Uncategorized – Page 108 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

FF6 Werewolf Tribute: first day

[NOTE: this is part three in a series of posts lifted from the quark message boards where I recently GM’d a game of Werewolf. The theme was Final Fantasy 6, one of my favorite RPGs of all time. To see all posts in the series, click here.

WARNING: there will be spoilers here, and lots of them, so if you haven’t played Final Fantasy 6, do yourself a favor and play the game before reading on!]

While Terra recuperates at Figaro Castle, Emperor Gestahl sends Kefka with an expeditionary force on a recon mission to find the mysterious magic user and bring her back to Vector. When Kefka arrives at Figaro Castle, he finds King Edgar cordial but evasive. Bored with diplomacy, he decides to take a more hard-line approach and orders his troops to attack the castle.

EDGAR: What’s happening?

KEFKA: Bring me the girl. Now!

EDGAR: I don’t know what you’re talking about!

KEFKA: Then…welcome to my barbecue!! Uwa ha ha ha!

EDGAR walks up to the throne room door and talks to a Soldier.

EDGAR: Get ready…!

FIGARO SOLDIER: Yes, Sir!

Soldier walks into the door.

KEFKA: Changed your mind…?

EDGAR: I guess I have no choice…

EDGAR whistles for a three Chocobos and jumps off the side of the
castle wall onto one of them.

EDGAR: Or maybe I do!

KEFKA: Ackk! Shameful that a king should flee, leaving his people
behind! How utterly delightful!

EDGAR takes the Chocobo around the other side of castle, where LOCKE
and TERRA are waiting.

EDGAR: Jump!

LOCKE and TERRA jump onto the Chocobos as they ride past, and they
proceed to ride off.

EDGAR: OK! Dive now!!!

LOCKE: Yahoooo!

Figaro Submergance Code Engaged!

The castle starts to pull together by itself.

CHANCELLOR: Into the golden desert Figaro Castle nobly descends!

Chancellor lowers into the castle, and it submerges. Kefka is wiped
out on the surface of the desert sands.

KEFKA: Go!! GET THEM!

Avulsion never asked to come on this mission. He felt humiliated every time he had to wipe the sand off of Kefka’s boots. All the same, he thought it would be easy to take down the three Chocobo riders with his Magiteck armor suit.

He was wrong.

Innocents lynch Avulsion, a mafioso.

PLAYERS:

Avulsion (mafia)
Baggins
Barigirl
Caysyka
CptSqweky
Drakon (innocent)
Drek
Fredward
Jerle
Locke
Lunesar
Onlera
PharaohsQueen
sunstarr12
ZeroMoon17

Among them: 1 Necromancer (Bannon), 1 Detective (Terra), 1 Assassin (Shadow), 2 Mafia (Kefka and 1 Imperial Agent)

NIGHT

FF6 Werewolf Tribute: first night

[NOTE: this is part two in a series of posts lifted from the quark message boards where I recently GM’d a game of Werewolf. The theme was Final Fantasy 6, one of my favorite RPGs of all time. To see all posts in the series, click here.

WARNING: there will be spoilers here, and lots of them, so if you haven’t played Final Fantasy 6, do yourself a favor and play the game before reading on!]

On the banks of the Doma river…

KEFKA: Hee, hee! Nothing can beat the music of hundreds of voices
screaming in unison! Uwa, ha, ha!

Meanwhile, inside the castle…

DOMA SENTRY: Sir CYAN! The Empire’s base is bustling with activity.
Something must be up!

CYAN: Huh? The water looks odd…

Seven posted Doma Sentries collapse and die.

DOMA SENTRY: Sir CYAN!

CYAN: This is…POISON!

With everyone dying around him, Cyan runs to save the king. He arrives too late to save his liege. The king tells him to save his family, but when Cyan runs into their quarters to rescue them…

CYAN: Elayne! Elayne! Wake up!

Elayne, Cyan’s wife, dies.

CYAN: This… This…can’t be happening!

From the other side of the room, Cyan hears a cough…

CYAN: ! Owain… NOT YOU TOO! Son…you can’t BOTH leave me!

Owain, Cyan’s son, dies.

CYAN: D… Dear me… <cough> <cough>

Cyan tries to escape the castle, but the poison is too strong. He collapses and dies with everyone else.

Mafia kills Drakon, an innocent.

Acting on behalf of the Returners, Locke rescues Terra from Narshe and spirits her away to Figaro Castle, where she meets several strange new people…

EDGAR: So…you’re an Imperial soldier! No problem. Figaro and the
Empire are allies! Please relax while you’re here. It’s not in my
blood to harm a lady.

TERRA: Look, why are you helping me? Is it because of my…abilities?

EDGAR waves his finger.

EDGAR: I’ll give you three reasons: First of all, your beauty has
captivated me! Second…I’m dying to know if I’m your type…

EDGAR walks away a bit.

EDGAR: I guess your…abilities…would be a distance 3rd.

TERRA: ……? What’s with you, anyway?

Suspicious, Terra checks out the castle for imperial agents. Instead, all she finds are maids, soldiers, and scholars studying the ancient arts of magic. Silly people, scholars.

Detective checks an innocent.

PLAYERS:

Avulsion
Baggins
Barigirl
Caysyka
CptSqweky
Drakon (innocent)
Drek
Fredward
Jerle
Locke
Lunesar
Onlera
PharaohsQueen
sunstarr12
ZeroMoon17

Among them: Bannon (Necromancer), Terra (Detective), Shadow (Assassin), 3 Mafia (Kefka and 2 Imperial Agents)

DAY

FF6 Werewolf Tribute: game start

[NOTE: this is part one in a series of posts lifted from the quark message boards where I recently GM’d a game of Werewolf. The theme was Final Fantasy 6, one of my favorite RPGs of all time. To see all posts in the series, click here.

WARNING: there will be spoilers here, and lots of them, so if you haven’t played Final Fantasy 6, do yourself a favor and play the game before reading on!]

Long ago, the War of the Magi
reduced the world to a scorched wasteland,
and magic simply ceased to exist.

One thousand years have passed…
Iron, gunpowder and steam engines
have been rediscovered,
and high technology reigns.

But there are those who would enslave the world
by reviving the dread destructive force
known as “magic.”

Could it be that those in power
are on the verge of repeating
a senseless and deadly mistake?

PLAYING:

Avulsion
Baggins
Barigirl
Caysyka
CptSqweky
Drakon
Drek
Fredward
Jerle
Locke
Lunesar
Onlera
PharaohsQueen
sunstarr12
ZeroMoon17

Among them: 1 Detective (Terra), 1 Necromancer (Bannon), 1 Assassin (Shadow), 3 Mafia (Emperor Gestahl, General Leo, and Kefka).

We will use the modified standard rules. Each player starts with 5 GP which disappear after the round is over.

NIGHT

Final Fantasy VI Werewolf tribute

Heh. Sorry for not posting in so long. I’ve been somewhat…preoccupied (and my last post said “building momentum”–ha!).

For this past week, I’ve been GMing a game of Werewolf on the Quark website. Werewolf is a forum roughly based on Mafia, but much more complex, since the online aspect gives it some very interesting dynamics–makes lying easier, gives it more strategy, more player roles, like “assassin” or “detective” or “necromancer,” etc. I’ve been playing for about a year now, and it’s lots of fun!

On the last round, about two weeks ago, I became the dirty lawyer (ie a traitorous innocent playing for the other team) for the assassin, a role that’s almost impossible to win. Previous to that round, it had only happened once–once, in almost four years of Werewolf rounds. Well, long story short, WE WON! Yeah!

So, having cut my teeth on the game (I haven’t played that many rounds of Werewolf, and some of the players are much more shrewd than me), I decided to GM the round. Out of a spontaneous impulse, I decided to theme it off of Final Fantasy 6, one of my favorite RPGs of all time.

Let me just say, that was either the best or the worst decision I’ve made all week.

I’ve been completely absorbed in this game. Completely. It’s been awesome, moving the story along, throwing in just the right cutscenes to represent different actions taken by either side, getting into character, showing Kefka’s gradual descent (or, should I say, ascent?) from deranged lunatic into Evil Force of Nature, etc etc. It’s been glorious! Absolutely glorious!

<sigh> I love Final Fantasy 6. It’s been years since I’ve played it (well, only a couple, since I was a college freshman when I first played it <blush>), but GMing this round has brought back all the old feelings for that game.

It is epic! Truly epic! The best game in the Final Fantasy series–so emotional, so poignant, so cliche and melodramatic BUT IN THE BEST POSSIBLE WAY!!!!!!

……….

So anyway, I have a confession to make: that round of Werewolf totally absorbed my life this past week. That’s why nothing’s happened. I’m debating posting some of the best moments of it on this blog, but I don’t know. Maybe I’ll end up doing it.

In totally unrelated (and a little bit more professional) news, I got an internship offer with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy a few days ago. Looks like an awesome place! I’m seriously considering accepting it. Dr. Bowen tells me they’re pro-Israel and right of center, but at the same time, very moderate–not the kind of partisan place that’s going to lock me into a Republican-only or Democrat-only career for the rest of my life. Also, I hear they’re extremely influential with policy makers…could be interesting, inshallah.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines of war such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell, and that God had suffered these Magi to place the weapons in the hands of princes, and to say to each prince: ‘Only because thine enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike.’

But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: ‘If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy those others in their sleep, and there shall be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.’

Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge…

In the new dark ages of man following the nuclear apocalypse, an order of Catholic monks preserves the last vestiges of civilization: a shopping list, an electrical diagram, and other assorted scraps of a long-dead world. As mankind rises from the dust, inevitable tensions arise between the church and the world, between Jerusalem and Babylon, Christ and Lucifer.

This book is epic. Epic. I can’t begin to describe how incredible it is. Virtually every page, especially towards the end, is packed with meaning. A cautionary tale of the folly of man in this fallen world, this story held me captivated right up to the chilling final chapter. Bravo.

As I understand it, Walter M. Miller Jr. wrote this book in the late 50s / early 60s, during the height of the Cold War. Science fiction at that time was both sweepingly visionary and frighteningly pessimistic about the future of mankind, and this book successfully captures both extremes. Like Asimov’s Foundation series, it reads more like a collection of elongated short stories, but Miller’s characterization and attention to detail is superior, in my opinion, to Asimov’s.

The most fascinating aspect about this book is the way that Miller hearkens to the past to give us a vision of our future. Many of his ideas are straight out of Augustine and Aquinas–indeed, in several places, the story feels like it’s set in 3rd or 4th century Europe, which only adds to the delicious irony.

Yet, while this book has a strong Catholic feel, I never felt alienated or excluded from its intended audience. Maybe it’s because my Mormon heritage is more compatible with Catholicism than other religious beliefs, but I don’t think it’s just that; the issues in this book are human issues, not just religious issues, and by focusing on that fact, Miller makes the story much more universal.

Even with all the deep, philosophical elements, this story is wonderfully entertaining. Irony abounds, especially in the first section, in which a young novice takes a simple electrical diagram from the pre-deluge world and, completely unaware of its significance (or lack thereof), spends the rest of his life making a beautiful illuminated manuscript of it. Even though the sections were short, I quickly fell in love with the characters in each one, and connected with them almost instantly.

The final scene, in particular, was incredibly touching. I won’t spoil it for you, but let me just say, if you are or ever have considered taking your own life, read this book, just for the final scene. The degree to which the last abbot clings to life, even in the face of so many good reasons to give up, is just incredible. And the final scene, in which…I won’t ruin it for you. Just read it!

A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of the most powerful, meaningful books I have read in my life. It is more than a good read, more than epic. I class it as one of the best works of fiction this genre has ever produced. If you have ever wondered about the destiny of mankind, or the proper relationship between the secular and the spiritual in our modern age–read this book!

back in Provo

Just arrived in Utah, after a LONG drive. Nevada is so freaking huge…and empty. Blegh.

Considering I need to be in class at 9am tomorrow, I’m going to post this and go straight to bed. Goodnight.

more later

Saturday was a great day. I wish I had the time to blog all about it, but unfortunately I need to get up a little early tomorrow and I need the extra sleep. More later, though–I promise!

T minus 5:08:37…

Business cards…check.
Clean clothes…check.
Clean shaven…check.
Soap and toiletries…check.
Batteries…check.
Battery recharger…check.
iRiver 800…check.
Music…check.
Computer…check.
Camera…check.
Tentative convention program…check.
Map and directions…check.
Snacks and lunch…check.

Five hours to liftoff and counting. This time tomorrow, I’m going to be in California! Yay! And holy cow, did I mention that I’m nervous?

World Fantasy 2009, here we come!

Mysterium by Robert Charles Wilson

Nobody knows why the government chose the small town of Two Rivers, Michigan, as the site for a top secret military project. Even most of the people involved in the project don’t know what it’s really about. That’s alright, because most of the denizens of this backwoods community are used to minding their own business. But after a mysterious explosion bathes the entire city in light, that becomes impossible.

On the outskirts of town, all the roads and power lines dead end in ancient virgin forest. It’s as if a perfect circle has been drawn around the town on the map, and everything within the circle has been transported to a parallel world.

A very unfriendly parallel world.

Robert Charles Wilson’s writing is awesome. I could eat up his prose all day. It not only flows beautifully, it’s clear and transparent, to the point where I forget that I’m reading and feel as if I’m there. He always uses the right expression, the right metaphor, and yet his prose never attracts so much attention to itself that it distracts from the story.

I noticed several similarities between Mysterium and Wilson’s other novels that I’ve read. All of them start in our modern world and move into a mysterious, unfamiliar milieu. All of them involve strange religions and religious conflicts. All of them involve male and female characters struggling to face personal relationship problems and eventually coming together. In these ways, this story felt very much like Spin.

At the same time, I can definitely tell that this is one of Wilson’s earlier works. The story flows like a thriller, but lags in certain points. After the town is transported into the parallel dimension, the story seems to meander without any clear direction. For several chapters, I lost the sense of progress that usually accompanies a good plot. The resolution receives very little foreshadowing–the “surprising yet inevitable” element was only “inevitable” three or four chapters from the end. If it weren’t for Wilson’s beautiful writing, I would have put this book down in the middle.

Unlike Spin, I found the milieu of this story somewhat depressing–not necessarily because of the setting itself (though it’s not the kind of alternate present that I’d want to live in), but because the people of Two Rivers never go back.

According to Card, there are two basic types of milieu stories: stories where the protagonist returns profoundly changed, or stories where the protagonist “goes native” and becomes assimilated. But…if the new world isn’t the kind of place you’d want to live in–in other words, if it’s dystopian (and Wilson’s alternate world in Mysterium is fairly dystopian)–then there’s this tension of “will the protagonist make it back? Will they return?” And if they don’t return, the story is emotionally disappointing. That was the case for me with Mysterium.

</spoiler alert>

From this review, it probably sounds like I hated this book. That wasn’t the case–not at all! This was a good story, and I enjoyed it. I finished the last hundred pages at a sprint at 1:30 in the morning–it was definitely that kind of a book. I couldn’t put it down. And at the same time, it was thoughtful and profound (as you can tell from my previous post, “Why I love Robert Charles Wilson“).

I’ve probably said enough. If you like thrilling, parallel world adventure stories with a contemplative, thoughtful “what if?” element, read this book. Even with all the misgivings I’ve mentioned here, it’s good SF. Very good.

Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb

It’s that time of year! Elves, Klingons, slave women, gamers, computer geeks, aspiring writers, and superfans are converging on Rubicon, the annual science fiction convention. Mild mannered citizens beware!

Newest among the motley crew is Jay Omega, a young, local computer professor and first-time author on a mission: make sure that nobody he knows in real life finds out that he is the author of Bimbos of the Death Sun. Fortunately, his friend and secret lover (but only a secret to him), Marion, is there to promote his book and keep him from getting hopelessly lost.

But then, Appin Dungannon, famous author of the prolific adventure series of Tratyn Runewind, is found dead in his hotel suite. Who could possibly want him dead? Turns out, just about everyone: Appin is also famous for hating the series more than any other person on the planet, and for treating his fans like slime.

As the convention threatens to fall apart, Jay takes on the case and tries to answer: who killed Dungannon, and why? In a world where fantasy has more power than fact, however, the answer is stranger than anyone in theiTr right mind would expect.

This book was hilarious. Sharyn McCrumb explores science fiction and fantasy fandom the way a drunk anthropologist would explore an aboriginal jungle tribe. Even though her characters are all shallow caricatures of the real thing, their clumsy interactions turn the story into a wonderful farce that is as entertaining as it is educational.

There were only a couple of parts that bothered me. At one point, McCrumb gets into the head of an overweight, hopelessly ugly fangirl cosplayer and shows her thought process as she pursues a romantic relationship with an equally ugly and socially incompetent fanboy. I didn’t feel that McCrumb authentically portrayed the character’s own thoughts–it sounded more like a person from the outside giving their take on the experience. Then again, McCrumb was going for humor, not true character depth.

Besides that, this book is definitely dated. The computer technology in the novel is ridiculously primitive, on par with the Commodore 64, the Tandy 400, and the trusty old 386. In other ways, too, this book is solidly 80s–any science fiction convention nowadays would probably have less Trekkies and more Anime cosplayers. However, the dated aspects only make the novel more endearing, in my opinion. Who wouldn’t be nostalgic for the good old days of the 386?

This book isn’t high literature, and Sharyn McCrumb would probably be the first to admit it. It was, however, wonderfully entertaining, one of those rare and beautiful books that made me laugh out loud, heartily. For someone like me who is just starting to become involved in science fiction and fantasy fandom, it was a hilarios and helpful primer to this fascinating subculture. As McCrumb states in her foreward:

Science fiction writers build castles in the air; the fans move into them; and the publishers collect the rent. It’s a nice place to visit, but please don’t try to live there.

That said, I find it telling that it was people in fandom who recommended this book to me. Good to know that at least a few of us don’t take ourselves too seriously.