The Blog of Roon

Renate finally did lose her temper with Aryk, confronting him with his poor judgment, unsteady temper, and unpredictability. They parted brass rags, Renate informing Aryk that she simply couldn’t trust him—but not for long, as Aryk’s angel Ricard quietly vanished to set up a test of character for Aryk.

Justifiably worried, Aryk went after him, and Renate went after Aryk, only to find the Church inviting Aryk to test himself against Kahan in Kahan’s own Demon World domain, the Red Palace. Offered the choice to go with him or stay behind, loyal Renate naturally went. To do otherwise would be to dishonor Godfrey’s hair-raising chase after her in her prologue, never mind what it would mean to Aryk.

Kahan did his level best to get under Aryk’s skin, by way of breaking Aryk down enough to stop him thinking. A representative sample:

Alan: “You’re here because the Church once saw promise in you, but now thinks that promise is running out. They think you’re an incorrigible loose cannon who can’t follow orders, has no fixed morality, and cheerfully reinterprets events to keep himself on the side of good no matter what happens.”
Alan: “They send people to me because they hope I’ll turn them to my side, thus giving them some opponents they can actually kill for a change.”
Alan: “I got wise to that centuries ago, though. I’m not convinced you’re Kahanite material. For one thing, you can’t rap.”
Aryk: “That’s…. I…. Fuck you!” Aryk balls up his fist.
Alan: “For another, you’re lousy with the comebacks.”

Renate called Aryk to order, whereupon Kahan started in on her. I think she gave as good as she got—little Rennie’s enviably hard to rattle in a social situation—but y’all can decide for yourselves:

Renate: “Aryk,” Renate says, calmly. “Language. And temper. Don’t prove him right.”
Alan: “Finally, you let women boss you around.”
Renate: “Mm. Terrible thing, that, indeed.”
Aryk: “Language, Rennie? Did you forget where we are?”
Renate: “I know where we are, Aryk. It’s a place where they want you to lose control. Think about that.”
Alan: “Just kidding,” Kahan says, laughing.
Alan: “This one’s a damn sight better than you in every category except the rapping.”
Alan: “We beings of Order are androgynous, did you know that? I just take on a male form and mannerisms because some time in the First Age, there got to be this stupid tradition about what men do and what women do.”
Alan: “Turned out, hitting things with big pointy rocks was a Man thing, so I ended up stuck this way.”
Renate: “How sad.”

I don’t know, but I suspect that Kahan’s wry compliment to Renate at Aryk’s expense was sincere, as far as it went. He definitely treated her with respect through the rest of the conversation. By his lights, she might well be a fairly desirable convert; she has definitely held to a strong ethic thus far, even when it’s cost her to do so. I think, though, that her ethics are too ambiguous, too difficult to articulate, too susceptible to constant re-evaluation to fit Kahan’s strict straitjackets. They aren’t well-suited, Renate and Kahan. Just as well.

Kahan turns out to be an unbridled individualist. I expect his faith is popular in Andragar, because they tend to measure everything by the individual also. (I hope Renate meets the Mute Lord, Dian Dan Shi, sometime. That’ll be an interesting conversation—assuming the Mute Lord knows sign language.) Renate has a far better and more nuanced sense of social context, social effort, and balancing individual and group needs; I shall have to figure out how to bring that into the action, because I myself think it’s an Andragarian weak spot. Perhaps some work on emergent behaviors…

Kahan also discussed heresy and schisms in the Church, and I plan to have Renate address that with Aryk. Heresy and schisms are disruptive, certainly, and they create confusion—but Renate differs from Kahan (or, at least, Kahan’s line to Aryk) in thinking them universally to be avoided. She in fact believes they are necessary to change, to adaptation, to growth—whereas Kahan the Uber-Lawful-Neutral, no doubt, considers them evidence of wishy-washy wobbling.

Perhaps schism and heresy aren’t the best change mechanisms the Church could conceivably come up with, but it’s what they’ve got, and rather than focusing on condemnation of the change mechanisms, she thinks Aryk should pay attention to the potential changes. We’ll see how that flies with him. (And I’ll see if we can’t turn Kahan’s stiff-necked changelessness against him. That should be possible.)

She’s also going to try to win Aryk back to the Church proper, which he’s rather down on at the moment. She may or may not succeed, but she thinks she needs to try; she now knows that Ricard, being intertwined with Aryk’s soul deeply enough to share his confusion, can’t really work on convincing him.

Aryk, notably, didn’t commit so much as a single bobble the entire rest of the conversation. He kept his temper, reiterated his faith, and resisted both Kahan’s casual insults and Kahan’s considered blandishments. Renate hasn’t had a chance to tell him so yet, but she is just wildly proud of him for how he handled himself.

The interview ended with the news that Rien had learned of their whereabouts and come hell-for-leather after them, only to be waylaid by his own particular demon enemy, Ghoster the trickster. As it turned out (the next session), Coris went with Rien, and Ghoster had a chamber of illusionary horrors ready for both of them—Aryk dead at Kahan’s hands, and Renate broken in spirit and permanently maimed.

Ghoster, however, overreached himself in his desire to see Rien strut his stuff; “Renate” focused her attention entirely on Rien, ignoring her lover Coris. (I, playing “Renate,” asked Alan whether Ghoster knew of Renate and Coris’s brand-new affair. He said no. So I played that up, as a clue.) Rien smelled a rat, Coris agreed, and the jig is up—until the real Renate and Aryk bust in next session.

She’s going to be ragingly furious. The lying whoreson, to use her likeness to torture people she loves! Aryk may have to hold her back for once, which will be an amusing change.

I think Monrroyo is about to wrap, unfortunately. It started off well, but it’s not dealing well with my scattered attention span (job-hunting is a cast-iron bitch), and I haven’t done a very good job at involving several players with the game.

I may be able to resuscitate it later, with some fresh blood and more work on my part to help the group pull together, but I don’t think this incarnation is going to last. Advice on plug-pulling etiquette would be helpful at this point…

I’m not calling it a failed experiment. I’m thrilled with the amount of inter-player drama we didn’t have (zero drama, in fact), and I got some very good writing out of a couple of people. But as new GMs will, I didn’t do the best work possible with what I was handed. So it goes.

Rennie and her pals have just fended off a fairly well-planned but otherwise inexpert kidnapping attempt on Rien. The deal is, a bunch of nobodies from nowhere are hunting Rien for (prophesied) reasons vague and very possibly nefarious—but it’s clear as the proverbial bell that Rien is not actually the one they want. The trick is going to be convincing them of that, preferably before they damage Renate’s pet Mage Knight.

Aryk abandoned a fourteen-year-old girl for whom he was specifically responsible in order to pitch in with the fight, which is about to earn him an epic telling-off from a horrified Renate. (I cleared this with Aryk’s player, of course, because I really don’t approve of drama.)

Coming up: the return of Dorothy Durai (which implicates Aryk as well as Renate this time), more happy-fun kidnapping attempts I shouldn’t wonder, Renate trying her sweet best to charm a Heaven Knight without going too far, Aryk growing the heck up finally (I dearly hope!), Rien coping with his jealous streak, and… possibly… a turning point in Renate’s life.

In case Renate defies my expectations and actually does manage to do herself in, her backup is one Tancred Lasalle, Sealed Librarian of the University of Eldorado.

He’s actually a bit of a prick just at the moment, I’m afraid. Over-intellectual, tunnel-visioned, self-centered, melodramatic. His one saving grace is that he does love honestly and well.

That’s his problem at the moment; a spell gone horribly awry sent the woman he loves into parts unknown in Chaos. At the moment he’s trying to pick himself up enough to think straight—he’s insulted her uncle, repeatedly and once violently snubbed her uncle’s security chief (now assigned to him as bodyguard), and completely failed to recognize the usefulness of the people under his nose. (I said he was self-centered and tunnel-visioned. I wasn’t kidding.)

I have a Grand Vision for how he’s going to get her back—but I’m more than a bit hazy on implementation details. Shall have to work those out as I go along, I’m sure.

I owe Monrroyo posts. I have no energy to write them. I’ll do it tomorrow. Sorry, guys.

Renate gets into the most awful trouble with the best of intentions. She’s just gone and gotten into a love-affair that is Not Going To End Well. At All. I’m torn between hoping it’s short, hoping they at least manage to keep some kindness for each other—and just plain dreading the imminent trainwreck.

Yeah, okay, so she’s managed to land Coris finally, slippery fish that he’s been. As is her way, she was completely honest with him about their prospects: she’s a noblewoman, which translates in practice to “political-marriage pawn,” and she has her own ideas about what political ends her marriage might serve.

Sure, the uber-feminist thing for her to do would be to reject hundreds of years of history in favor of True Love, and that does seem to be what Coris wants of her. But I’m intentionally playing it a little more layered than that. She knows political marriage is a raw deal, but honestly, who doesn’t have to cope with raw deals now and then? If it’s what she has to do to justify her status, obey her dearly-loved father, and further her people’s ends, then so bloody well be it; she accepts the necessity. Especially if she also takes a bullet for her sister Sabine’s sake—Mad Stephen of nearby, traitorous Glenworth being a cogent example of this possibility.

So she can’t promise anyone a lifetime; she certainly hasn’t promised Coris one. In her heart of hearts, she judges that the affair may indeed be a lifelong one on her part, owing to her extremely jaundiced estimation of her own life expectancy. (An estimation I don’t necessarily share, mind you.) She will give him whatever she can, while she can, as long as she can. But duty comes first, if death doesn’t beat it to the punch.

Sad to say, Coris is very not getting it. It makes sense, really, that a man who has freed himself of serious political and personal obligations to wander the world a free spirit would expect Renate to do the same—but she put her priorities firmly in order when she was sixteen, and she chose Karlbotel, with all that that choice implied.

Worse still, Coris appears to have a potentially quite nasty jealous and possessive streak. “Well, if it comes down to it, I could always kill the other guy,” he said of the prospect of Renate’s political marriage, the exact amount of jest in the statement not precisely defined. This is less frightening in Dragonhunt-world than one might think, because of the easy availability of resurrection magic (and that’s precisely how Renate answered: “Eh, well, what are Raphaelites for?”), but that doesn’t make it a good thing, not at all.

Not least because Renate is not the kind of girl it pays to be possessive of. That’s what I think is going to wreck them, if Coris can’t get over it. Sexual fidelity she can give him, if that’s what he wants. (It’s an open question at this point whether they’ve actually done the deed. If they haven’t, I daresay they will, Rennie being the total snugglepuppy she is. And I’m assuming the Alchemist’s Guild does birth control—I expect Dragonhunt women have running jokes about “monthly dues.”) But if he can’t cope with her vivid and profound emotional ties to other men and women, well, they just won’t make it.

Which brings us to Rien, who took the news rather badly, if by “badly” we mean “total emotional meltdown.” He’s another one who wants to own her completely; it’s why she’s kept a small but definite distance between them, and she had to tell him so. And he still didn’t get it. Well, fairer to say neither of them quite gets what’s going through the other’s mind.

In her world, nothing’s really changing just because she’s become Coris’s lover. She is still terribly fond of Rien. She would still lay down her life for him without a moment’s thought. She will still care for him, watch out for him, be his friend and his advisor. She still won’t sleep with him—but she never has and never planned to.

But he can’t see it that way… and neither can Coris… and they’d just better not fight over her, because she’ll tick them both off for it. Her heart is big enough for both of them and more; are theirs big enough to share her, let her be her gentle, loving self?

Part of an IM conversation with Adrian (Rien’s player):

Dorothea: “There’s more to learn about Dorothy Durai,” says Alan. Can I kill him now?

Skaarjj: Yes

Skaarjj: Yes you can

Dorothea: Can I kill him good?

Skaarjj: especially since he sent *me* the message “You won’t see Ander yet, but he will turn up when you least expect him.”

Dorothea: heh

Skaarjj: so yes, kill him good, and with much prejudice

Dorothea: I’ll leave something for you.

Skaarjj: oh good… send me pieces by registered mail and i’ll jump on them some

Dorothea: will do

PBS showed a half-staged version of Candide the other day. I am probably close to alone in loving that show as much as I do. It’s over-cerebral, Brechtian-distanced, shapelessly plotted (at least, as it’s generally cut down), sometimes much too slow—but it’s wonderful and I love it and always shall. I’d quite die to play the easily-assimilated Old Lady.

The production was good; I was dubious about Kristin Chenoweth as Cunegonde, but she pulled it off. I don’t like what they did to the second act, though. Yes, any production of Candide has to be cut viciously; the show is just too long, and contains too many songs that are wonderfully clever but don’t advance anything much. And yes, some of the cuts were good—if you’re going to keep Pangloss’s “Dear Boy” then there’s no reason to keep his patter-song about how Paquette gave him syphilis.

But you can’t cut without considering the shape of the whole, and this production to my mind didn’t leave enough shape. They apologized for it by emphasizing the word “picaresque” in the narration, but that’s not enough. Candide does have a thematic shape, to my mind. Our Hero starts out clueless but deeply honorable and goes through six different kinds of hell in the first act, while Our Heroine starts out greedy and soulless and gets exactly what she wants. The act ends with hope for both: Our Hero thinks he can improve his fortunes in America, while Our Heroine is quite willing to abandon her ill-got gains to go with him.

The second act is a muddle, no question about it. Myself, I think the way to play it is to demonstrate that Candide can resist every temptation, every worldly evil, and even despair itself (El Dorado, the two-faced shipmaster, and Martin) as long as he can believe in Cunegonde.

(I’d love to stage “The Simple Life,” because it’s just begging for a setpiece boat that can be shifted about by chorus members in time to the music, but I do agree with this production about cutting it. Its thematic purpose is to show Candide the way forward, despite the hypocrisy of the speakers; but Candide is strong enough to find his own way. Martin’s anti-Pangloss song of despair is more important.)

But Cunegonde too fails Candide—she is helpless throughout, dependent on her surroundings—in a part of the show this version left out. Reduced to penury, she and the Old Lady proposition a disguised Candide merely because he is rich; he recognizes her, and his heart fails at last.

Was it this, the meaning of my life?
The sacred hope I cherished?
Nothing more than this?
…
You cared for gold,
you cared for gold!
Take it with my kiss,
my bitter kiss.
Since it was this you wanted,
No more than this.

Without this, the show falls apart, I think. They really should have kept it, not just because it’s a gorgeous song (which it is), but because it’s Candide at his nadir, his last extremity. Only if he goes down this far does “Make Our Garden Grow” become a fulfillment for him.

You may be wondering why I post this analysis here rather than CavLec. I fear the answer will disappoint, but here it is nonetheless: there is a passing similarity between Candide and Renate. They can get through anything that assails them from without. Gangbangers, hired swords, demons, murderers, dragons—Renate can face them down and not flinch, game right to the end.

It is only from within that she can be hurt. Emil did it. Rien did it. Aryk did it. Aaron did it. She is careful about what she loves, but Rien demonstrates how perhaps she is not careful enough. Betray or deny her trust and her love, and she will do you the favor of destroying herself for you.

The really curious thing about this, though, is that I suspect it to be true of Dark Eternal as well. We shall see if I am right.

We dropped by the local big-box bookstore after dinner today. Said store has a gaming section, which amounts to “anything you want as long as it’s d20″ with a few other things tossed in as afterthoughts.

Stupid editing trick number one: David stopped at the White Wolf section, stared a moment, then asked me in bemusement, “Vampire: The Penguin?”

I can’t find an image of the spine of this book, and the font is different on the cover, but go here and take a look at the first item on the navigation menu for what he was talking about. Because, yeah—what is supposed to be “requiem” sure as hell does look like “penguin” on first glance, because of really quite excruciatingly bad font design.

(Unfortunate trend in gaming publications, bad font design is. We glanced through d20 Oriental Adventures for the heck of it, and I have quite a hate on for their faux-I Ching header font. Yucko. Unreadable.)

Stupid editing trick number two: As long as we’re singling out d20 and Latin, who the hell let the title “Libris Mortis” get by? Okay, okay, I know the most exposure Joe Average has to the Latin word for “book” is the cute little bookplates with “ex libris” on them, but they couldn’t have bothered consulting a Latin dictionary? They have such things online nowadays.

Clue, jackasses, and for free, yet: Latin is a case language. “Ex libris” is both plural (which y’all don’t want) and the wrong case: “from the books [of so-and-so].” Y’all want the nominative singular, which happens to be “liber.”

(And even then, just for the record, the title wouldn’t translate to what they want. It would be the “Book of Death,” rather than “Book of the Undead.” “Immortalis” is completely the wrong idea, of course, but “immortuum,” genitive plural “immortuorum” might work.)

We gamers get enough sneers from the literati. Don’t make it any freaking worse, hm?

I am learning that one of the pleasures of GMing is the added little fillips of drama and irony when one’s players discuss situations they don’t have all the answers to.

Especially when the answers are really gonna hurt. If they ever find them, which they very well may not; they can cope with the situation without all the answers.

When I came up with this year’s Murder at Christmas character, I was thrilled to bits with her until I realized that nobody in her right mind would think she’d dunnit. (At the time, of course, nobody knew who the murderer would be yet.)

But I checked this year’s whodunnit poll, and what do you know! Somebody thinks Pamela dunnit!

Partly I got fortunate in the first victim, I must say. But even so, it’s nice to keep the streak going, after my successful portrayal of a carmine kipper last year.

Did Pamela do it? I ain’t sayin’. She might of done. Means, motive, and opportunity all there. But I’m just thrilled to be a suspect, whether she dunnit or not!