Cry of the Woolf

Virginia Woolf had some smart things to say about roleplaying, in particular the tendency I often deplore to cram everything into a genre envelope and play self-consciously as if trying to replicate a TV show's contrived structure. Ms Woolf thinks there's too much of artifice in such narratives and not enough of life: 

‘So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the game narrative is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The players seem constrained, not by their own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has them in thrall to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole. The tyrant is obeyed; the game is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we feel a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as events unfold in the customary way. Is life like this? Must roleplaying be like this?

 
‘Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old. The moment of importance came not here but there, so that, if the players could do whatever what they chose, not what their characters' arcs say they must, if they could base their actions on their own in-character impulses and not on convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted story style. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged.’

They're not zombies

Another taster bite from The Frankenstein Wars, the interactive adventure that Cubus Games are creating based on my story and world concept. This is Tom Clerval's first meeting with the creature created by Victor Frankenstein three decades earlier:

There was a creak on the companionway. Mr Legion filled the frame of the door, having to twist his hulking torso to enter the cabin so that for a moment he resembled one of those wretches who are unearthed after being buried alive, their rigorous limbs pressed taut against the confines of the wood. His flesh gleamed like oiled ivory in the lamplight. I noted fresh stitching where his arm had been wounded less than an hour before, the skin already healing over the hastily-worked sutures.

As he stepped in he was able to straighten up, but even so his big angular head still bumped against the cabin ceiling, and the very mass of him seemed to press the air and light away so that Blakeney and I sat closer against the narrow hull. I felt as an inhabitant of a doll's house might feel, when the wall is suddenly thrown open and a giant child intrudes its looming face and limbs and vital energy.

Imagine my even greater astonishment, faced by this gaunt apparition that had haunted my childhood dreams, when he drew a long thin cigar from his pocket, tilted back the hood of the lamp, and sucked it alight with all the delicacy of a toff in a Pall Mall club.

Blakeney must have sensed my confusion. "Mr Legion is hardly the simple-minded monster given life by your godfather's experiments, Dr Clerval. He was a child then; now he is a man. Of a kind."

The creature turned his eyes upon me. They held a look that burned with the fever-light of shrewd intellect and dark depths of resentment. When he opened his lips, I sat so transfixed that it took me moments to realize that the soft, rich tones were his speaking voice. His glance slid off me so that he addressed neither Blakeney nor myself, but an unseen audience: “Of a kind..? Unfinished! Sent before my time into this world scarce half made up, that dogs bark at me - why, I have no delight to pass away the time, unless to spy my shadow in the sun, and ponder on my own deformity…”

He blew out a smoke ring, watching it with a satisfied smile as it rose and grew diffuse. Was he ugly? Truly deformed? Though my godfather had not cast him to normal standards of beauty, nonetheless he had built something impressive. Viewed as an attempt at copying humanity, he was a monster indeed. But seen as a new thing, a species apart – then his long, harsh body took on the outlines of something noble, even divine.

Moving with the easy grace one sometimes sees in very big men, he turned to leave, adding over his shoulder, “And so I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days.”

Blakeney filled the silence after his heavy tread had faded along the companionway. "That was all for your benefit. His sense of mischief, you understand. Theatricality, one might even say."

“He works for you?” I asked, still marvelling at the transformation. In my memory, I saw that same giant body pouncing like an animal from the mountainside, those lips parting only to issue a howl to chill the blood. If Blakeney had shown me an African lion smoking a cigar and quoting Shakespeare, I could not have been more amazed.

“Works for me, you say? Not that exactly. We have… an understanding.”

Something in Blakeney's calculating tone brought me out of my daze. “I’m not going to help you, Blakeney.”

“That’s just what he said. And yet we have our understanding.”

See, no zombie he. That's a mind-shattering revelation that the Twitterverse has been struggling with, for example in this brief overview on Pocket Gamer. Well, as Wilde said, it's worse not to be talked about, but I wish more people were familiar with Mary Shelley's brilliant novel about the creation of a new kind of man rather than with the "Hulk will smash" laboratory partwork that is the Universal or Hammer idea of the monster.

Actually, thanks to Project Gutenberg you can read Shelley's original Frankenstein free in almost any format you could ask for. For a shorter read, here's me explaining why this isn't yet another zombie thing. Because, yawn, there are far too many of those already. After all, the watchword is not "It's undead," but "It's alive!"

Hiya

Any time I put up a picture by Russ Nicholson, it's yet more evidence of the imagination and versatility that makes him Britain's premier fantasy illustrator. This one has a special place in our hearts, for it was one of the first Russ drew for me (in my 1985 gamebook The Eye of the Dragon) and the original is framed on the wall of Jamie's study and watches him as he creates modern masterworks like the Dirk Lloyd books - or skives off to play a couple of hours of Skyrim, more like.

I got to thinking about it a while back when I was preparing a seasonal RPG special. Our gaming group meets every fortnight (on a Thursday, since you asked) but we also try to have four all-day Sunday specials to mark the solstices and equinoxes. This autumn I drew the referee's straw and needed to come up with a storyline in a hurry. The snag was, I was also in the middle of prepping Frankenstein for epub3. Spare time had become a highly theoretical concept. So I did what any of us might do in the circumstances, and reached for a classic adventure novel to plunder for ideas.

I'd never read She before. It's certainly packed with great scenes and ideas. As a novel it feels a little flat because it is just a "this happened, and then this, and then this" kind of story. Nothing is made of the potential emotional and moral challenges that would make us sit up and take notice today. Not that I'm complaining. If it had been a really thrilling read, I'd have worried about spoiling it for those of my gamers (all of them, I'm betting) who haven't yet read it. But, bereft as it is of the character stuff that makes a story really grip, you're free to rip it off as an epic adventure scenario - and by those terms it certainly does the business.

There's no point in me posting the adventure here. It relates to the characters in my own campaign, who were coming to Ayesha's (that's pronounced "Asha", by the way) kingdom from 9th century Baghdad, not 19th century Cambridge. And they had specific campaign reasons for going. And the system we use is GURPS 4e. And my Ayesha was more of a sci-fantasy boffin than H Rider Haggard's psychic beauty. But you don't need my notes anyway. Haggard's book is one big RPG scenario pack, complete with suggested episodes to keep the action going. Thanks to the wonderful Project Gutenberg, it's right there for everyone to read, so why not try it out on your players?