A nasty build-up of legend
All right, luvvies? I don’t know about you, but my attention span is shot, and progress on things like #ProjectBigbird is happening a sentence or two at a time, if at all. We’ve been in this long enough that I sometimes forget it’s the pandemic’s fault, not the project’s. There are some short stories in this one, in case you’re having similar attention span issues. Enjoy!
Coming right up
Merely Roleplayers
Short stories
What is a roleplaying game?
Pin power
Vigil: Cold Snap
continues in the Main House. Now that Jinny’s got a glimpse of what they’re up against, Act 3 is a chase through the forest to reach Brier’s tree before the cold can reach it…
There’s an excellent short story by William Hope Hodgson, The Whistling Room, which has had a big influence on how I think about hauntings and monstrous things. The Podcastle short fiction podcast has an especially good reading of the story, which is how I first came across it (and Hodgson, and his paranormal detective Carnacki, who I went on to write a play about).
I’m going to spoil the story, so if you want to experience it fresh, head to Podcastle now and come back to me in a bit.
Spoilers for The Whistling Room from here:
So in The Whistling Room, Carnacki learns that the ‘haunted’ room he’s investigating was the site of a grisly event. Many years ago, a court jester had his tongue cut out for singing a mocking song about the king, and was then roasted alive when he still wouldn’t stop whistling it.
But it’s not that the jester’s ghost is haunting the room, seeking closure. It’s that the events were so terrible, and left people with such a strong impression, that the room couldn’t help but become associated with the jester, his song, and his awful death. Carnacki describes the associations and the impressions building up in the room like a kind of psychic fungus. Left to fester, the story part-forgotten and twisted through time, the room itself takes up the tune, becoming something malicious and dangerous.
I love this theory of hauntings as something generated by the living, rather than as evidence of life after death. It’s something I have in mind a lot when coming up with monsters for the players to struggle against in Vigil. What are the preoccupations of this community? What could have happened in the forest, in the school, on the high street, or in the library that might have left traces on those places, and what might those traces grow into, if nurtured with folklore and rumour?
I think the idea that a powerful enough story, reinforced by belief and retelling, can become the truth is one for our times. Fake news bleeds into reality when people take action because of it, either because they believe it or because it gives them an excuse to do something they wanted to do anyway. Politicians lie and lie until the truth gives up and their version of events is all that’s left.
Naturally this is something that would preoccupy writers - we’re invested in the power of story, and it’s deeply worrying to see powerful baddies using it against the rest of us. So it’s not surprising that it’s popping up as a central theme in more and more modern works. Here’s a quick reading list:
The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds: a comic about the secret US government department tasked with stopping conspiracy theories becoming too widely believed - because then they’d become true.
Something Is Killing The Children, also by Tynion, with Werther Dell’Edera: a comic about monster hunters whose job is as much about controlling narrative as it is about fighting monsters with machetes.
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck: a novel set in a new company town established in a strange realm where every object must be regularly labelled and named aloud, otherwise it melts into mushy paste.
Once & Future by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora: a comic about old legends, specifically English ones, and how they repeat with new twists for new ages, and the people who harness that repetition for their own ends.
And of course, Vigil. Those are just the ones I’ve clocked recently - am I missing any obvious examples of recent work with similar themes?
Short stories
are how I developed my storytelling brain. I wrote a lot of them as exercises or coursework while studying creative writing, I’ve read a lot and listened to even more on podcasts, and I made a good go of regularly writing and submitting them to magazines for a couple of years. Some of them even made it to publication!
When a Crossroads is a Corner: a 250-word quick hit of dread, winner of Apex Magazine’s annual horror flash fiction contest.
Dead Without Dying: a weird misfit story with a great big crashing gear change right in the middle that I’m still very proud of pulling off. Originally published in AE: the Canadian Science Fiction Review.
What Is a Roleplaying Game jam
This is still more of an idea than a plan at the moment. I need to work out what’s actually involved in running a game jam, and whether I have the capacity, before I commit to anything. But part of the point of this newsletter is to give you a preview of plans like these before they happen (or before I decide not to do them after all).
So a game jam is a time-limited challenge to make a game on a theme. I’ve taken part in a couple on itch.io: Record Collection, where you make a game inspired by an album, and Felonious Fauna, where you make a game about animals who do crimes.
Working on #ProjectBigbird, my first full roleplaying game system, at some point I’m going to reach the roleplaying game designer’s rite of passage: writing the ‘what is a roleplaying game?’ section of the rulebook.
The idea of the What Is a Roleplaying Game jam would be for everyone to contribute a ‘what is a roleplaying game?’ section: one they’ve used in a game they created, or an attempt at writing the platonic ideal of the text that could apply to any game, or a joke version, or a version that is itself a game. The jam would be both an exorcism and the creation of a shared resource, so no new game designer has to go through the same rite of passage if they’d rather just get on with designing their game.
Since having the idea, I’ve found that at least some of the ground has already been covered. What is a Roleplaying Game? is a roleplaying game released by Epidiah Ravachol back in 2013, and in response to that, D. Vincent Baker released the roleplaying game What is a Roleplaying Game? in 2015. So maybe the jam idea is redundant - or, maybe enough time has passed and enough new thought has emerged since then that it’s still worth doing. It’s mostly a joke idea anyway, so maybe it’s still worth doing if it makes a few people smile. If I decide to push ahead with it, I’ll let you know!
Sigils of power
Both bought at a long-ago MCM Comic Con. Hauntings and monsters aren’t the only things that gain power from the meanings we invest in them; the same goes for symbols. The pentacle was once a potent tool in certain kinds of magic because of its widely recognised religious meaning. It’s largely lost that meaning now. Today it signifies magic itself, rather than signifying the binding of divine or infernal power, which significance made it magically potent in the first place. It’s become something of a magical short-circuit.
That blue symbol on the left, though? It’s widely recognised today as signifying power. Activation and deactivation. If I had to spend tonight in the whistling room, I wouldn’t be drawing a pentacle around me - I’d be drawing one of these.
Until next time,
Matt x