Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

The Secret Lair Episode 29: Storygaming

I’m proud to share this link because, well … I’m going to urge you to follow the link and read what Kris Johnson writes because he explains it in that distinctive K.J. way that I dearly miss.

For my part, suffice to say I went to Cleveland, got kidnapped by the Overlords of the Secret Lair, and this link will take you to the recording of their interrogation of me, wherin I go way past name/rank/serial number and spill all sorts of  passionate thoughts on my experiences in the tabletop roleplaying hobby over the past couple of years, drop all sorts of names, push all kinds of buttons, and throw down some “this is how I see it, your mileage may vary”  proclamations about why I love to play dirty hippie story games.

And the other thing about this historic event is that after recording over 40 episodes of a podcast together, this is the FIRST time that Chris Miller, Kris Johnson, and I have ever recorded a show while actually sitting around a real table, face-to-face.

BOO-YAH!

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

The Newer, Smugger, Crappier Atheism – Here’s a “New Rule”… from RPGpundit

I usually find the RPGPundit pretty smug and obnoxious when he writes about roleplaying games – he is after all the guy who consistently labels anyone who enjoys, discusses, plays, or designs hippie/indie/story games as “SWINE”.

But I’ve gotta go along with him on this one – people who use a belief system (including absolute belief in non-belief) as an excuse to be a dick to other people are equally dickish, whether they’re on the theistic OR atheistic side of the fence. I just wish that Pundit realized that when he flatly paints all of my friends and peers with the “SWINE” label, he’s kinda doing the same thing, in my opinion.

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

A big thanks to Paul Tevis for getting this great article on my radar:

John Scalzi – Three Cheers for Chewbacca, SciFi’s Ultimate Sidekick

I heartily agree with the whole thing – Chewie is one of my favorite characters, and exploring the nature of sidekick-ism through him is something I have done just for the hell of it on occasion. I even created an rpg character based on Chewbacca (Kashyyyk, from the PTA Star Wars game we play annually at GenCon) who is right in the thick of struggling with these issues. And reading this article brought a lot of the issues back to the front of my noggin.

Here’s a pertinent quote from Scalzi’s article …

Never once in the movies do you get the sense that Chewbacca is looking enviously at Han Solo’s captain’s chair and thinking to himself, man, how long do I have to hang around with this wahoo until I get to sit there? Why? Because Chewie is comfortable with himself as a person and a sidekick. He’s so comfortable, in fact, that he actually lets other people talk for him. I strongly believe Chewbacca could speak human if he so chose — but he prefers to let the other characters shine. That’s the sort of selfless assist to others that makes him perfect in the sidekick role.

- via John Scalzi – Three Cheers for Chewbacca, SciFi’s Ultimate Sidekick.

Now, imagine my SW-PTA character, Kashyyyk, is essentially that character – a competent, protective fuzzball who is by nature plenty content to spend his life as the sidekick, best friend, and pseudo-father-figure to the roguish hero Han Calrissian. Kash (who by the way can and does speak human) is committed to watching his pal’s back and keeping him safe in the midst of also helping him become the galaxy-saving rebel hero Kash believes Han can be.

But then pour all over that an interesting little twist – imagine that Kashyyyk is also the fated messiah of the wookiee race, destined to lead his people to a new era of freedom from the oppression of the Imperial Skywalker Dynasty and – at least in my mind – freeing them from their persistent role of playing second fiddle to humans.

Imagine that however the fiction plays out, Kashyyyk is going to find it nigh-impossible to remain true to BOTH aspects. You can pretend to walk the line between sidekick and alpha-dog all you want, but eventually it catches up to you. Eventually you’ve got to choose.

Now, I have NO IDEA how it will all play out. But I’m betting it’s going to be one helluva lot of fun, angst, and blood, sweat and tears.

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

After running through several versions and asking questions, taking advice, polling children, etc. I finally have the new logo design for Mick Bradley Creative. I have a simpler version for business cards and other printed stuff, but here’s the jazzed-up Webby version:

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

My oldest son Conor (a.k.a. Cartographer) has been sick the past few days, and this afternoon he came home from the doc with a new drive to pay lots of attention to his body temperature. He wants to take his temp every ten minutes or so. Okay, fine. He likes a routine, that’s his thing. But then he told Leah and me that from now on, every morning even after he gets better, he wants to take his temperature after he brushes his teeth but before he goes out to wait for the bus.

Being the rude blurt-out guy I can sometimes be, I said “Dude, that’s just hypochondria.”

Leah looked at me with a sour ‘that was unhelpful’ kind of look, but before she could say anything, Conor answered instead. He said simply,

“Yeah, I want to add hypochondria to my daily routine.”

So yeah, Leah and I both just laughed, and then I said, “I love you, dude.” And that was that.

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

Wherin Joel Shempert’s OP and Jason Godesky’s first comment both grab me by the throat and remind me of the one truly authentic throughline in my life: I believe I’m called to explore and share stories and make myths in community with others. I’ve done it through acting, preaching, writing, podcasting, and roleplaying, but I’ve always done it – and in whatever form, to whatever level of competence, it is the one thing I know I’m wired to do. This post from Story by the Throat is a waypoint for me because it very nicely touches on – and stirs up – my feelings.

Making it Ourselves « Story by the Throat!

As a footnote, here’s an interesting issue that I’m still pondering – I agree with Joel that true art almost never authentically happens by committee – but committee is not the same thing as community, right? That’s my feeling, but it might take some time for me to work through how to articulate the difference. I think it has a lot to do with the difference between what many people think “Story Now” means in roleplaying – i.e. making decisions based upon what works best for ‘the story’ – and what I believe it actually means – organically exploring the premise in the moment, making choices, and letting the results spring forth as they will to guide the shared fiction at the table.

I think that the points Jason raises in his comment speak to that fairly well – but I love that he stresses that his intent is to add to Joel’s original idea, not to counter it.

No doubt I’ll have to revisit all this soon.

Note: edited for clarity a few hours after originally published

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

There’s an interesting thread going on over at Story Games called “In X, you play people who Y” and I decided to try to put Vegas After Midnight through the wringer, because I think that explicitly and concisely being able to state what players do in any given game is a good thing. Certainly it is in VAM. Answering questions like this has been a challenge for me, but that’s all the more reason to keep at it.

My first few attempts have been sub-par, and I’ve gotten helpful advice and criticism from folks to encourage me to step up. Well, I figured I’d do that here, so as not to threadnap the discussion over there.

This is stuff coming mostly off the top of my head, so who knows what I’ll end up writing. But I need to try out a bunch of different ideas. Some will be dumb, some funny, some might even actually hit the mark. Your input and comments are welcome.

Here we go …

In VAM, you hack up DRYH and dump a bunch of Vegas pastiche all over it. No wait, I do that, not you.

In VAM, you play deranged Elvis cultists in sequin jumpsuits who kick the snot out of a bunch of evil clowns who are trying to kill you and take your stuff. Potentially true, and capable of hooking attention, but too limited in scope and a bit snarky.

In VAM, you play characters who wake up into the neon-drenched madness of a nightmare pastiche of Vegas and match wits, blood, and sanity with deranged Elvis cultists, Rat-Packer gangsters, and evil circus freaks in a high-stakes game of life and death for the fate of reality. Entirely accurate, but too long and probably confusing. The actual statement lies within this one, but needs to be distilled into something concise.

In VAM, you play characters who wake up into a neon-drenched nightmare pastiche of Vegas and decide to play instead of being played, no matter what the cost. Grrr. Cleverness without clarity is not cleverness.

In VAM, you play …

Well, tell me what impressions YOU have, based upon what you’ve heard and read. I’m not above stealing good ideas.

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

I hope that my post from last week gave you the impression that I’ll be occasionally sharing faith-related discoveries here on the Monkey from now on, just as I have been sharing stuff about roleplaying and mythopoeia and all that. Because I will be. And this is one of them.

This is why I’m going to continue the habit of putting the general category of my posts in brackets at the beginning of the title.  That way, you know what you’re dealing with, no matter what clever wittiness I attempt in the title that comes after the brackets. Don’t read stuff you’re not interested in.

That said, here’s a faith-related post that is from one of my favorite blogs, Shuck and Jive. Shuck and Jive: Stuff

It is the blog of John Shuck, a progressive Presbyterian minister in Tennessee. He writes about a lot of things, but he also usually posts the text of his Sunday sermon the day after he preaches it to his church. This one is called “Stuff”, and it is based on a story from Mark 10 in the New Testament. Lots of cool stuff here, including a deft and sincere inclusion of George Carlin’s famous bit on “stuff”. But I must admit, the part that hit me between the eyes and made me want to share it here was this:

It is also true that if every person on Earth possessed as much stuff as the average American, we would need five planets worth of stuff to keep up with the demand. In essence Earth does not have enough stuff to keep everyone at the level at which most of us are accustomed.

via Shuck and Jive: Stuff: A Sermon.

Holy Shit. What else is there to say?

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

When I was in Cleveland last week for my meeting with the Evangelism Connections group, I had a couple of epiphanies, and I’ve taken some time to process them and I want to share them here. Basically it all amounts to me being tired of trying to keep the various compartments of my life – and my life history – from getting mingled. You might be surprised how I’ve compartmentalized my life and my experiences into segments that I have not openly shared with people who are outside those boxes. So this is going to be one of those uber-personal navel-gazing posts where I spill a bunch of stuff openly in an effort to live up to a promise I made to myself and God as I was driving home from the Cleveland trip. If you’re not all that interested in knowing anything more about me than you already do, then you should stop reading here. I’m doing this because I wanna. You don’t have to read if you don’t wanna. But anyway …

Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-posted from The Harping Monkey.

First, a mini-catchup:

I am sitting here while Liam plays on the Playhouse Disney Website and there’s all kinds of stuff rolling around in my head. There are several things I want to write about. I literally have two partially-written posts in my drafts waiting to be finished and published – a political post about Bill Maher and a personal post about an epiphany I had during my recent trip to Cleveland. And this morning one of my newest Facebook friends, Tammy (who happens to be a significantly memorable high-school girlfriend and a fellow thespian) asked me to elaborate on something I mentioned in an earlier tweet about my “ALT experience”. “ALT” is insider shorthand for Amarillo Little Theatre, which is where I spent almost nine years in my 20s trodding the boards. So adding to my other posts-in-waiting I want to write about my years at ALT in more detail than I have ever done since I began to blog.

But what I will actually be doing in this post is writing about Vegas After Midnight again – because during lunch Liam and I were rocking out to my VAM playlist and it reminded me of a conversation I had with my lovely Leah a couple of days ago that I want to share.

So, the actual point of this post, as promised in the title, is …

Read the rest of this entry »