Chapter One: The Eighth Deadly Sin

  The human raised his axe over his head, ready for the killing blow, and Belial watched on, delighted. The human could see him, if he looked hard, since he was currently in Belial’s thrall, and the old demon was under strict orders to remain unnoticed, but he wasn’t worried about that. The human, one of two left in the entire battle, was caught up in his veneration, however accidental, of the demon of war.

The human on the ground was piteously wounded, trying to pull himself along the ground and to safety, his hand held up as though it would do anything to even blunt the inevitable death blow. “Radra, save me!” he cried.

The axe remained in the air.

“Radra?” asked the human with the axe. “Do you speak of Radra, the preserver of fish for the boats of men?” The other man’s eyes widened, and the axe-wielder brought his weapon to his side.

“We of the hills call her Radra, she who shows the path of the grain.” The axe-wielder’s face darkened at what sounded like heresy. “B-b-but is there any finer meal than fish and fresh bread?” He smiled, as broadly and sincerely as he could. The axe-wielder’s face softened.

“I cannot argue with that, friend, and Radra is great enough indeed for fish and bread.” He tucked the axe away in a loop in his belt and surveyed the field, where a dozen men lay bleeding in the dirt. “This is such a waste. What a miserable way for us to end up with fewer mouths to feed, when you could’ve showed us Radra’s ways with grain and we could’ve shown you how to hunt for fish.” He held out a hand to the man on the ground. “Let today be the day when we begin to teach each other.”

The man on the ground clasped the arm of the man who moments ago sought to kill him and smiled. He also tried to pull himself to his feet, but winced and fell back to the ground.

“Your leg is too injured, friend. Allow me to apply a splint and then we can see who of our people we can save.”

Belial screeched and howled the entire way back to Hell, slamming into the ground before the Morningstar’s throne with enough force to crack the stones.

“Well,” said the Morningstar, lounging on his throne. Like the demons, Hell had warped his appearance toward chaos and decay, but he was even more mutable and less a part of reality and currently looked like a man in the shape of an ember burning with a pale purple fire. “Well, well, well. What’s your explanation for your failure this time?” Belial tried to speak, but he simply couldn’t find the words.

“The first time,” the Morningstar continued, “You claimed that the war ended at a draw because their weapons all broke when the first murder was committed with bare hands. The second time, you claimed that Lust got in your way because one of the warlords thought the leader of the enemy looked like their former mate. Then there was the debacle with Lamech, so, tell me, what’s the excuse this time. I bet it’s extra pathetic.”

“It’s … it’s …” and it was then that Belial realized exactly what the problem was. “It’s the Fall.”

“What?” the Monringstar shouted, his voice like a cone of the sun’s flame, his words reverberating in the air like the drumming cadence at the beginning and the end of creation. “My plan, my ultimate plan, has made your job more difficult, has it?”

“It has made war something that ends, my lord, that’s all. They know that they’re mortal now. Recall, we demons were created before Man was even created, when were all guessing at what animal The Presence and his court would use as the model for the pinnacle of their creation. I was made the Demon of War because the other primates, they’ll fight to the last of them if given half a chance.”

“And those primates, you’re saying that they don’t know that they can die, and humans do?”

“No. Well, yes and no. Humans know that they can die, but they’ve also learned what it means to live, and that working together is their greatest strength. An ape might work for someone towards an end a few days or a few weeks hence, but humans think they can see far, far into the future.”

“They’re deluded,” the Morningstar said with a sneer.

“Yes, but they’re also planners, especially when it comes to survival. No matter how vicious the war, one of them’s eventually going to realize that they need to talk and come to terms of peace,” Belial finally dared to stand and almost immediately regretted it. His body wasn’t mortal, but it could be damage and the long fall to Hell had taken a toll. Nevertheless, he stood as straight as he could.

“You made me for war,” he said, “and I can bring you war, but I can’t bring you annihilation, my lord.”

“That’s unfortunate,” the Morninstar said, with a sly smile like the last setting of the last star. “I really do need annihilation.”

“Please, my lord, I’ll …” The Morningstar held up a hand and Belial stopped.

“I do not need your whining words in my ears to know what justice you will face,” the Morningstar said. He uncurled himself from his throne and stepped toward his minion, stopped just when the heat of his presence became uncomfortable, then leaned forward until his face was close enough to Belial’s that the demon could hear the sizzling of his own flesh. “You’re banished,” the Morningstar said. “Banished from my realm until you have succeeded in annihilating humanity, as was your purpose, or you’ve fallen to The Presence in the effort. And so,” the Morningstar flicked a finger and Belial flew back up to the surface of the Earth, “begone.”

Belial lay on the ground for a long time before the feeling returned to his limbs, and he began to wish that it hadn’t. They were shattered in a dozen places, and he could feel that what passed for organs in his body were just as damaged. He would heal quickly, but it would still be a week or two of agony. He ground his teeth, curls of sulphur past his teeth.

“I will be back, Morningstar,” he vowed. “I will be back and you will bow to me.”

No Slouch

“Don’t worry” the preacher says

“The world’s only getting worse” and they laugh

The frame’s bent, the foundation’s cracked

The floor sags and entropy marches on

But we’ve got this toolbox in my shed

And a friend with a truck and tow-rope

There’s wood and cinderblock in the garage

And these hands and those hands and yours

The centre can’t hold forever, I know

And that bastard gyre ever-widens

But we might as well try, we rough beasts

We might as well.

The Lady Detectives

 In the early 1940s, Sentinel Comics was pumping out dozens of titles a month, with most of them ending up either on the newstands or in the hands of G.I.s, and for the latter group, it was clear that they were interested in three things: Cowboys, Legacy, and lady heroes who weren't afraid to show a little skin and kick a little butt.

One of their top-selling titles was The Flying Tigress, which featured the adventures of Mei Tran, a "Chinaman" who worked as secretary to an army general* in the Pacific Theatre. When she got wind of a predicament the Army couldn't solve, she'd put on a literal catsuit and solve it with her "kung fu magic." The comics were deeply, deeply racist and anti-Asian, but immensely popular, not the least because of her "exotic beauty." SC printed and distributed posters depicting Flying Tigress in costume, most of them going to soldiers overseas, and they were so sought after that there are reports of men getting into fist fights over them, and they're among the most valuable SC memorabilia of that time.

Meanwhile, over in Two-Fisted Comics, Detective Sweet moved from back-up feature to frontliner several times. By day, she's Esther Attar, a wealthy socialite and younger sister to a police detective who frequently finds himself in over his head, moving Esther to don a man's suit and gas mask and set out to solve the crime and save her brother, using perfume-based gadgets and gizmos to save the day. When she moved to a frontliner, the man's suit changed to a woman's cut and her popularity only increased.

Science fiction heroines and magical women were popular as well, with Lady Taara, Supreme Scientist Of Earth and Lady Lama being among the most popular.

As such, it was natural that Sentinel Comics would create a title that put all four ladies in the same comic. Utterly ignoring that Taara is from the 34th century and Flying Tigress is stationed out of Indonesia somewhere, the Lady Detectives comic featured the four female characters solving crime and fighting supervillains, and it should've been lightning in a bottle. It wasn't, though, and was cancelled after only ten issues.

Fans and academics have puzzled over why the title just didn't work, but the most common and simplest theory is this: it was just too cheesecake. As I said, the boys overseas wanted some sexy ladies, but they also wanted some buttkicking, and The Lady Detectives was just too light on action. It was also a half-mag, but they still insisted on putting a pin-up in every issue. The printing just wasn't good enough to sustain it, resulting in smeary, difficult to discern pin-up art. Most of the characters would vanish by the end of the war, never to return, although Lady Lama shows up in a more recent title and eagle-eyed readers have spotted a Flying Tigress poster in Unity's locker.

* The general's name and appearance varied wildly through the title. He starts as General Millcroft, an older man in a snappy uniform, then reappears as General Mills, a handsome middle-aged man, and in the later run of the comic has a decidedly Patton-like appearance and is generally called "General Willis," although in one memorable scene a character refers to him as "General Willis" while the nameplate on his desk clearly says "General Mills."

My Son

 These are my son's socks.

He tends to "dress down," as they say, preferring

elastic waists

plain T-shirts

even plainer hoodies

Looking at him, it's hard to see any sort of pattern, but these are my son's socks

At first, we thought he liked socks that had a video game or comic book theme but, no, it turns out that

he just likes patterns

They're usually hidden, these patterns

behind pants with ripped knees

food stains

some old and faded

but they're there

Complex patterns

sometimes repeating

sometimes unique

always colorful

and interesting

and shockingly bright

These are my son('s socks)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness: A Summary

 TMNT And Other Strangeness is a standalone tabletop roleplaying game, published by Palladium Games and based not on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon franchise, but on the original series of comics by Eastman and Laird. It was published in 1985, only two years before the cartoon’s release, and reaction to the game, and use of its rules, was heavily coloured by the cartoon. It uses the “spine” of Palladium’s “Multiversal” ruleset, with additional rules from Eric Wujcik, and they get along like chocolate and peanut butter, if the chocolate in question is from the antimatter universe. I'll be referring to my copy of the book, the eighth printing of the Revised Edition, from 1989.

For those who aren’t aware, the very kid-friendly cartoon about a quartet of “radical dudes” who stop fantastic, gonzo villains from taking over the world, who always get back home for pizza and, oh yeah, are anthropomorphic turtles, started out as a comic book series that combined the grim and gritty art and writing of Frank Miller’s Daredevil with the tropes of “funny animal” comics. Kids expecting cute and adorable characters instead got the Terror Bears, a clear parody of Care Bears, but with brain-melting psychic powers instead of the Care Bear Stare, and Dr. Feral, a mad scientist twisting animals into new and terrifying shapes.

This, combined with a multistep, complicated and opaque character creation system, made for a game that was perhaps not ideally suited to the, “I just wanna play Leonardo” crowd. Okay, enough preamble - on to character creation!

In the first step, you roll three six-sided dice to determine each of your attributes, and you do this eight times, assigning each to an attribute, in order. In the original printing, and multiple subsequent printings, it refers to their being eight attributes and then lists seven of them, “I.Q., M.E., P.S., P.P., P.E., P.B., and Spd.” Get accustomed to this kind of attention to detail. The “roll six-sided dice in order” thing is similar to attribute generation in Dungeons And Dragons, and similarly if you have a 16 or higher in a given attribute, you get bonuses. Given the way averages work in D&D, this is annoying, but TMNT adds a further level to it: if you roll a sixteen or higher, you roll another six-sided die and add it to your total. So, yeah, you rolled a 4 for P.S. and someone else in the group rolled a 24, and now you’ll be expected to play your character as an utter physical weakling, every week. Fun!

The attributes stand for Intelligence, Mental Endurance, Physical Strength, Physical Prowess, Physical Endurance, Physical Beauty and Speed. These are pretty self-explanatory. The missing one, Mental Affinity, denotes your charisma and personality.

Aficionados of the Palladium games know what comes next: charts! So many charts. There are a variety of sourcebooks, including one with dinosaurs, and a bunch set in a post-apocalyptic future, covering North America, South America, Australia and other places,* each one with its own set of charts. The order does differ a bit, but you usually start by rolling to determine what animal you are and what turned you into a mutant animal, then actually building your animal character, then determining your equipment, then your alignment, your experience level (we’re almost done, I swear), your skills and your equipment. Yes, I already mentioned equipment. This book was made in the before times, when gaming had yet to evolve editors.

I should clarify, too, that you really aren’t supposed to pick things out, at all, ever. If there’s a chart, you should always, always roll on that chart. It doesn’t matter if this results in a mouse gladiator, that’s what the dice intended, and you WILL play it. This is a common feature in the Palladium Games, and one of the most common house rules is to gleefully ignore it.

Let’s break those steps down:

Step One: Cause Of Mutation

This can involve a series of charts, but you eventually determine if you were exposed to ooze accidentally, created in a lab, or time travel or something weirder still. This also determines your skills, often with yet another roll on another table. More on those in their proper section. This isn’t the last time I’ll be talking about character options out of order.

Somewhere in this step, you also determine the animal you’ll be, not down to the species, always, but at least to the genus.

Step Two: Build Your Animal

Once you’ve determined your animal type, you get three basic stats: Size Level, Build and Total BIO-E. What’s BIO-E? No one really cares what it stands for, just that it’s the points that you spend to alter your animal. See, you start out as the animal, unmutated, and spent those points alter their Size Level, and their four major attributes:

Hands

Biped

Speech

Looks

These are rated from None to Partial to Full. None doesn’t mean they’re non-existent, but rather that they’re completely animalistic. None Hands means that they have paws or hooves, Partial Biped means that they stand and move like a bear, and Full Looks means that they look as close to human as they can get - not necessarily fully human, but close. As a general rule, you can make a character that has Full Hands, Biped and Speech and is of roughly human size, which matches, but, well, it’s broken.

Remember when I said that you start with the unmutated animal? You kind of don’t. In addition to adjusting the four dials mentioned above, and your Size Level, you also buy your animal’s typical characteristics. Let’s take the mighty elephant as an exemplar.

You start as a creature with Size Level 20, a Short build, and no tusks, trunk, big ears or thick skin. You have no hands, you’re totally nonbipedal, and can't speak, but you're an elephant. I mean, you don't look like one, but it says right on your character sheet that you are one. Buying those elephant traits costs 30 BIO-E. We have no starting BIO-E, so we have to reduce our Size Level to get some.

I should note at this point that the section describing the characteristics of the various animal types starts on page 29, but the chart with the Size Levels is back on page 10. Sandwiched in between are the experience and skills sections which, again, are a later stage. That stage also includes determining our starting equipment, but that comes after Animal Types because this book hates us and wants us to cry.

Anyhow, we’re back on that chart - so we have to go down to Size Level 14. Based on our Short build, we’re 60+1d6 inches tall. Yeah. We’re an elephant that’s shorter than an average adult man, and we still don’t have hands, can’t walk and can’t speak. If we want to be able to do all of these things - and what’s the point in having a TMNT character that can’t strike a cool pose and drop a sick burn on a Foot Clan Ninja while clutching a culturally appropriative melee weapon in its fist - they we need 30 more BIO-E, which takes down to Size Level 8, making us 36+1d6 inches.

Who’s a wee little pachyderm man? WE are. Oh, and those tusks that we paid for? They cost us 10 BIO-E, or two Size Levels. And why? They’re intended for us to use them as natural weapons, but it doesn’t tell us how much damage they do, anywhere, and given that damage for other natural weapons goes from 1d8 to 2d12, we’re just plain guessing. Board might give us a clue - they have Large Tusks that do 2d6 damage, so I'd probably go with that.

I should note, I plucked the elephant out because it was the first one that caught my eye, but this is the way the book works out - if you want all of the cool stuff, your character will quite often be pocket-sized.

Oh, I should mention - your Size Level can adjust your attributes. Between Size Levels 6 and 10 is the “butter zone” where you only get bonuses - any lower and you get penalties to Physical Strength and … I.Q? Sure, everyone knows small people aren’t smart, I guess. Larger, and you have penalties on Speed.

This is, frankly, the biggest letdown of the whole system. This was a time in game design where there was an emphasis on having players make “hard choices” when building characters - you shouldn’t be completely happy with your character, or the options available to them because … well, no one every gave me a good reason for that, and so I usually adjusted their characters so they were roughly the creature they wanted them to be.

Step Three: Equipment

It’s shopping time! Palladium Games books are famous/infamous for having long lists of detailed descriptions of equipment that have very little difference between them, mechanically. The TMNT book's equipment section is relatively slim, but does have lots of lovingly rendered pictures of ninja weapons.

We rolled up the money we have to spend during step one, so now we flip forward to page 63, where we’ve made an oddly smooth transition from the combat rules into the equipment section.

It’s worth noting, by the book as written, we might have some skill with weapons, but we haven’t actually chosen our weapon skills yet. In addition, we have a bunch of other things that we can buy for skills that we don’t have yet. Again, smart players realized that you should pick skills first, and it’s not actually made entirely clear in the book’s layout that we’re actually supposed to buy equipment now or later, but at least one version of the character creation steps tells us to do this third, so here we are.

Step Four: Alignment

There are seven different alignments, but, realistically, you’re, like, ten years old - you’re probably picking from the Selfish or Good alignments, of which there are four. I genuinely dislike alignment systems because, as here, they give you an ethos, and a poorly defined one, rather than giving you individual drives that you can use to determine your character’s ethos. As we did back in the day, we’re going to ignore it.

Step Five: Experience

Thanks to Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of RPGs had a level-based system, where you start weak and, through play, become considerably more powerful. TMNT goes from level 1 to level 15 and, thanks to the increases in skill, hit points and other traits, a difference of just four or five levels can make a character practically untouchable by those of lower levels.

As with other major concepts in this game, this is presented in a patchwork quilt. We first get two pages of philosophical musing, accompanied by two charts. A little more than 40 pages later, we get a single page that tells us combat skills and how they’re modified by level. Other references to level and experience are scattered throughout, most especially in the next section.

Step Six: Skills

Skills are … a mess. They’re percentile based, from 1%-98%, modified by your attributes and sometimes your background, animal type, level, and probably some other factors I’m currently blanking on. There’s a lot of math.

You can get skills in everything from fishing to explosives, but in a game that’s based on a comic book about a group of people tracking down bad guys and following clues, the only real investigate skill is Tracking. Well, there’s one other skill that sounds useful - “Intelligence” - but it’s mentioned in just one spot and doesn’t get written up, at all, so we have no idea how it works. It’s also the name of one of our eight attributes, so perhaps that’s for the best.

That skill shows up as an item in a “skill program,” a small suite of skills that you might be able to pick as an option depending on what you rolled for background or mutation cause, and is copied and pasted from a different Palladium RPG, but only the description of the skills made it into this book. I didn’t check to see if all of the skills show up here, or if all of the skills in the main list can, in fact, be selected, because I have things I need to do other than write this blog post. I’m going to assume that this isn’t an isolated incident.

There are physical skills that boost your physical attributes, like Body Building and Gymnastics. If you take enough of them, you can boost your attributes quite high, which seems appropriate for a game that’s heavily focused on physical combat. I generally focused on getting as many of these skills as possible.

Another branch of skills deserves a special mention, though, in the specific context of TMNT: Weapon Proficiencies. Honestly, if you don’t have a vested interested in how you can wield a kusari gama or naginta, why have you read this deep? This is, what, 3000 words about an RPG that’s almost 40 years old?

Anyhow, different backgrounds allow you to select from different sets of Weapon Proficiency (“W.P.”) skills. Like an ouroboros of suckitude, this leads us back to …

Step Three Electric Boogaloo: Equipment: The Quickening

Like any good writer of horror, I have saved the most terrifying moment for the very end: the sai, the iconic weapon of one of the title characters, is listed in the equipment section, along with all the necessary stats. There is absolutely no indication here of which of the Weapon Proficiencies one takes in order to be able to wield it. If you look at Raphael’s entry at the end of the book, you’ll see “W.P. Sai” listed as a skill, but nowhere else in the book other than a chart used to generate Foot Clan mooks.

The common defense I’ve heard for this is that this is a book that trusts you to be able to make up your own skills as you need to, to fill the needs of your game. My counterargument is to simply say that I will need documentary proof that this was actually an intentional choice and not an editorial oversight, because the latter seems far more likely, given everything we’ve been through.

The Rest Of The Game

Combat gets its own rather lengthy section to talk about exactly how one goes about kicking people in the face in this game. Palladium combat isn’t the worst RPG combat I’ve ever seen, but it’s on the list. It combines all of the math we’ve seen already, plus a roll of a twenty-sided dice and the addition and subtraction of a remarkable number of modifiers. In my day, most players drew out a little chart of the various kinds of attacks their characters were capable of and dreaded being asked to show their arithmetic. I didn't feel like telling them that I would absolutely never ask them to do so because I was pretty sure I couldn't figure it out either.

One question you might have about combat: What if you don’t have the requisite Weapon Proficiency? If your character doesn’t have W.P. Sword and there’s a katana lying there on the ground, can you pick it up and use it? There’s nothing to say you can, and only the fact that you don’t have W.P. Sword on your sheet to say you can’t. Depending on who’s running the game, they might let you use it with a penalty, or it might be like the 80s era point and click games where you keep clicking on something that ought to be clickable, but isn’t.

There is no clear section on how to use skills or when they come up. Some skills describe in detail how to use them, and what failure and success represent, while others just give a barebones description. “Forging,” for example, says that you can use it to make fake documents, and that “Skill forgers can recognize others counterfeits at a 6%.” That’s it. That’s what you get. If the person running the game agrees, you can make a hundred fake passports with a single roll, then make a second roll to make a slug coin that will bamboozle a Chuck E. Cheese arcade game, two tasks that are exactly as difficult, apparently.

There’s a section on building adventures that, yes, involves a number of new charts for making minions and bad guys, as well as a couple of short adventures and a list of characters from the TMNT universe, including the four shellheads themselves. There are some short sample adventures that basically present a group of bad guys and make some vague hand motions in the direction of how your players can meet up with them, and wear. There's a reference to how encountering one of the bad guys will be a lot worse if the players meet it in the sewers. We don't actually know why that's the case - there's nothing about how fighting in a sewer is any different from any other kind of fight.

There’s a set of rules for how to make your own Animal Type, rules that the book itself ignores, and that later books will laugh at maniacally.

And that’s it.

Final Thoughts: Why?

There are a lot of “why” questions going through your head right now, I’m sure, but somewhere near the top is, “Why did people play this game?” The truth, more often than not, is that we didn’t. Most of us spent our afternoons rolling on endless tables, making character after character. Occasionally we’d pick out a favourite one and throw it up against a friend’s in a sort of gladiatorial combat, but it was mostly about making our own mutant animals, but it was mostly about using character creation as a game in and of itself.

I ran a few brief games with the system, and they were reasonably fun, but we were barely in the double digits and the opaque nature of the rules left us wanting something simpler. I sincerely believe that one could make a TMNT game that actually works, and could even get back some of the feel of that character creation mini-game.

There’s a popular position that a good RPG does absolutely everything that the people at the gaming table want it to, and I disagree. The same way that the most basic verb, “to be,” is irregular in so many ways, I sincerely think that we are naturally attracted to systems that don’t quite work. TMNT And Other Strangeness’ major problem is that there are so many things that don’t work.

Still, though, in writing this up, I found I still have my copy of Transdimensional, which has dinosaurs in it. Now, where are my dice …

What 13th Age Does

 13th Age is from Rob Heinsoo and Johnathan Tweet, and is the combination of 3rd and 4th edition you might expect, but with some pretty major twists.

1. There are 10 levels, not 20. You ramp up, though - when you roll weapon damage, you roll a number of dice equal to your level, and might roll MORE dice depending on your class. HP ramps up as well. 2. There's no XP, you just go up a level every 13 encounters or so (this is actually the same as it should be based on 3rd and 4th encounter math). 3. Background instead of skills. Players are encouraged to make these more specific than just "Butcher" or "Wizard." After all, if you're "Apprentice to Mal-vel, Butcher to the Archmage," then you can use that background not just for non-combat use of a cleaver, but for things related to wherever you decide Mal-vel, or issues related to the Archmage. 4. One Unique Thing. Every PC gets one of these things and, whatever it is, it's always true. This could be "Last Son Of The House of Antresuga," with the campaign at least partly focused around that. I had a monk character who was Definitely Not A Bear. Yes, he was very large and hairy, liked eating honeycomb to get at the grubs and his melee attacks did slashing damage, but he was Definitely Not A Bear. It was just ... fun, a way of making him stand out from the crowd. 5. "Flat" Monster Design. The DM chooses one attack from the two, maybe three, that the monster has available, rolls a d20 and then does a flat amount of damage, plus possible extra effects. And that's IT. No long lists of spells or giant list of abilities, just a few, limited options. Which means, honestly, that the options are that much greater. You can have an ancient red dragon in a fight with three or four guardians, ALL of them with a unique set of abilities, and you don't get lost because while they're unique, they're limited to just those abilities. 6. The number on the d20 matters. This might be my favourite part - monsters will have notes like, "Natural even hit - 6 ongoing fire damage," or "Natural odd miss - slashing damage equal to monster level," and that's a reference not to the total of the roll, but just what shows up on the die face. Heroes have these as well and classes like the bard and fighter get LOTS of them, so just about every time the player rolls, they'll have options to choose from for what that means.

7. The escalation die.

Fights should start with the players missing MOST of the time. Like, 60% of the time, but on the second round you put out a d6 turned to a 1 - everyone gets that bonus to their d20 rolls. The next round, it goes up to 2, then 3, until players get a +6. The net effect is that players learn to not use their best attacks on the first turn, when they're likely to whiff, and let's them take big, stupid risks.

8. It assumes familiarity with f20.

"F20" is the general term for games where you explore exotic locations where you have exotic encounters, with rolls of the d20 as the primary driver of success. 13th Age is by two professional game designers, and while they do explain what they're talking about in some frankly hilarious sidebars, it assumes that you're looking to play this game for is core activity. This is a disadvantage for people who aren't terribly familiar with games of this type, but a serious advantage for those who are. The system's not exactly stripped down, but it's laser-focused on its core activity, so you can quite easily bolt other subsystems onto it without impacting the math too much.

https://www.13thagesrd.com/

The Parable Of The Two Women At The Coffee Shop

And Jim came to the LORD and said, "Hey, I want to write a parable."

And the LORD said, "Cool, sounds good. Make sure it's short. Parables are short."

Jim said, "But, aren't parables a thing that God does, not man?"

"Well, biblical parables, sure, but you aren't writing a biblical parable, right?"

"No, of course not."

"Good. Hey, can I hear it? I like it when My children speak to me."

"Wait, when did you start capitalizing 'My?'"

"14th century or so. It fell out of fashion. Typeface issues."

"Ah."

...

"Jim, the parable?"

"Right! So, the moderate white church is like two women who agree to meet at a coffee shop. One of them orders them coffees and ..."

"Names. If you only have two characters in a parable, they should have names, even if it's just a title, and as soon as you can get them in."

"Ah. The moderate white church is like a Christian woman and an atheist woman who agree to meet at a coffee shop. The Christian woman orders coffees for both of them, and she's pretty sure she orders the very specific coffee the atheist woman asked for, but she's thinking so much about the conversation they're going to have that she thinks maybe she forgot."

"Wow, what kind of conversation could do that?"

"Oh, when a Christian person sits down one-on-one with a non-Christian person, their church will have taught them that they absolutely must bring up Christianity and 'preach the gospel to the unbeliever,' even if it doesn't make any sense in context."

"Right, yeah, that. I interrupted you - go on."

"So, the Christian woman is sitting there, rehearsing the conversation in her mind, trying to figure out what her friend might say in response and desperately hoping that the non-Christian woman follows the script, when the non-Christian comes in and sits down.

'Sweet Jesus fuck, what a day,' she says ..."

*winces*

"What? She's a non-Christian. She swears. Heck, some Christians swear."

"I know, it's just that you're kind of limiting your audience with that."

"I'll use asterisks then. 'Sweet Jesus f***, what a day. Really need some caffeine,' she says, and sits. The Christian woman starts the conversation she'd planned as the non-Christian woman slugs down a mouthful of coffee beverage. The non-Christian woman doesn't hear the Christian woman's carefully planned opening because she was clearly about to talk about her day and says, 'What?

The Christian woman repeats her opening salvo in the salvation fusillade, but is interrupted when the non-Christian woman throws up all over the table. Messily. The non-Christian woman says, 'you made sure they used soy milk, right?' and the Christian woman responds that she was more concerned with her eternal soul, and not her drink order. The non-Christian replies that she's not lactose-intolerant, she's actually allergic, and the room's spinning, so would she please get out her EpiPen. Then the non-Christian woman collapses to the ground and starts gurgling.

The Christian woman says that she's concerned for the non-Christian woman's eternal salvation, and the non-Christian woman croaks out one final, 'Screw you, Barbara,' and dies."

...

"Wow."

"What did you think?"

"That was kind of a lot, Jim. Parables usually come with an explanation."

"Oh, well, the moderate white church has kind of always been here, every since the 17th or 18th century or so. People who mean well, and occasionally do well, but often let bad stuff happen to people because it would seem awkward or rude to stop it. Sometimes they even cause the problem to begin with, but rather than taking ownership of their role, or acting to be better, they persist in focusing on salvation even while the problem is ongoing, or even getting worse."

"Yeah, that does happen. Too often, honestly. It's not a bad parable. Too simplistic to be canonized, but I'm glad you told it to me. As I said, I like it when My children speak to me."

"Thanks, LORD, that means a lot."

"You're welcome, Jim. You always are."

MST3K Top 25: #23, "Horror At Party Beach"

When you think of MST3K, you probably think of a black and white 50s/60s scifi movie being riffed on by three figures in profile. There's a reason for that - they did a lot of black and white sci movies, but, well, they aren't good. They're also short, and pretty repetitive and frequently burdened with a whole lot of sexism. I mean, yes, Jack Frost has the father reassert his "natural" manly leadership, but it's based on traditional Slavic folklore - bad gender dynamics are to be expected, and the setting is pure fantasy.

And, holy crap, every time I watch this movie, I forget just how racist it is. First, though, the plot. Sorry, the "plot."

In a small coastal town, kids are partying on the beach while, out at sea, people dump nuclear waste overboard which immediately causes a human skull to mutate into a giant humanoid figure that looks like someone jammed a clam on top of an old-timey diving suit and then jammed a bunch of hot dogs in its mouth.

The first victim of these monsters is, of course, the girlfriend of our main protagonist, a blue-eyed, blond-haired scientist-type. The rest of the movie is taken up with the scientists coming up with enough clues to figure out how to kill the monsters while they run around killing young women. Almost exclusively young women. Frequently really dull-witted, under-dressed young women. Yeah, it's pretty darned skeevy.

Eventually they figure out that the creatures are vulnerable to elemental sodium, get a bunch of the stuff and ... throw it at them? Frankly, their delivery system appears to be government-issue clips of sodium exploding, as it is wont to do when exposed to water.

With a running time of less than 80 minutes, they still manage to make a movie where basically nothing interesting happens. There are a few things though:

1. The costumes are gloriously derpy. This isn't unusual for a scifi movie from this era, but they're given long, loving shots, in close-up, and more than once.

2. The initial scene where our hero and his girlfriend encounter what Crow calls, "Jean Paul Sartre's biker gang." They're almost entirely non-threatening, are built up as villains for an entire scene and then just ... disappear after their one confrontation with the hero.

3. The science talk. It's long, it's boring, it's deeply implausible and I just love all of it.

Less loved are the scenes with the black housekeeper. They're dreadfully, horribly racist. Seriously, just gross.

The host segments are excellent here, especially their surf rock spectacular, "Sodium," but otherwise there's not much here to recommend the movie.

Rating: C-. This is a cookie-cutter black and white monster movie and it's just not a whole lot of fun to watch without commentary.

MST3K Top 25: #24, "Jack Frost"

Continuing in my reviews of some person's top 25 list of MST3k movies, it's Jack Frost!

No, not you.

Former a sort of troika with two other movies, Jack Frost is one of several Russo-Finnish productions that the boys and the bots endured, and it's probably my favourite of the lot.

Produced by a film company with far more love of their native lands' mythology than they have moviemaking talent, this is, in its essence, a retelling of a whole bunch of Slavic stories, with its main set piece a story in which a young and powerful hero learns an important lesson about humility in pursuit of his lady love, a young woman who lives a Cinderella-like life of misery in a house with a horribly mother, a browbeaten father and an ugly stepsister who is the apple of her mother's eye. I mean, a beet of her mother's eye. Beets are Russian, aren't they?

Anyhow, if you've ever read Joseph's Campbells, "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" or watched a George Lucas movie, you know about how this movie goes. It begins, as they always do, with a young, beautiful woman named Nastenka being threatened with a horrible beating if she doesn't knit a pair of socks in a single night, which means that she has to plead with the dawning sun to stay down for just a few stitches longer, while out in the woods her future husband Ivan beats up a bunch of bad guys, throwing their clubs into orbit, before ignoring the admonition of a mushroom-headed wizard and pridefully attempting to shoot a mother bear with her cubs in order to impress Nastenka, causing him to gain the head of a bear. Y'know, the usual.

Not you either.

So, cursed with the head of a bear, Ivan goes off to do good deeds in an attempt get back in the mushroom wizard's good graces, and hopefully in Nastenka's good graces as well. After driving off several groups of people with his horrifying bear-headedness, he encounters an old woman who needs helps getting to her home in the mountains. She rides him bear-back* all the way home, finding out when she gets there that she's blind. The mushroom wizard restores Ivan's fine-looking head and he tears off looking for Nastenka.

Meanwhile, Nastenka's put back to the grinding wheel, working hard for her mother in an effort to get the ugly stepsister married off. It works out in one of the ways you expect it will - the mother does everything she can to hide Nastenka's beauty, Nastenka remains pure and faithful to herself and when she tries to sacrifice herself to help someone else (the stepsister, in this case), she's revealed to be as beautiful on the outside as she is on the inside. Naturally, her mother commands her father to take her out to the woods to abandon her. Horrified at the thought, he decides to go against her, but rather than let him face her wrath, she sacrifices herself again and jumps off.

That's the stuff.

Then she meets Jack Frost! Finally! Near the end of the movie! He's actually a pretty nice guy in this iteration, basically just a dude responsible for bringing on winter with a magic staff that you must never touch or you fall into eternal slumber. He takes her off to his place to warm up, then takes off, leaving behind his staff because of course he does.

Meanwhile, Ivan can't find his beloved and so consults one of my favourite characters in all of folklore: Baba Yaga. She flies across the sky in a mortar piloted by a pestle and lives in a cabin that runs around the land on chicken feet. She's basically immortal, is always cranky and is typically either the villain of the tale, or the person who tells the hero what they need to know, but only after they beat her challenges.

In this case, the challenge is evidently stuffing her into her own oven. A couple of times. Tough old bird, that Baba Yaga. He snags a magic sled and heads over to Jack Frost's where, if you've been following the plot at all, you know that Nastenka has touched Jack Frost's staff* and now sleeps in a deep, magical slumber. Does she awaken from it when Ivan confesses his love for her? Yes, yes she does.

They return to town, with Jack Frost who, seeing how terrible the ugly stepsister and her mom are, drives the ugly sister away on a pig-driven sled with a dowry of ravens. And, of course, gender balance is restored and the henpecked husband is restored to being the head of his house as Ivan marries Nastenka in what amounts to a cutscene.

Fin.

Whatta Fin. The movie is ridiculous, but the skits are even better. Mike dresses up like Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, Bobo and Brain Guy have a petty squabble after spending too much together, Crow gets turned into a bear and eats Tom Servo - it's just a great episode of MST3K all around.

Rating: B+. It's not traditional Western filmmaking, and it's goofy as all heck, but it's also fun and fast-paced and is really supposed to make you laugh. I think that's what a lot of people miss about mythology in general - it's supposed to be funny. Odysseus telling the Cyclopes that his name is "Nothing" is supposed to make you laugh; Robin of Locksley being genuinely terrible in a fistfight is intended to make him a little mockable. The humour here is ... Finno-Russian, but it's supposed to be there, and I would watch this movie without Mike and the bots. Well, I would, except I've watched it about half a dozen times with them, so...

* Yes, I see what I did there.

MST3K Top 25: #25, "Alien From L.A."

A while back, my wife sent me a top 25 list of MST3K episodes, and we've gradually been working our way through them during quarantine, at the rate of one or two a week. The boys love Mike and/or Joel and/or Jonah and the bots, so it's a nice time to gather 'round and laugh together. Because Facebook is basically my living room and I generally end up talking about bad movies with people in my living room, imma gonna do that now.

 

The first movie on the list is "Alien From L.A.," a Golan Globus production directed by Albert Pyun. People who are at all into B-movies are already groaning and rolling their eyes - Golan Globus and Cannon Films are among the worst studios ... ever, really, and Albert Pyun was one of their favourite directors because he was cheap, and worked fast. He's probably best known for the 1990 Captain America movie, which is as terrible a movie as can exist and is a part of the genuinely terrible decisions that nearly drove Marvel Comics out of business.

 

That’s a story for another time, though, as there’s more than enough terribleness in “Alien From L.A.” for me to talk about. The movie came out in 1988, and is … loosely science fiction, so, of course, it had to have a gimmick. The first involves a shy, unattractive, nerdy heroine making a journey to the center of a hollow earth where she meets threatening weirdos who teach her the real meaning of self-esteem, such that when she returns to the surface, she is a bolder, more confident person.

The second, stranger gimmick, is that the shy, nerdy heroine is played by Kathy Ireland. Yes, that Kathy Ireland. In order to make us believe that Kathy frickin’ Ireland is unattractive, they dress her as frumpily as possible, give her glasses so massive and thick they could be used to focus an industrial laser and instruct her to talk in a high-pitched voice that sounds like some combination of nails on a chalkboard and a small child screaming. It’s genuinely the worst part of the entire part, and you’d better believe that Mike and the bots take every opportunity they can to make fun of it.

 

Our movie begins with her dad falling to his apparent death “in Africa,” before cutting to Los Angeles where young Wanda Saknussemm (that is not a spelling error) is dumped by her hunky boyfriend (Don Michael Paul) because they’re incompatible. And, frankly, he’s right, because she’s freakishly annoying and he has at least the vestiges of a personality.

 

She gets the letter about her father’s death, which leads to some immediate questions. Her father’s “death” consisted of going up a set of stairs in what looked to be an Egyptian tomb in the basement of an abandoned house, completely alone. I mean, saying that her father vanished would make sense, but the plot requires that she be pining for her father for the entire movie, so, here we are. By the way, as Mike and the bots point out, her emotional reaction to absolutely everything is staring absently into the middle distance, so we don’t get much actual pining. This is par for the course with a Pyun film - the plot and characters just sort of mill around on screen for the running time of the movie, and then it ends. Aren’t you looking forward to the plot description?

 

Well, it’s pretty short, really. Wanda heads off to “Africa,” where she goes to the same abandoned house and falls down the same hole at the top of the same stairs. She wakes up in an underground dystopia that looks like every single lava level that every single video game in the 90s had, with mostly red and purple rocky backdrops and periodic gouts of flame. There she and an underground dweller face off against a group of toughs where she learns that the underground is pretty much a hardscrabble dystopia, and loses the first layer of her unattractiveness - those massive glasses and her frumpy over-sweater.

 

And here’s where the meandering begins. She and the underground dweller, who inexplicably is attempting an Australian accent, go to the big city where it turns out that people from the surface world are wanted, for reasons. Well, sort of. For some reason, the powers that be don’t want anyone to be aware of the surface world, which is why they announce that she’s in the city over their public address system. After a costume change, she ends up hunted in a confusing series of “action” shots where she loses and gains at least two additional male love interests before finding her father and returning to the surface world. We close with her confronting her formal male love interest, now dressed as one expects Kathy Ireland to be dressed in the 80s - in a revealing bathing suit.

 

That’s … that’s it. That’s the movie, folks. It’s one hour and twenty-seven minutes of Kathy Ireland talking in a high-pitched, nasally voice and a whole bunch of questionable costume choices.

 

Final Rating: D-. This is a low rating, even for an Albert Pyun file, but even for him this is a cheap, generic sort of movie. There isn’t a single scene worth watching, really, and despite its short running time it still manages to feel plodding and slow. Do not watch without the MST3K crew, or an equal astute group of jokesters.

BLM Nashua Vigil

(I did my best to write down all of the names of the speakers, but I'm sure I got some spellings wrong. If you're reading this and have any corrections, please drop them in the comments. My goal here is to amplify the voices I heard, and I cannot do so nearly as effectively if we don't know whose voices they are.)

Last night, on June 6th, I was the guest of some very gracious hosts. I went to a vigil hosted by Black Lives Matter Nashua and, well, that makes me a guest. The meeting was partly for me, but it wasn't about me. I get that this makes some people uncomfortable, the notion that they're not the center of things, but, as I said, they were gracious and ... well, right to do so.

The vigil was at Greeley Park on Concord Street, which the city closed off for the duration. Not only was Concord Street lined with cars, but I and my companion noticed that basically every single side street was well. Somewhat amusingly, there were still spaces at the park itself, but we allowed that it was all right as they'd need them for some of the more elderly attendees, as well as those with families. There were easily over a thousand people in attendance, after all.

Everyone took some pains to keep socially distant, and everyone was masked. I saw a fair number of people who had their noses sticking out the top of their mask, but, well, that's gonna happen. We're new to this, we're all new to this.

Police presence was minimal - I spotted six officers, and three or four plain clothes officers, and the chief of police was also present. About halfway through the event, a helicopter began circling overhead - I never got a good look at it, but I suspect it was a news helicopter as there was a persistent, though relatively small media presence.

We took up position under a tree with some friends from work and waited for the event to get underway.

First of all, I mentioned this on Facebook, but if you really think that BLM is funded by George Soros, let me assure you that the man is a skinflint on a level that would make Scrooge McDuck think he was a too tight in the purse-strings. They couldn't get the first mic to work, and Jordan, the organizer, attempted to rally the crowd by yelling through a vastly undersized megaphone. He introduced two clergy members, whose names I didn't get, and, well, the first guy didn't have any problems at all.

He prayed for peace, for understanding, for change and for the Lord's guidance. The second clergy person tried to use a megaphone with her mask on. It worked about as well as you'd expect, which is a shame.

The first speaker was Annie Kuster - as I said to my travelling companion, "Hey, it's that lady from my voicemail!" - and while I fault her for a lot of things, I can't fault her for enthusiasm. She charged the stage with that janky mic in hand and belted out a greeting to everyone, ending with a cry of, "Black Lives Matter!" Everyone applauded, as you do, and a guy up front jumped up and started trying to lead a chant of "All Lives Matter."

He was escorted from the premises by a lone officer. As I observed later, I suspect he was not arrested for anything, but that was entirely within his control. Jordan took the stage again and that was when it was made clear to the non-Black folks in the crowd that they were guests in the space tonight, and this was a place for Black voices and experiences. Which is fair. I mean, it's in the name of the event and everything, so it shouldn't've been a surprise to anyone.

The first speaker was Melanie Levesque, senator for the 12th District of New Hampshire. She spoke in measured tones about the Pettus Bridge march during the Civil Rights era, tied it into the demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death and wrapped back around to talking about the systemic issues from the 60s that persist into the present day. While she said that, "the vast majority of law officers are good and just," they are part of a system that makes racial disparity inevitable. She closed with a quote from Barack Obama, "Don't boo, vote."

Next up was Jim Dunchess, the mayor of Nashua, who read a prepared proclamation. I haven't been able to find the text of the proclamation as of this writing, but it was good to see a high official of the city present there. He was calm and conciliatory, every measure a politician, but the sort that seems to actually be getting good done in his city, to look at his record.

Third was Linda Gathright. She spoke for only slightly longer than Annie Kuster, but spoke powerfully. She is the Clerk on criminal justice for the town, and asked that anyone with concerns about interactions with the police let her know about those issues. She called for us, and for the BLM movement to focus on "actionable policies and reforms," ending her speech with the admonition that "black lives are not disposable."

Shoshanna Kelly spoke fourth, and while the others certainly were emotional at times, she started by telling us, "I'm going to try to get through this without crying," and seemed to manage to do so only by speaking with great passion. She talked about George Floyd's daughter saying, "Daddy changed the world," and charged all of us to prove her right. She also spoke in less than glowing terms about the president, and said that "A leader is not elected ... a leader is what you do," and charged us with things that we could do to lead. It was getting dim out at this point, and I was writing in a tiny notebook, so I might've missed one or two, but the gist is:

1. Buy from a Black-owned business

2. Donate

3. Read a book from a black author

4. Listen

5. Come to a Community Conversation*

6. Talk to your kids

7. Ask questions

8. Vote.

On that last one, she commented that, "voting is the difference between fighting the system and changing the system." She closed with, "Black lives are worth it, and America is worth it."

Elaine Davis then came out and sang, "Rise Up," a capella, over a janky microphone on a warm, windy early summer day. She killed it.

Next was Grace Kandecki, who was introduced as a "youth," but carried herself with enviable poise. She was born in the Congo, but spent most of her life in the States. She talked about systemic racism as being an abstract set of standards, cultural norms and laws that produce unequal opportunity for people "of colour," and spoke against increase militarisation.

Kurt Burtram might've been my favourite speaker of the night, if I had to choose. He used humour in the best possible way: to disrupt. His jokes were only occasionally intended to lighten the mood and were usually aimed at the non-Black members of the audience as a friendly but pointed barb. He talked a lot about his family and friends, his personal experiences with racism in New Hampshire. As he put it, "I know who I am: I am not a threat to you." He closed with what seemed to be a gag, doing a genuinely terrible impression of Louis Armstrong as he croaked out, "What A Wonderful World," throwing in jokes about how he'll "only see friends shaking hands after Covid." When we were done singing with him. He put the mic back on the stand and said, simply, "And I think to myself, 'what a wonderful world.'" And left.

Jaden Smith followed up with a poem, whose title I didn't catch. The overall theme was pondering the notion of living in a "world where everyone's colour blind," and how that wouldn't fix the problems that we think it would, ending with a stanza in which she exclaimed her pride and self-worth.

Next was Kendall Reyes, a former NFL defensive end. He spoke unguardedly about his own failures to properly serve the Black community he came from, but said, "We're all here because we want to do better," ending with an admonition that everyone there donated $10 to a cause, or spent 1 hour a week volunteering, we could make a difference.

Nala Doyle was not soft-spoken as she exclaimed that the problem with police wasn't a few bad apples, but a rotten tree, and advocated for demilitarisation of the police and the removal of qualified immunity.

Samantha Searles, the Communications Director for Black Lives Matter Nashua, gave a memorable introduction: "I came from black slaves that could not be killed, a Cherokee who would not be moved, and a white man who loved a black woman before it was legal." She never let the foot off of the gas, going hard after the racist comments of Manchester alderman Joseph Kelly Levasseur, the current president and a lynching in Claremont*. She ended with the argument that, "If you really want change, vote or, better yet, run for office yourself. With what happened in 2016, lack of experience or ability is no longer an argument."

Hutch Mosely is an 8th grader and he's kind of incredible. He spoke with gravitas and ability well beyond his years when he said, "We can be angry all we want, or we can stand up and make a change," closing with a quote from Barack Obama: "We are the change we seek."

Alana Shoat opened with thanks to the crowd, saying, "I've never felt to at home in my community and I've been her my whole life." She talked about the inadequacy of a single month, the shortest in the year, for Black History month, and that the struggle for civil rights was, "not about black people versus white people anymore, or about left versus right anymore, it's about all of us versus injustice," closing with the observation that, "All lives cannot matter until black lives do."

The closing speaker was Jamila Ashanti Scale, who read from a statement that was very powerful and moving - my pull-quote was an admonition to the spirit of George Floyd that "justice will be served and you will not be forgotten." As she spoke, a rainstorm started, and a rainbow formed behind the bandstand she spoke from.

The event closed with a series of statements from Jordan, the organizer of the event, recapping a lot of the points already made, and observing, "We can boo and vote; I think we can multitask," and talked extensively about his radicalization at the death of Sandra Bland, and how mobilized he and the rest of his online friends felt in that moment.

Throughout the even, the victims of injustice were named almost a hundred times - George Floyd, Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and a dozen others.

Apart from the one gentleman who tried to disrupt the event, is was entirely peaceful. I've felt more threatened picking up take-out, which makes me think of Alana Shoat, and makes me hope for a day when she can feel the kind of security I'm privileged to feel every day.

* Police found there was no hate crime because the other kids had put the loop of rope around their necks too, there wasn't proof one of the other boys pushed the black boy with the intent of hanging him, and there were no racial epithets on that specific occasion, although there had been in the past.