Memoriam

(Note: This post has some videos embedded, and one sound file. They are relevant to what I'm saying. You don't have to listen to them all but, well, you'll miss bits if you don't. Most are songs, if that helps. I should also note: I'm not always the narrator in these clips.)

I miss my grandfather on days like today. He was clever, funny, articulate and, most of all, fearless. He spoke his mind clearly and boldly, and without an excess of words.

He fought in WWII, where he served as a radio operator, and he simply hated war and regarded it as the worst possible state of man. He was glad to have served because if there was a potential for a worse state, he felt strongly it would be life under Axis rule, but he hated war. It might be the best lesson he taught me. Well, that, and how to keep from slicing my tee shot.

Today is Memorial Day. It's not my holiday, in the larger sense, because it's an American holiday when one remembers the veterans who've died, whether in war or after. As I understand it, the day's near the end of May because the weather's decent and it gives one a chance to visit the graves of those veterans, to tend to their graves and leave flowers and such. Thus its original name: Decoration Day.

The rough Canadian equivalent would probably be Remembrance Day, placed on the Monday of the week in which November 11th falls. That day is known in some places as Armistice Day, commemorating the day that World War I officially ended. The Armistice had been under discussion for some time, of course, and was really just the formal recognition of the end of hostilities.

Right to the end, the generals and men in the back offices continued to give perilous and fatal orders the men in the field. They were, after all, just men in the field. Plenty more where they came from. The last formal casualty, on the British side, was 90 minutes before the signing, but unofficially, deaths continued until the 14th, as news spread.

Nasty bit of business, that war, but they all are. All of them. We like to talk about "good wars," but while there might be some wars that don't kill quite so many bystanders, where mostly only the bad guys die and most of the good guys live, we haven't had a "good" war yet. And then there's talk of "just wars." Don't get me started on "just wars."

"Just war theory" seems to mean, "Killing people by the shedload as usual, but it's okay because we feel bad about it this time."

And don't get me wrong, sometimes wars need to happen, the same way that sometimes cancer treatments need to happen. But celebrating war, lauding those who participated in them merely for participating in them, acting as through peace came about just through the violent conflict and not through the negotiation of peace, I can't do that.

No soldier has ever died to "defend our freedoms." They've died because someone, somewhere, screwed up and now they have to go out and die while everyone else figures out how to unscrew things again, until the next time. It's not nearly as romantic when phrased that way, though. Reducing their actions to "defending freedoms" sounds so very ennobling.

So, given all that, given my deep and abiding hatred for warfare, how do I "celebrate" Memorial Day? I remember. I remember the cost of human stupidity, of stubbornness, of brutish, reflexive nationalism, a cost measured out and paid for in blood. The blood of soldiers, but also the blood of civilians, of innocents and villains and everyone across the great, majestic stretch of humanity.

Don't take this as hostility toward soldiers, or those who've served in war as a civilian. I mean, my grandfather was right. As terrible as World War II was, it was the best of a bunch of bad options. I know, however, that some will say that because I don't want them to die in something as stupid as war means that I hate them. As though one must hate firefighters if one hopes for a day when housefires are a thing of the past.

To be specific, though, I think of nurses who died on their feet from exhaustion, trying so hard to keep death at bay that they didn't see the reaper sneaking up on them. I think of the young soldiers who died at the first moment of the charge, a bullet passing from the front of the skull and out the back, sending then to the dirt, forever. I think of the children who died in a stranger's basement, huddled in a corner when the roof came down and staved in their skull or crushed their chest as indifferent violence rains down overhead.

If I want to get really fuming angry, I wonder if that nurse had a beautiful sonnet in her head that she never got down on paper. Did the soldier have someone at home whose heart would break forever at the news of his death? And the children. God, the children.

I remember. I memorialize. I hope.

https://soundcloud.com/jim-roberts-223408216/the-war-prayer

Mark Twain's War Prayer was about a specific pair of wars, but it really doesn't matter. We found more of them later. We always do.

Once more into the breach.

My favourite campaigns

My wife tagged me into a Facebook post from someone looking for ideas for D&D campaigns, specifically asking us to share our favourite campaigns. I started typing up a Facebook post, but,

These campaigns are in chronological order, as best as I can remember them. This isn't a comprehensive list, these are just the campaigns I learned something from. Most of my campaigns were unnamed until after college, but I've invented names here, where I could. I should not that these are all campaigns I ran - pretty much from the beginning, I was a GM, not a player, unless someone had a new system or concept they wanted to play.

Name: White Plume Mountain
System: AD&D (pre-published module)
Inspiration: I was at a birthday party and a friend pulled out this cool book he'd found in his brother's room. It was some kind of game, and he knew his parents didn't like it (It was the 80s, and we were kids in a private Christian school - yeah, Satanic Panic was in full swing.) They couldn't figure it out, and I was the weirdly social one, so I sat in a corner until I sort of figured it out.
Synopsis: I honestly don't remember - I believe it was pretty much just a straight-up, "explore this location and take everything that isn't bolted down," adventure.
What I Learned: You might notice that I didn't have a Player's Handbook. That is correct. I had the adventure module, and the portion of the Fiend Folio my friend could sneak out of his brother's room. We kind of winged it with the dice we gaffled from a Yahtzee set and had a lot of fun.

Name: Justice Machine
System: Heroes Unlimited (pre-published sourcebook)
Inspiration: While I'd picked up various RPG books over the years, it was hard to get a group together to play them. One of my friends read the Justice Machine comic, and I had the book for the main system, so I picked this up at a game shop.
Synopsis: I never actually found out.
What I Learned: Never pick up a sourcebook just because you THINK your friend will like it.

Name: The one where we play mutant animals
System: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness
Inspiration: The cartoon, initially, but the book is based on the original comic books, which were VERY different. Still good, just entirely different.
Synopsis: I ran a lot of different games in this system, most of them only lasting a couple of sessions, but generally the all took place at or out of Project: Manticore, an agency that used mutant animals as agents. Think of it as being OWCA, but with time travel once I got Transdimensional Turtles.
What I Learned: Making characters can be as much fun as playing them. System only gets in the way of player fun if the GM allows it to, but system can get in the way of GM fun by sucking.

Name: The Ballad of Jack Generess And The Airships
System: D&D (homebrew)
Inspiration: I fell in love with JRPGs and decided to try playing a JRPG-inspired campaign with a bunch of guys I met in my freshman year of high school.
Synopsis: I created the hex-grid world-map before I did anything, but I mostly improvised the dungeons and their contents, although I usually had a pretty good notion of what the boss was going to be. It was a pretty straightforward adventure, with the heroes rising from 1st through 12th level, ending with a massive fight between the party and their allies vs. the cyberlich and his minions. There were evil gnomes with jetpacks, flying squirrels, great ballads sung to the tune of Talking Heads songs, the whole nine yards.
What I Learned: This was the first time I played a campaign from beginning to end with the same group of people, playing the same group of characters or at least a continuous line of characters. I learned a whole lot from this game, including how to say "yes, and" off of the improv stage, how to imbalance a game properly, and a lot about how to manage player expectations. Also, a lot of the character names and place names I'd use in future campaigns started here.

Name: The Mothman Saga
System: Werewolf: The Apocalypse
Inspiration: UFO culture, specifically John Keel's, "The Mothman Prophecies"
Synopsis: I threw out 90% of W:tA's mythos and instead argued that the world was going to hell in a handbasket because the ultraterrestrials were fighting, using Earth as their field of battle.
What I Learned: This was the first WoD game I'd run, and while I'd played in a few one-offs of more narrative games, it was the first game that explicitly gave me permission to tell players that they succeeded just because success was more interesting than failure. Also, it was one of the few games I'd run that used real-world figures and events.

Name: The War Of Skulls
System: Rifts
Inspiration: The cover of the Rifts gamebook. I wanted a game that ended with my players fighting a giant sluglord dude surrounded by women in gimp suits. ... Look, I was young and stupid, I'm not going to defend it.
Synopsis: I can't even tell you. Check out the next section.
What I Learned: Never run a game with more players than you can count on two hands, unless you really know what you're doing. Never assume that just because a book is designed by the same dude as a book you already own that they're even similar (Rifts was designed by the guy who did TMNT - he didn't do any better this time around). Never, ever improvise mech combat.

Name: Chaos Rising
System: 2nd ed D&D
Inspiration: I had the characters first, and so just built a challenge around that.
Synopsis: A dark lord rises in the West and the heroes have to go out and stop him. I made him a racist and a bigot, though, tying into the history courses I was taking at the time, which made him memorable.
What I Learned: College students basically game just like high school students, and still like stabbing stuff in the face, mostly.

Name: Savage Species
System: 3rd ed D&D
Inspiration: The 3rd edition sourcebook of the same name, and the phrase describing the X-Men as being "in a world that hates and fears them."
Synopsis: In a world of magic and wonder with a variety of mythical creatures abounding, the players track down a demon lord to a high tower and are killed, placed in a healing sleep and wake three hundred years later in a world where there's basically just humans left, and the demon lord is still around and needs killing.
What I Learned: Playing with bigotry in games is only slightly less dangerous than playing with matches near flammable objects, third edition has limits, but if you ignore them, they do kinda go away.

Name: Ptolus
System: 3rd ed, and later 3.5 ed D&D
Inspiration: The sourcebook of the same name. From which I took the title of the name, a handful of stat blocks and not a whole lot else, although I'd use bits of the book in various other campaigns in the ensuing years.
Synopsis: There are dungeons beneath the city of Ammeara, and they're leaking a dangerous amount of magic, with monsters running to the surface to escape it.
What I Learned: We actually spent about half of the game on dimension-hopping, which was a lot of fun. Also, I had my first gender-fluid PC, which was cool.

Name: Asengervald
System: Pathfinder
Inspiration: Pathfinder with all the fun parts, except for gold pieces and XP.
Synopsis: In the far north of my campaign world, there's a space I labelled Asengervald, and that I just never visited. For about three decades. So we did! Vikings, gnolls, "squeezings," all sorts of fun to be had.
What I Learned: Loki is a jerk, Pathfinder is vastly improved if you just give everyone a bonus to the appropriate stat at the point in the level where the game tells you they ought to give them a magic item that gives them that bonus instead, players are more cunning than you can guess, resource management is fun if you aren't always managing the same resource.

And that's about it, for now. I've run a couple of campaigns since, but they are memorable at this point because, well, they're barely memories.