Thursday, December 08, 2011

Game Stuff

I feel like I need to remind everyone that this is ostensibly a game blog. I talk a lot about my travels, and people seem to be generally interested in those things, but I started this blog to talk about games and gaming, and I’ve been pretty lax on that for a long time. This entire vacation I’ve avoided talking about anything game-related, with the exception of how Alcatraz is wicked-cool from a dungeon perspective.

So today I’m going to go over every day of this vacation and talk about how that day’s events can translate into an in-game event. Good? Excellent.

Chapter Eight: Fighting the Ocean

The following stat block is for the the Ocean. As a bad guy. Because everyone should have an epic slapping match with the wild blue, yeah? Yeah.

The Ocean

Level 40 Solo

Gargantuan natural animate (aquatic, swarm)

XP 555,000

HP 1893; Bloodied 947

Regeneration 20 (if the Ocean takes cold damage, its regeneration deactivates until the end of its next turn.)

AC 51; Fortitude 58; Reflex 48; Will 55

Speed 6

Immune fire, acid, disease, sleep; Resist 20 primal; Vulnerability 25 cold

Saving Throws +5; Action Points 2

Initiative +25

Perception +30

 

Traits

O Wave Aura • Aura 1000

Creatures that start their turn within the aura take 20 force damage and ongoing 15 drowning damage (save ends).

Standard Actions

C Battering Waves (force) • At-Will

Attack: Close Burst 50 (Targets: creatures in burst); +43 vs. Fortitude

Hit: 2d10 + 17 force damage.

C Tsunami (force) • Recharge 5 6

Attack: Close Burst 100 (Targets creatures in burst); +43 vs. Reflex

Hit: 2d10 + 17 force damage and the Ocean shifts 20 squares.

C Sea of Blood (force, necrotic) • Encounter

Attack: Close Burst 100 (targets creatures in burst); +45 vs. AC

Hit: 2d10 + 17 force and necrotic damage and the target takes 20 ongoing necrotic damage (save ends).

First Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 25 ongoing necrotic damage (save ends).

Second Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 30 ongoing necrotic damage and is slowed (save ends).

Third Failed Saving Throw: The target takes 40 ongoing necrotic damage and is helpless (save ends).

Move Actions

Shifting Tides • Recharge when bloodied.

Effect: The Ocean shifts 20 squares and makes a Battering Waves attack at any point during the move. .

Minor Actions

To the Horizon and Beyond • Encounter

Effect: The Ocean spends an action point and gains 600 hit points and shifts 20 squares.

Skills Endurance +38, Intimidate +38, Nature +35

Str 33 (+31)

Dex 27 (+28)

Wis 30 (+30)

Con 36 (+33)

Int 27 (+28)

Cha 36 (+33)

Alignment      Languages

© 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. This formatted statistics block has been generated using the D&D Adventure Tools.

       

Chapter Seven: City Parks

Parks as we currently understand them are a relatively new thing. Originally, rich nobles would own large plots of green space for game hunting. It wasn’t until the late 1800’s that landscapers were commissioned to build public parks in the interest of creating areas for relaxation and exercise. Philanthropic industrialists and landowners often gave parks as gifts to the public, though many were also built through public subscription. The best parks, and those with the most innovative designs, have proven very robust and have continued to adapt to meet the needs of those who use them today.

Most of the societies we use as backdrops for games have technology roughly on par with that of medieval Europe. Parks during this time would be game parks primarily, though the high levels of magic and industry would certainly make parks a realistic inclusion in those games. In a medieval fantasy game, you might find your party asked to aid in the building or designing of a park with particular needs (we want to preserve the local indigenous Flargbargle population, but not have them interact with visitors, you see…), or using a park as a location for adventure. Parks are, in many ways, quite like classic dungeons. There are branched paths, awesome conflict locations, and lots of places to hide. They could also be an area near the party’s home base, and a constant source of trouble, should those Flargbargles decide to get out and light things on fire.

For more modern games, from the Victorian-style leanings of steampunk-inspired worlds to the 1920’s Cthulhu weird horror games, parks are an awesome way to shake up the scenery some without leaving the urban textures of the setting. Some parks may even serve as a source of inspiration for adventures in these milieus. As an example:

birkenheadThis is Birkenhead Park. It is one of the more impressive parks created by Mr. Joseph Paxton in 1847. It is, according to the good folks at Wikipedia, the first publically funded civic park in Britain. It inspired landscape architect Frederick Olmstead to incorporate many of its elements in New York’s Central Park and Sefton Park in Liverpool.

It is not well known for its links to the paranormal, other areas Paxton created are. The Crystal Palace has been the home to a number of strange goings on, the Conservative Wall is likely haunted, and the Emperor Fountain’s charm is the site of at least a dozen cult rituals.

Birkenhead Park is no different, except that it is perhaps more subtle. Locked away in a secret crypt somewhere in this park is an amulet that, when combined with its counterparts in Central Park and Sefton Park, will release the Demon Azzulat from its prison beneath the Conservative Wall. Paxton knew this, and made sure to incorporate keys to recapture the demon hidden in his various works. Now a cult has begun searching for the amulets, and one has already been found. It’s up to you and yours to stop them.

Chapter Six: Cultures Within Cities

I think one of the greatest problems with role-playing game descriptions of places is that we tend to lump things together in a strange way. This country is where the evil-bad sorcerers live. This kingdom is like Iowa, but with more wizards. Everyone in this duchy has a pet that is also their soul that is also their source of Power. It’s not unlike the Star Wars planet problem. Hoth is the icy winter planet. Dagoba is the swamp planet. Coruscant is the city planet. It’s all rather silly, because for a planet to bear human-like life, that planet needs to have diversity, but for the sake of easy storytelling, it’s just a lot simpler to have your whole planet made up of a single thing. So instead of journeying to the swamp, you journey to the swamp planet, and that makes enough sense to us as far as internal consistency is concerned that we don’t really think about it.

But planets have a lot of things going on in them, and as gamers we have a lot more opportunity to check those things out. I mean, we have hours and hours to explore the various aspects of a planet or, in a fantasy setting, a city or country.

San Francisco is a city made up of a bunch of smaller cities. Chinatown, for instance, boasts the world’s largest ethnic Chinese population currently living outside of China. The Castro has a totally different feel to it than Market street, and Nob Hill is a very different place from Fisherman’s Wharf. Each of these neighborhoods is tied together by proximity, language (mostly), government and the like, but hanging out on Castro street eating lunch is a very different experience than hanging out on Sutter street having lunch.

I hope this chart helps.

The Neighborhood…

    1. Is filthy mess
    2. Is clean as a whistle
    3. Is entirely vegetarian
    4. Is incredibly conservative
    5. Is incredibly liberal
    6. Is owned by thieves
    7. Is owned by industrialists/wizards
    8. Is owned by noblewomen
    9. Believes in a local religion very strongly
    10. Believes in a local religion more than usual
    11. Dislikes a local religion more than usual
    12. Dislikes a local religion very strongly
    13. Likes a minority group more than usual
    14. Dislikes a minority group more than usual
    15. Will riot at the slightest provocation
    16. Will riot with the right motivation
    17. Is incredibly peaceful
    18. Requires incredible motivation to riot
    19. Is paved with local rock that is hard to find elsewhere
    20. Is paved with rock that is hard to find here
    21. Has more shops than usual
    22. Has less shops than a community of this size requires
    23. Has a strong police presence
    24. Has no police presence
    25. Has unique architecture
    26. Speaks a strange dialect
    27. Speaks a language different from the surrounding neighborhoods
    28. Eats a food different from the surrounding neighborhoods
    29. Includes a group of people normally outcast in this society (goblins, elves, the Amish)
    30. Produces a specific food better than anyone else in the world
    31. Produces a specific food that no one else really likes, but is very popular here (onion cakes)
    32. Hates a group of people normally included in this society
    33. Has a horrible pest problem
    34. Has a horrible disease problem
    35. Is more hilly than the surrounding area
    36. Is less hilly than the surrounding area
    37. Is more swampy than the surrounding area
    38. Is completely barren of vegetation
    39. Is completely overgrown with vegetation
    40. Is composed of a racial group that is a very tight-knit community
    41. Is composed of a racial group that is warring within itself
    42. Is mostly vampires
    43. Has a lot more children than adults
    44. Has a lot more old people than young people
    45. Has a lot more young adults than old people or children
    46. Is artistic
    47. Is Spartan
    48. Is Sparta
    49. Requires a strange mode of transportation to reach it
    50. Requires a resource that is difficult to find in the local area
    51. Has a local group of heroes and disdains outsiders
    52. Is actively recruiting a group of heroes to represent and protect it
    53. Has a local group of monsters and disdains outsiders
    54. Is actively recruiting a group of monsters to harrass and bother it
    55. Eats a sentient humanoid race as a delicacy
    56. Eats a sentient humanoid race as a staple
    57. Has a school for wizards at its heart
    58. Has a school for fighters at its heart
    59. Has a school for bards at its heart
    60. Is the university district
    61. Is the college district
    62. Is the theatre district
    63. Is the financial core
    64. Centers around a dock, port or gate
    65. Is home to a bird sanctuary
    66. Is the most commercial district and thus attracts the most vagrants
    67. Has a ridiculous number of magic item shops, some legit and others fake
    68. Has a horrible reputation but is actually a nice place
    69. Has a great reputation but is actually where a lot of murders happen
    70. Has a great reputation and is a really nice place, but a lot of murders happen there
    71. Is a great sea-serpent/gryphon/unicorn watching spot
    72. Is controlled by a local cult
    73. Is controlled by a local comedian
    74. Is controlled by a local chef
    75. Is controlled by a player character’s mother
    76. Is a gambling district, full of well-run casinos
    77. Is a gambling district, full of run down cheat-houses
    78. Is a gambling district where the gambling isn’t for money
    79. Is the best place in the country to buy work pants
    80. Is the best place in the country to buy magic weapons or armor
    81. Is the worst place in the country
    82. Has the best public education in the city
    83. Has a public education system that is terrible, but one plucky teacher is making a difference
    84. Has a public education system that is misinforming its students
    85. Has no public education system at all and is proud of that thank you very much
    86. Has a taboo about shoes
    87. Has a taboo about kangaroos
    88. Has a taboo about sloughs
    89. Has a taboo about schools
    90. Has a taboo about imperfect rhymes
    91. Is more sexually open-minded
    92. Is more sexually closed-minded
    93. Is incredibly boring
    94. Is known for its hair styles
    95. Is known for its unique fashion sense
    96. Has a unique power source
    97. Has its own mayor, town council and bylaws
    98. Has an alderman that is an animal (not anthropomorphic, just a bear in a fez)
    99. Is missing
    100. Is a lie

Chapter Five: Expanding the Dungeon Epiphany

Dungeons in medieval Europe usually happened in towers, and for good reason. A tower is hard to escape, easy to guard, and manages to make a lot of concerns like ventilation and sunlight (needed to keep prisoners relatively healthy) from becoming actual problems.

In the modern era, we have perfected dungeons. There are no dungeons ever created that are more horrible than the prisons currently occupied by Cuban criminals. It has taken centuries of dedicated work and design to create conditions as horrible as those we expect modern convicts to live in, and that is a pretty terrifying thing.

As I’m sure you’ve probably guessed by now, I’m one of those bleeding heart liberal types that believes we should be aiming at rehabilitation and lowering the instances of reoffending rather than punishing criminals for their immoral deeds. I don’t believe that punishment at all helps us as a society. I believe that the system as it stands creates better criminals, not people ready to re-enter the work-a-day world.

But if you want a truly terrifying dungeon (and who doesn’t?), one that is built to house people and not Precious Stuff, here’s how you do it:

The cells have to be small. Very small. Claustrophobically small. A 5’x7’ cell leaves room for exactly nothing. You have a bed, a metal table and chair that are built into the wall, a toilet and a small shelf for personal effects above that toilet. You keep your clothes in a trunk under your bed.

The regimen has to be brutal. Shower twice per week. Go outside twice per week for recreation and exercise. Work your ass off six days per week at whatever shit job the prison has been commissioned to do. Fifteen minutes to pray on Sunday. Not Christian? Not my problem.

The punishments have to be severe. And when I say severe, I don’t mean “Beat you with sticks,” severe, I mean “Damage you psychologically for the rest of your life,” severe. The Hole is bigger than your average cell, but it doesn’t get any light, it doesn’t get any fresh air, it gets just enough to keep you alive, and you stay in it 24-hours a day. That may not seem like much, but it fucking gets to you. I stood in the Hole for a minute, maybe two, with the door wide open. It scared the shit out of me.

The prisoners are not people. They are prisoners. They get no rights. They get three meals a day, they get to be clean and healthy. Everything else is a privilege.

Also, if you wanted to run a prison scenario in your game, I would highly suggest adapting Vampire’s morality system and applying it to behavior. If you’re on your best behavior, you gain Privilege. When you break the rules, you get punished, and that punishment slowly breaks you, turning you into a monster.

Morality Crime
10 Thinking about breaking a rule
9 Minor, unnoticed rule break
8 Injury to another (accidental or otherwise)
7 Minor smuggling (cigarettes, food)
6 Major smuggling (utensils, weapons)
5 Intentional damage to prison property or the property of another inmate
4 Impassioned crime (manslaughter)
3 Planned crime (escape attempt, murder)
2 Casual, callous crime (serial murder, torture for a purpose)
1 Perversion or heinous act (mass murder, torture for entertainment)

Punishments depend mostly on the sort of crime committed and whether or not the inmate is caught doing it. They could range from having to do an extra bout of cleaning duty to a week in the Hole. Most of those at 5 or below end up with extended sentences, from a few more years to a couple of decades.

Chapter Four: What Makes a Good Game vs. A Good Genre Game?

I think my scale of “What Makes a Good Comic Book Movie” works for games, too. There are games that are just really good, solid examples of gaming. And there are good Fantasy Heartbreakers. And good Space Opera games. But they aren’t necessarily the same thing; a fantasy game can be a good game without being a good Fantasy Game. Take Mouse Guard, for instance. It’s a fantasy game, for sure. You play mice with technology roughly equal to that found in the middle ages. It’s a really good game, one of the best role-playing games I’ve ever played. But it isn’t a very good fantasy game. There are no spells or orcs or trolls; just a bunch of animals. It’s not very tactically deep, which good fantasy games have at their core. It’s got a really solid narrativist slant towards character advancement that I like quite a bit, which puts it more into the realm of Good Indie Game than Good Fantasy Game. In short, it’s a really good game, but it’s not a very good fantasy game.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, I’d put D&D 3.5. It’s not a very good game, really. The rules are clunky and fit together in strange ways. There are things that make exactly no sense at all (grapple rules, anyone? item creation?) but nothing about the game really shines, except maybe how easy it is to put a new skin on it and call it something else. But no matter what sort of flavor you put on it, Type III D&D is a fantasy game at its core, and it’s a damned good one.

So what’s the difference?

Good Games are games that push the envelope, do things that games haven’t really done before, or find new and interesting ways to do things we’ve just sort of taken for granted. Nobilis does things with diceless play that exemplify what role-playing games without randomizers can do. Mouse Guard does new and interesting things with turn structure and conflict resolution. The Dramatic Unisystem rocked a really solid dramatic editing system. The Gumshoe system solved a really simple, but pervasive, problem in investigative role-playing. These are things that are revolutionary and powerful, and they’re the sort of innovations that shape the direction of gaming for many years.

Good Genre Games don’t need to be good games. They don’t need to innovate, they don’t need to do things differently or break new ground. They have to instead typify the genre they are attempting to emulate. RIFTS is not a good game, but it is a good genre game, and that is part of why it is as pervasively popular as it has been. Don’t Rest Your Head is a really good horror game, but it doesn’t really do anything innovative or definitive for gaming. It’s just a fun game about getting sleepy, then getting scared, then going crazy. I think perhaps the best example of a Good Genre Game is Exalted. The game itself is shit. The system is just a bastardization of what White Wolf has been doing for decades, the mechanical side of the game is entirely busted and the writing is poorly at best. But it captures the genre of over-the-top Shonen anime better than any game I’ve ever seen. Better, even, than Big Eyes, Small Mouth, which fits in the Good Game category.

And there are certainly games that fall into both categories. Dread, for instance, does something for horror games I’ve never seen before (actually instilling some sense of fear in a game) through a mechanic that I’d never seen used before (a Jenga tower), while perfectly capturing the essence of horror fiction. It is both a Good Game and a Good Genre Game.

If only there were more of those.

Chapter Three: Mixing it Up – Travel Wise

The intrepid heroes must travel many days by horse to reach the dungeon of Kazaakh’Thuul wherein lies the evil lich Bastaard the Badguy.

Or.

The intrepid heroes travel a day by horse, trading in their mounts for coin to pay for the ferry to the next village and hopefully enough for passage by airship or railcar across the mountains before renting camels to cross the sandy desert for six days to reach the pyramid of Kazaakh’Thuul wherein lies the evil lich Bastaard the Badguy.

Travel is boring. We tend to gloss over it because sitting in one spot for three hours mostly sucks, and we don’t want to describe the incredible ennui we experience while moving from point A to point B via sitting around doing nothing. It’s a lot more exciting when travel involves kicking the crap out of stuff while you’re moving, right?

Except that travel offers some interesting opportunities in role-playing games that we don’t often think about. As an example, take my first ride on a ferry. While it certainly doesn’t compare to the experience of walking on a castle’s battlements, it was cool to be able to finally ride on one. For some people, this isn’t a big deal at all; they take ferries every day. But living in landlocked Northern Alberta, riding a ferry was pretty awesome for me. Moreover, it gave me a chance to interact with my travelling companion in a meaningful way (and in a less meaningful media-in-my-eyeballs way), and to have a few interesting experiences regarding ferry coffee and bad café food. It was pretty great.

And most real travel doesn’t happen in one travel mode. You can’t get to most places by plane, you have to get close and then take a ferry, boat, or train and then drive or walk the rest of the way. People didn’t take wagons from one side of the continent to the other while settling Canada and the USA; they took trains, rode horses, took wagons, walked, climbed, forded rivers the hard way… There are very few occasions when one form of travel will get you where you’re going, and you’re going to need to mix and match.

How this interacts with your game is sort of up to you. You could easily just pass your players an itinerary that shows them how they get from one place to another and ask what they do during each stage. You could provide a few options, and have some interesting features plotted out for various points during various journeys. Provide situations in which the player characters have to interact with one another, because nothing else is going to happen for a while. Give the player characters an opportunity to find the magic in a form of travel they’ve never experienced before. I mean, riding a ferry isn’t a fantastic experience, but for me, it was a big deal, because it was my first time. Has your half-orc barbarian ever ridden an airship before? Probably not, so what is he or she feeling?

Chapter Two: When the Students Come to Visit – On the Topic of Mentors

We went to visit N’s school while we were in Comox, and that gave me a bit of a strange nostalgic feeling about visiting my old teachers whenever I came back to the town I graduated in. Every once in a great while, I’d stop by the school to visit Mr. D or Mr. F or Ms. W, and it was always sort of a strange experience. I mean, they’d done their job, right? They taught me enough to get me through finals, and now I had passed my finals, and was arguably an adult.

The trip got me thinking about a player character’s mentors. I’m coming at this from a very D&D-oriented viewpoint, because in D&D one of the big blanks in character creation is social areas. Every D&D character’s parents are dead so that you never, ever have to interact with them. No one was ever taught how to do their jobs, they just know, or they went to faceless schools and never had any favorite teachers or instructors. No one has ever served under a commanding officer, they were just in the army.

Mouse Guard rocks mentors in a very real way. There is, in fact, an entire chapter in character creation devoted to the mouse that taught you what you know, and there are plot hooks deep in the concept. When we were making our first round of characters for Mouse Guard, one of my players found that he liked his character’s mentor more than he liked his own character, which is, in my opinion, the definition of a great supporting character. It reminds me Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Anthony Stewart Head is easily the best actor in the series, and his character is incredibly believable, fun, scary, amusing and just a little sexy. He is, in nearly every way, more interesting than the titular character, which makes him a great background character, and adds a lot of depth to the series.

So what happens when you go back and visit a mentor who has taught you everything you know? What sort of relationship is that? There’s a pretty solid relationship gradient, from “still trying to teach you things,” to “why are you bothering me? figure it out on your own…” But trying to figure that relationship out before you ever have to go back and meet your mentor is going to add a lot to the interactions you have with him or her.

Also, mentors serve as great plot hooks. Roll a d10

    1. Your mentor is in trouble. Some horrible bad thing is trying to get to the player character by doing naughtybad things to people that character cares about. Go save!
    2. Your mentor is in trobule. Some horrible bad thing from the mentor’s past is coming back to haunt her, and she cannot deal with it alone. She needs your help!
    3. Your mentor is in trouble. Whatever nasty badness your party is already dealing with has decided to make him a focus for whatever evil plot they’re trying to pull off.
    4. Your mentor has hired you. She needs you to find a dingus of great power from the nastiest dungeon in the area, and can’t do it herself because of that back injury from a few years ago.
    5. Your mentor has hired you. He has a rival in town that is likely doing naughty things, and he would like you to look into it.
    6. Your mentor has hired you. She’s double booked herself with jobs and needs you to take one of her obligations off her hands.
    7. Your mentor has become a villain. He has holed up in a castle in the middle of nowhere and is sending minions out to do bad things on his behalf.
    8. Your mentor has become a villain. She has obtained a mystical artifact of some power and is using it to wreck havoc on everyone and everything around her.
    9. Your mentor has become a villain. He has begun building an army to take down the current reigning whoever of the whereplace.
    10. Your mentor is in trouble for becoming a villain and is hiring you to deal with her public relations problem.

Chapter One: Family Ties

Most characters in a role-playing games don’t value family at all. Chances are your character is a single child of deceased parents who raised him or herself on the mean streets of disconnection and neglect. Which is, honestly, very lazy of you. Most people don’t bother fleshing out their character’s family life at all. I know I sure don’t, but I’ve come to terms with my laziness. When I do, it’s usually as an aside, or a cute character quirk, but most of my characters don’t have attachments to people, because those really seem to get in the way of adventure.

Which I guess is sort of the point of this section. Family is just going to get in your way, and that’s a good thing. Knowing how your parents are and what they do for a living, knowing where you have brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents, and cousins is going to make adventuring a little tough. I mean, look at all those potential Bad Guy Targets. Moreover, what happens if you don’t really like most of your family?

I grew up pretty privileged in that I actually get along with my mom and dad pretty well. My brothers are both wicked people. I don’t really have a lot of contact with my extended family, but I know who they are and what they’re about, generally. Most of them are Mormon (I am not), with the exception of J, who converted to Catholicism when she married her beau. Most have big families, with the exception of T, who came out of the closet a few years ago and whose son is still dealing. Most are well adjusted, with the exception of DL, who held his children hostage in a motel with a vacuum attachment, once.

See, and this is the sort of thing your character can bring to the table if you have a chance to broaden out the family history beyond whatever is on your character sheet. Who is your Aunt Betty? What’s she about? What does she do? What’s one story you could tell about her that would make the rest of the table go “Wha?”

As an example, I’m going to flesh out a character’s uncle, and then leave you a blank template to copy/paste and use at your leisure.

Name: Uncle Bartlebus
Occupation: Thatcher
Hobby: Music. Bart’s had a lute in his attic for years and every once in a while he’ll bust it out and play a few songs from when he had longer hair and a grudge.
Physically: Bart’s a huge guy, and strong. Thatch is heavy, and it goes on roofs. Age is starting to show around the temples, though, and some wrinkles have begun to show up around the eyes.
Mentally: Insecure and a little attention-grabby. Immature. Wishes he’d gone along with a travelling musician’s troupe when he was younger but has a wife and kids to look after now.
One Story: That time he drove the wagon too fast and lamed the horse two days out of town, and we all had to hitch a ride with some strangers who we were convinced were going to kill and eat us.

Name:
Occupation:
Hobby:
Physically:
Mentally:
One Story:

Fill this out five times, and you have a rough skeleton of a family going.

Sunday, December 04, 2011

Chapter Eight: Come at me Brocean

I got in a fight with the Pacific Ocean today, and it whooped my ass fairly handily.

k5Yesterday, we went to the wicked-huge Golden Gate Park. At the end of the park is a beach, and on the beach, the offending ocean. It and I got into something of a disagreement last night, as it was convinced that my shoes would be a good place to live, and I was of the opinion that the ocean belongs damned near anywhere but my shoes. So our relationship was off to something of a rocky start, but I was wiling to give it a second chance.

The next day, the ocean decided that being really, really cold was a good way to get back at me for not letting it live in my shoes, so we started an all-out brawl. I tried to walk into it, facing the horrible cold and wetness, while it would throw waves at me. It was not the most effective way to fight the Pacific ocean, perhaps, but I enjoyed myself, and that’s all that really counts. After watching me flail, my ally came in from building a fortress to aid me in battle. She lost pretty good too. There are pictures to document our shame.

The surfers seemed to think we were crazy like crazy people, and I don’t blame them for that, but I think we had way, way more fun than anyone ever should playing in a cold-ass ocean. I just learned on wikipedia that the folk at Ocean Beach don’t take kindly to out-of-towners stealing waves. I suppose that’s sort of what we were doing, but to be fair, we were two assholes from Canada doing our best impersonation of polar bears. I understand your plight, guys, but we were only there for a couple of hours.

Next time I’m in San Francisco, I go surfing. I meant to this time around, but we ran out of money before we got around to it, and it’s pretty expensive to do.

Next, we went to the corner of Haight and Ashbury, mostly because Dave told us we should. Mostly, it was like a more commercialized Whyte Ave, which would have been sweet if we had more than $20 at our disposal. Even then, there have been some four areas of town N and I have identified as Whyte-Ave-Except-X. We didn’t do a whole lot there, but we did buy some bread, cheese and meat, and sat on the street eating our lunch, much to the chagrin of rich and high-class shoppers that kept going into the store we were sitting in front of.

Being homeless is interesting. Being seen as homeless is also interesting, and is worse in the States than it is in Canada. I was wearing a hoodie and jeans, with a backpack on my lap. I looked like a homeless dude, and people let me know through stares and by rearranging their stuff so that I couldn’t steal it. I sort of wanted to get a sign that said “I’m not homeless, I’m Canadian.” Makes me feel bad for the people who are actually homeless in this country.

Tomorrow we go home. We have to get up, eat pancakes, pack, and be on a plane. Either later tonight or tomorrow, I’ll be writing up entries for how each of these chapters can be used in role-playing games. Then I’ll be posting it as a separate post, as well as editing each chapter. It will be very awesome.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Chapter Seven: Follow Those Lesbians

I find it slightly difficult to believe that I wake up at nine thirty on a regular basis when I’m on vacation. When I was at GenCon, I would wake up at seven or eight, pick the girls up at nine, and be at the con for nine thirty. Normally, if I’m doing that, I’m a fucking wreck, and it’s definitely taking its toll on me in San Francisco. I keep putting it off until later and later, and this morning that meant a dearth of pancake goodness. We weren’t really accounting for the weekend influx of people, so I ended up eating a half a pancake, making sure N got at least one solid pancake first. I’m a sweetness like that.

A fellow in the common outdoor dining area had his computer and camera stolen today, and was pretty upset about it, understandably. I’m not sure what it is I don’t like about him, but the few times I’ve spoken to him, he’s seemed a little off somehow. He gives me shivery-bad feelings and I don’t like his moustache.

Our day today was not as jam-packed as our days have been. Having already seen and done damned near everything we wanted to do, we spent some of today going through lists of “Things to do in San Francisco” and trying to find something we haven’t already done that doesn’t cost any money (as we’ve basically run out of anything more than ramen cash). We didn’t find much, but there were a couple of neat-looking parks, and we hadn’t seen the ocean since we’d arrived, so we decided to make both of those things happen.

First things first, though: the hot dog stand.

2011-12-03 13.15.34I like to try something I’ve never done every time I go on a vacation somewhere. Eating a hot dog from a hot dog stand is one of the most incredibly American things you can do. It’s like going to a baseball game without the boredom. Or shooting the skin off of people we don’t like, without the mess or the questionable racial connotations. Eating a hot dog at a hot dog stand is an American thing to do, and by the gods I meant to do it this time. I’ve been to the United States a lot of times in the past five years, and I had never once eaten at a hot dog stand. So, today I did, and I am happy to say, the experience was pretty great.

I mean, it wasn’t the best hot dog I’ve ever eaten. That title goes to the incredible Fat Frank’s on Whyte Ave. But it was certainly a passable wiener. Moreover, it was exactly what my body wanted at that moment. Some meat of undisclosed components, some bread that was a little too sweet, some stuff that was trying valiantly to be vegetables in the form of a red-pepper chutney. It was tasty, and it made me feel, for a moment, like America might be the greatest place on earth.

But the Obama-is-Hitler people were out again, so the feeling didn’t last long. M commented on my Facebook status when Chapter Six came out that the Obama-is-Hitler folk had a good point about the Glass Steagal banking restrictions and that Obama isn’t exactly an amazing president. And I’m willing to grant that some solid banking restrictions are in order, here. But both Glass and Steagal were Democrats. Republicans aren’t about to start throwing down restrictions on banks, and the Democrats aren’t exactly running someone against their own incumbent president. Short of a civil war, there aren’t a lot of other options.

2011-12-03 14.18.50After hot dogs, we decided to take a bus down to Golden Gate Park, which is a huge-crazy-awesome park that takes up a huge chunk on the west side of the city. The bus ride was a lot of fun, but I’m starting to think that San Francisco is trying to hide something from me. I have yet to find a place in the city that isn’t gorgeous, which makes me wonder where the poor people go. I have been told “Oakland,” but it’s a little hard to believe they made a whole other city in which to keep the poor people. The bus was pretty full, but we managed to find a seat in the back and check out the awesome architecture that is this beautiful place. If I was going to live in a place in the states, it would probably be here.*

The park is gorgeous. Much later in our walk, I read a little plaque talking about how the guy who founded it wanted to make sure that it was wild and strange and twisty and wonderful. They went out of their way to make sure there was nothing of the city of San Francisco in the park, and they wanted it to be a safe haven from the grind of the city. There are spectacular trees and beds of flowers, there are small ponds where ducks and seagulls live, there are windmills that used to carry irrigation water to the plants further up the hills. There were many hot dog stands and many, many dogs, most of which were adorable.

2011-12-03 15.36.27We decided at one point that we were going to walk to the beach, and that became something of a driving goal for the trip. We determined which way was west, and made most of our travel choices based on what would get us as far in that direction as quickly as possible. Occasionally, we would have to take a detour. Golden Gate Park was designed with twists and turns on all of the roads through the forest to keep the place from becoming a wind tunnel, so there was never a path that ran directly from where we were standing to the place with the sand and all the waves. At least once, we would find a group of people and follow them, trust them to guide us in the direction we were supposed to go. At least twice, I decided the beach was very close because I could hear it or smell it or both, and then it turned out to be farther away than I had thought. I am not good at finding the ocean.

There was a buffalo. He rolled around in the dirt for a while, and it was adorable.

When we finally found the beach, the waves were incredible. I hadn’t come with swim trunks or anything, and I loathe walking with sand in my shoes, but we decided to take a stroll down the beach anyway. N took off her shoes and went wading a little way in. Apparently, the water was quite cold, but it was still a lot of fun to run away from the waves and watch people surfing in the distance. The waves were huge, thrashing things that gave some warning as to their reach on the beach, and because I was still wearing my not-at-all-waterproof shoes, I played a game of tag with the sea foam and looked like a total idiot. It was a blast, and we’re going back tomorrow if it’s nice.

Then we came home and I typed a blog.

*So far. I mean, I’ve only seen a few cities in the country. Also, I never, ever want to live in the United States, except when eating hot dogs there.

Chapter Six: A Bad Case of Crabs

We woke up at nine thirty for pancakes. This is still a big deal for me, but I’ve got the stove downstairs figured out and can make a pretty damned fine pancake, now. I over-cooked the batch yesterday.

Francis was eating in the common kitchen area outside, so we sat with him for a while and munched our breakfast. Then we decided that today was a good day for a nap. We’ve been doing that thing that people do when they’re travelling. We’ve been focusing on the What Do We Do Today problem rather than relaxing and enjoying ourselves, so today was the day we decided to stay in bed until four in the afternoon and then do leisurely things rather than force ourselves into doing something in specific.

2011-12-02 16.50.59To be fair, there’s only one thing left on our list of things to do. We have been to Alcatraz, visited the Castro, eaten on Fisherman’s Wharf, seen the Golden Gate Bridge, ridden one of those cute rail cars that you see people using to escape from spies in movies, seen the Occupy San Francisco camp, and attended an AIDS rally. For three days, that’s a solid event tally. So there’s nothing wrong with taking a day to just nap and chill out, yeah?

So we did. We slept. And I’m defending this choice to the end.

When we finally woke up we decided that today was the day we’d eat at Joe’s Crab Shack. I’d never heard of the place, but N was pretty excited when she saw it. I guess it had been featured on a TV show, and given that I don’t actually watch television, I probably missed that… series… Still, I like me some crustacean, and if the lady says “I want you to eat crab,” I go “OKAY!” and then eat myself to death on crab.

We didn’t have an easy time finding a trolley this time around, mostly because they weren’t running. We waited for three different trollies to not come before we decided to find another way, which took three or four misfires before we finally found a way to get to where we were going. While we were looking, though, we actually got to see some of these characters that equate President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler. We actually stood there stunned. We had no idea what to think about that. I mean, it’s one of those weird things you see on television sometimes, you read about it in the news, but its so strange, so out there, that you have to think no reasonable person would ever go there. But go there they did, and they did it to us. An African American lady asked us if we were going to do our part to get him out of office. We tried to calmly explain that we were from Canada, and thus incapable of voting either for or against the man. In the interest of not having our faces k4bitten, we didn’t mention that we’re liberal-leaning Canadians, or that, given the chance, we’d be voting for him. She said that “Even Canadians have a chance to change the world for once,” and suggested that we should “Say something about him to the Queen, eh?”

We had no choice. We had to walk away laughing.

The place was not at all what we were expecting at first. We walked up a flight of stairs into a hokey 1960’s style diner with a host in a tie die shirt and and a flourish. The view was sort of meh, looking out over Tarantino’s and San Francisco’s Pier 39. Our waiter was friendly and easygoing, and explained the whole of the process to us: bucket in the middle is for shells, weird-ass fork thing is for breaking the little bastards open, here have a bib.

N was a little disappointed, and the place was definitely out of our price range, but we decided to stick it out. When N was convinced it actually was the right place, we settled into a huge steamed crab meal with shrimp, sausage, and corn on the cob. Then they let us know why the place receives 5-star reviews. This song came on, and all of the servers, the host, and a few of the kitchen staff started dancing.

The dance wasn’t anything incredible, it was a six-step line dance, but it was a lot of fun, and our server was one of the better dancers in the group. The host in tie dye was obviously helping one of the newer guys learn the steps, but all in all it was a lot of fun to see, and a few of the staff really got into it. Mostly, I’m a sucker for kitschy things like this. I think they add charm to what would otherwise be a joyless cracking of crabs for consumption. Not that you could ever convince me that eating crab is a joyless experience, but the kitsch and the fun and the weird added a lot to the evening for me.

There was a birthday party, followed by a guy yelling and a bunch of people screaming and laughing. We later found out that this was a special sort of drink they serve with little shark-shaped shot glasses full of some red stuff. The guy serving the show would yell “OH MY GOD THERE’S A SHARK IN THE WATER!” and they’d pour in the shot while screaming. It looked like a lot of fun.

The whole meal was pretty great.

Next we decided to grab some cookies from Fisherman’s Wharf just down the street and wander the shops there. There was a sword-shop that had some really neat gear in it I’d love to get for the store (two replica’s of the Master Sword from the Legend of Zelda and sharpened batarangs, for example). Apparently getting that stuff into Canada can be a bit tricky. There was a silver shop we stopped in where the lady didn’t pay any attention to us until we were leaving, and a horrible magic shop pretending it had anything to do with Harry Houdini. The tricks they sold looked pretty bad, but I give them a few points for effort. The fake-ass Houdini offering to tell my fortune in the corner was especially bad.

We spent some time kicking out over the bay and followed some kids smoking weed to a part of the wharf where some sea lions were hanging out. We could only barely see the lions, but they were really loud and barking like cuteness. The weed kids were looking at us like we were going to suddenly bust out some badges and guns as we were walking past them, which we found hilarious. We resolved to come back and check out the sea lions during the day time.

We decided to head back to the Castro and see what was going on down that way. Friday is supposedly a party night or something (I’ve forgotten, it’s been so long), and we wanted to be where the coolest people watching would be had. We were not at all disappointed:

nakedguy

That dude was, according to N, wearing a Santa Hat over his junk. Fellow’s got swagger. I can appreciate that.

Friday, December 02, 2011

Chapter Five: Dungeons & Demonstrations

I've done time in Alcatraz.

654When I first learned that this trip would take the shape of a Vancouver stop-off and a San Francisco stay, the first thing on my list of things to do was a tour of North America's most notorious dungeon. I'm a nerd. I like places that are tough to get into and places that are tough to get out of. For nerds like me, Alcatraz is something of a holy place; it's a place where real things happened that could have happened in my games.

The place is run down and falling apart and I wouldn't have it any other way. The buildings are slowly deteriorating, and the paint is coming off of everything, but there is a strange sort of beauty in the way the island fortress is put together. When I think about prisons I think austere, cold, simple, concrete. I don't think about Spanish arches or stone scrollwork. I don't think about flowers or gardens or school houses. I certainly don't think about the spectacular view of the city of San Francisco.

But those things are all there, and they are so tied in with the way the island prison is put together that you can't really tell where one stops and the other begins. But they are very different places, Alcatraz the island and Alcatraz the prison. The latter is a cold, dark, horrible place filled with a long history of violence and despair. The prison cells are small, barely big enough to fit the necessities of life. A bed, a steel chair and table that are built into the wall, a toilet. And that is it. Five feet wide, six feet long and seven feet tall. The width isn't enough for me to spread my arms side to side without touching the walls.

664That's nothing compared to the Hole, though. There is nothing in this world that I can compare to the feeling of going into the solitary confinement cells. They are dark, blank rooms that seem to suck the life from you at the door. They are actually terrifying to walk into even now, and they haven't been used since well before I was born. There is the normal cage, and beyond the cage a steel door. The door has a grate designed to keep out the light, keep you from seeing anything. These places were a horror to behold, truly, and I cannot do the feeling of stepping into one justice through the written word.

There are a lot of individual things I could talk about regarding my trip to The Rock, but I'll mostly cover the salient points:

  • The treaty given to the white folk during the Native American occupation of the island is awesome and everyone should read it.
  • The place is gorgeous and old and powerful to visit. If you're ever in San Francisco, you should go.
  • I'm actually sort of sad that I didn't get one of the steel cups. They're pretty great.
  • Al Capone looks smug as shit in his mug shot. Also, went crazy from syphilis.
  • Three people may have escaped from Alcatraz, and the escape would make for an epic fucking adventure in a game.
  • I stood on a place where people were killed by grenades.
  • The families of the corrections officers actually lived on the island and had a sort of small town up and running near the prison.

So, this post is all out of order because I wanted a punchy opening. Also, there are a bunch of pictures at the end that I took of the prison.

595We got up in the single digits again and ate pancakes. We met up with my coworker Ida and he husband Francis, and we all ate together and decided we'd hit the Rock as a group. We finished off breakfast, I found us a route, we bought transit passes at Walgreens - which is fucking everywhere - and then visited a kickass spy shop that sold all sorts of shit to women who think their husbands are cheating on them. There was a knife that went into a bigger knife and a camera in the spine of a Get Shorty DVD. I assume it's in that one because no one will ever watch that movie.

Then we went to Alcatraz, which seems pretty silly to say like that, and then we were sort of at a loss for what to do with the afternoon. Ida and Francis caught some food, and we decided to use our newfound freedom (whatup, bus pass?) to explore the city some and see the famous Castro.

The bus ride took a while and we got to see a lot of the city that we missed on the BART. Market street is gorgeous, and there was a lot of fun to be had just watching people go about their days and do their things. The Castro itself is amazing and we could not have picked a better day to visit. Turns out, it's National AIDS Day and there was going to be a candle light vigil and fundraiser thing. Sweet! Wait, no, AIDS is bad. Boo AIDS! 713

We decided to have a quick bite to eat in the shadow of the Castro theatre itself, in a little place called Mystique. I had the chicken sandwich, N had the burger, both were delightful. The service was amazing. The venue could not have been more perfect. It was a really good meal.

Except, we ate at the wrong restaurant. A bunch of places along the Castro were going to be giving ten percent of their days earnings to various AIDS charities, and Mystique was nor one of them. We were made aware of this by the gent who let us know the vigil was going on, and felt appropriately remorseful. Because boo AIDS.

The vigil wasn't going to be for another hour, so we tooled around some and stopped into a couple of stores. We stopped in at a comic shop that was a miserable little thing compared to Warp. I've been good and spoiled by games stores living in Alberta. There was a cute sex toy store that Brenda at The Travelling Tickle Trunk puts to shame. I'm actually more impressed by Edmonton's Whyte Ave the more I travel.

We walked past a gentleman who told us that we look marvelous and that he loves our colors. I assume he was talking about N's hair, which is currently an adorable shade of pink. That pretty much made my day.

The vigil itself happened in the same spot Harvey Milk made a number of speeches, and was pretty special in its own right. There were candles and speeches by the lovely Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and a number of folk from various AIDS research groups and organizations. It was really cool to be a part of, especially considering a long discussion N and I had on the Vancouver train regarding big chasing not two days before.

Then we packed it in and started the journey home. Turns out our timing sucked, as the good folks at the Occupy San Fransisco camp were getting raided and so the trolly was only going to get us about halfway home. We considered going to see what all the fuss was about, but we figured by the time we got there, the adventure would be over.

Turns out it wasn't all that crazy anyhow, but we'll be keeping an ear out for trouble.

Alright. Now that that’s out of the way, more pictures of Alcatraz!

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