Ierne: The Gate, these little vignettes are not really meant to be interconnected. Imagine you’re flying over Ierne and every so often you zoom down to ground level and get a small glimpse of what’s going on with a few people, then you fly back up and go somewhere else on the island. I’m not saying they couldn’t be interconnected–some have already suggested ways in which they are–but I’m leaving that to you.

By the way, I promise I won’t tease forever on what Ierne is to be. Astute readers will have picked up the few clues I’ve left in previous posts or seen the one outright mention of it I made earlier in January. So I’ll come clean, but not just yet.

It’s midterms this week so I’m taking a break from game design thinking. You can follow the posts in this series so far by checking out the tag “Rebuilding Vampire.”

In lieu of more design, I’d like to quickly address a couple of things, just to be clear to myself mostly, though others may find this useful as well.

First the caveat.

I think I already said this in a previous post, but it bears repeating to be 100% crystal clear:

I love Vampire: The Masquerade to undeath. Really, to little tiny bits. Thus, this game that’s emerging as I write along is *not* me saying “VtM Sucks!” Not even by a long shot. This *is* me saying, “VtM had some things that I felt got lost in the shuffle and here’s me trying to bring them back to the spotlight in my own way.” The latter does not detract from the former. If I wanted to be more dramatic in my answer, I’d say that this game is both my reply, and love letter, to VtM, my way of saying, “You made me think about these things, here’s what I thought of them; thanks so much, and enjoy the gift.”

Now the self-deprecation.

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As I have already mentioned, at the crux of the tragic story of the vampire is the fact that they are on a downward spiral towards damnation, destined to destroy all that they held dear. If you read through the comments on the previous two posts in this series you will find that over and over we keep going back to the simple, and very important, idea of why should one care about the vampire’s journey on the road of dwindling Humanity. Or put another way, why should I (the player of the vampire character) care about the loss of Humanity? Why stall it? Why not give in to the beast?

There are traits in the two Vampire games that sort of deal with this. In VtM we have the traits of Nature and Demeanor, which basically sum up what your behavioral essence is on the inside and how you project yourself to the world. These are good to help shape how you want to play your character, but they really don’t say much about who your character is, which ultimately is what we’re driving at when looking for the reasons to cling to Humanity. VtR uses Virtue and Vice to replace Nature/Demeanor. I like the contrast of these two traits because, while they can help you shape how you play the character, they now say something about who this character is, if maybe a bit indirectly. The Virtue/Vice split also hearkens back to classical philosophical thought, something I can totally dig. Both of these sets of traits, however, have the same drawback for me: they are too vague. This is great for the games in which they are used, as a limited number of combinations can be used to represent virtually endless characterizations across a number of games sharing the same basic system, but for what I’m seeking to do, I want something that’s a hell of a lot more focused.

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I’ve met a fair number of rabbis during my time as a Jew. Most of them are regular people who have dedicated their lives to studying G-d’s Torah and helping people out perform mitzvot. They lead normal lives and have the same kinds of issues most people do, except they face them with this admirable confidence in Hashem. What’s more, I’ve yet to meet one that doesn’t also impart that joy they have to others. I also know there are some rabbis that transcend even the rabbis I have known, that make them seem in comparison as normal as I seem next to a rabbi. These are rabbis that have achieved levels of connectivity to G-d that are truly astounding. We call them tzadikim, which can be translated as righteous. Today I met such a rabbi.

I can’t tell you anything about the Kalever Rebbe; before Monday I had never heard of him, or seen his picture. Understand, there are a lot of Chassidic groups each with their own Rebbe, even if the one most people know of is Chabad-Lubavitch. But I saw that the Kalever Rebbe would be visiting FIU for one day, at a time when I could drop by for a visit. I’ve been going through some spiritual stuff lately and I figured meeting with a tzadik would be good (my wife concurred).

Long story short, he was delayed from the 12 PM time he was originally scheduled to have been on campus, but after my class I walked over and was able to see him.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, maybe something earth-shaking, a spiritual sledgehammer to the chest, based on accounts of meetings with other tzadikim I have heard/read. It was nothing like that. It was actually about as mundane and simple a meeting as you can imagine: him in a chair at the head of a conference table, me standing to his right, us sharing some words. He shook my hand and didn’t let go until we were done, and he’d pat it for emphasis pretty much every other word. He gave me a few blessings, and gave me a very simple, almost elementary, answer when I told him what I’ve been going through. A smile never left his face.

It took only a few minutes. I walked out and went on with my day. But it was subliminal, and without any effort, he imparted me with some of the peace that seemed to hang around him like fruits on a tree.

There was nothing extraordinary about our meeting, and that’s what I found most extraordinary.