I hope he can see this because I'm doing it as hard as I can.

Because I have non-Boston friends who may not have heard of this ridiculousness yet:

The Mooninites shut down the city of Boston. ATHF for the win.

(And Adult Swim's Response for good measure.)

EDITED TO ADD: Argh it is not a hoax stop calling it a hoax.

what I resist persists and speaks louder than I know

Alright, so we are once again playing the Total Request Geek game, this time fulfilling the demands of oberndorf, who has asked that I reminisce about a couple of games I ran in college. Since we seem to be proceeding in roughly chronological order:

In the summer before my sophomore year of college White Wolf decided to put out an entirely new game line called Exalted. At the time they didn't know what a staggering success it was going to be, and so they were terrified of marketing it as the entirely new thing that it was. Their earliest advertisements tied it, conceptually, to the original World of Darkness, explaining it as some sort of secret mythic history. If you accepted the Kindred of the East version of events, then we were currently in the sixth incarnation of the cycle of ages, and Exalted could be seen as either the far past or the far future of that world. In addition to protecting White Wolf's interests this also helped to explain their choice to rape and pillage the thematic elements of the World of Darkness wholesale for use in the Exalted line.

Its interesting to note that, once Exalted took off like a rocket and became their new cash cow, White Wolf finally had the money and the stability to tank the original World of Darkness, a move they claim they had been planning since the very beginning. I don't know if that's true or not, but I do know its interesting to see how these things progress. They went from being fearful of even putting their toe in the Exalted pool for fear of threatening their precious World of Darkness to using it as leverage to totally reinvent the product line that was responsible for their very existence as a game writing company.

Needless to say I bought Exalted. And right away I liked it.

I didn't, however, understand it. I pretty fundamentally didn't get it, probably due to the fact that I perused the book relatively casually. I saw the elements I liked, the kung fu and the allusions to anime and Final Fantasy. But I utterly failed to notice that those elements had been carefully fitted and modified, so that rather than forming a hasty patchwork of cool things they fit into a seamless and integrated whole, a whole cloth cosmology that actually made sense. Similarly I wasn't as crunchy back then as I am now, and while I appreciated the versatility and obvious potential of the Charms I didn't really understand that they formed a truly gestalt power system at least on par with 3rd edition D&D.

And it is out of that lack of understanding that my first ever Exalted game grew. Having learned from my mistakes with the Chicago chronicle I endeavored to give the players what they wanted. Inspired by the starting setting of Chrono Cross I set the game in the islands of the West. I let Gavin play a one-armed pirate, because the notion that Celestial Exaltation was reserved for hale and hearty hosts was implicit in the first edition (a mistake they hastily and thoroughly corrected in the second.) I gave oberndorf a non-functional Final Fantasy style airship, a relic of the first age powered by hearthstones, so inherently cool and powerful that it should have counted as an Artifact 5 at least, if not an Artifact N/A. I didn't know what I was doing and it showed; rather than having my players struggle through Charm selection I picked their first five Charms for them -- badly -- and endeavored to let them grow from there as we all learned the system together.

As a result it imploded pretty rapidly, which is a good thing, because I had honestly no idea where I was going with it. Its a testament to how cool a system it was that I as well as several of my players remained interested. thablueguy helped me to get a better grasp of what the game was actually about, as did pax_malificus, who would go on to run an a more succesful Exalted campaign, at least briefly, that included attackmonkey, loopygirl and the_matras among its players.

I'm sad I can't say more about the Exalted game I ran, but honestly it was short-lived, a brilliant flash of coolness that far exceeded the amount of work I put into it, and then burned itself out and was gone. Fortunately it was eventually replaced by a new game of Changeling. A post about that should follow soon.

I'm back with scars to show

So, following on from my last post, let's talk about the other big Changeling game in my life.

We're into recent enough territory now that I actually have notes for that game, carefully archived and backed up on some auxilliary storage medium, an external hard drive or possibly a burned CD. And I suppose I could dig them out and pore over them in an attempt to recapture just what was going on there, in that place and time, but then you wouldn't be getting an entirely honest impression. My memory would be refreshed and therefore different things would rise to the surface. As it stands you get a relatively unbiased window looking in, a snapshot of what I actually recall when conjuring up thoughts about that particular roleplaying endeavor.

And besides, why look at boring (and at this point arcane) Storyteller's notes when I've got pictures?

I don't have a scanner in my life, otherwise I would attempt to share these pictures with you, because honestly they need to be preserved in digital format. They are among my most prized possessions. Rodrigo drew them, and through my various moves across the country and around greater Boston I have carried them with me to each new home. Rodrigo played in that game, you see, in the time when thablueguy and I were still sometimes referring to him as our "pet freshman," a tongue-in-cheek sobriquet that he put up with for some reason, demonstrating far more self-assurance than I would have in his shoes.

I like to think that each time I sit down at the table I bring an increasingly refined toolkit to bear on the gaming hobby. In planning for Changeling I was demonstrating that I had learned from my mistakes in Exalted, falling back on a system I knew so thoroughly it was like rediscovering an old friend. To this day I could probably make a Changeling character from scratch, given a little paper to work with, and given a handful of ten-sided dice I could even run a passable one-shot in the system, all without the aid of any books. Which isn't to say that I don't have books; I have most of the books in the Changeling line and I cherish them. I've just moved beyond them, which meant that I was operating in a sandbox that was very, very familiar to me. It was like coming home.

I was also utilizing what I had learned from the ill-fated Chicago chronicle, albeit in an indirect way. I was more of a dewy-eyed idealist in those days, as evidenced by some of the entirely fatuous and yet ultimately very characteristic things I said on an audio-only documentary on roleplaying games Rodrigo made as an exercise for one of his RTVF classes. I believed then, as I do now, that roleplaying could be a vehicle to something greater, something sublime, and that at its best it could actually change your life. And I was starting to understand the mechanism by which that was accomplished; it became less of a blind belief and more of a demonstrated phenomena that I was eager to utilize.

Too eager, perhaps, because as could be expected I pushed too hard and too fast. It was a good game of Changeling, in the end, but it was just a game, and I subjected friendships to stresses they should not have borne in my attempts to use gaming as therapy, to make clumsy ham-fisted points to people about things I didn't have the temerity to broach so arrogantly in real life. Frankly, after some of the crap I pulled, I'm surprised that lassarina is still talking to me (and _glass_house_ as well, though I was not quite so much a blunt instrument with her.)

It didn't help matters that the interpersonal relationships of the players were often tense and strained out of game, but I made things worse and I did it deliberately. People made characters that in some way reflected these issues, as they tend to do, and several times I herded them into head-on confrontations. It could have been awful, and a few times it sort of was. Ultimately I got gun-shy, pulled back from the brink, re-focused on the plot and brought the game to its conclusion. Ending games is a rare pleasure and I like to think this one went over passably well. I was looking to have an affect, and its clear that I did, but not in the way I would have wanted to, looking back on it.

But at least I got awesome group portraits out of it, hand-drawn by Rodrigo and carefully preserved by me. They're waiting to be scanned and someday, probably, framed.