178: when you roll a 1
Hullo.
I know it’s cover
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Nanananananana
Dus
Byyyyeeee!!!
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I hadn’t got around to doing the Marvel February solicits, and minutes before putting this together, Marvel have released the March ones. Let’s have a quick tour to show you what awaits in 2021 to wrap up 2020.
Coo.
There’s also the Marneus Calgar trade in March, for those who like a spine (before it is inevitably torn out by someone’s power fist. I just originally typoed “power glove” which does not bode ill for the rest of this newsletter.)
Also, I hadn’t shown you Esad’s concept art for the Eternals, which was released with the full lettered preview of issue 1.
Coo.
Eternals is out on January 6th, which is the next time I’ll be talking to you folk. See you then.
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We had the launch live stream of DIE: THE GREAT GAME last week, which was a lot of fun. Stephanie, Chrissy, Rian, Clayton and myself talking about all things comics, with a heavy craft riff, smattering of philosophy and more. There’s a bunch of minor and major DIE in there. We were mainly answering questions from the audience, which lead in all kinds of directions.
That this basically worked made me think it’s likely something we should do more often, right?
The trade is now in bookshops as well as comic shops.
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Stephanie is interviewed by the DIE-Compressed folks about all things, and is just great. I love hearing my collaborators just talk about the work, and this is a goldmine. I’ve just lined up my own interview with the DIE-compressed folks for the new year too.
I’d seen various game designers talk about QAnon as ARG design, but this is the most methodical pieces I’ve seen, coming it as actually the inversion of what game designers try to do, weaponizing things game designers try hard to avoid. In the livestream above, Rian asks me about certain themes in my work, and I boil it down to something like “I believe in using story to inoculate people against story” which seems relevant.
I’ve talked a bunch about Blades in the Dark’s thief-caper RPG before, and it and its sister Forged in the Dark games are presently in Bundle of Holding. A good time to go nose.
I found myself re-reading a couple of old games journalism things I did back in the day – these were basically two big diary features we ran on RPS. Gameboys From Hell about demons-trying-to-take-over-hell-em-up game Solium Infernum is the better of the two, which starts with Quinns (of SUSD fame) and myself basically figuring out the game and moving towards something that made me intensely nostalgic, proud we’d pulled it off, punch the air glee and also made me very aware that my Catholicism is only part of my tendency to do all these fun dramas in hell. Meanwhile, Pride & Falls about Neptune Pride starts as a whole lot of fun and ends up with an emotional descent into a mess, and a look at some of the worst emotions a game can churn up. Also weirdly crosses over with Phonogram’s production at one point. I don’t have much urge to write games journalism any more (the DIE interviews are some of the hardest things to force myself to do) but skimming through this stuff certainly made me glad I once did.
You ever read Alan Moore writing about Frank Miller from back in the day? Alan’s pre-ALAN FUCKING MOORE critical voice is something we don’t think about much nowadays, in terms of how we view him. That’s a shame, I feel.
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This is exciting. Dan “Once & Future” Mora is going to be drawing Detective Comics with the always great Mariko Tamaki next year. Dan’s been doing genre defining action work, and I’m glad it’s going to be exposed to a whole bunch of folks. I’ve said he’s doing some the absolute best blockbuster action comics today, and now the superhero comics mainstream are going to see it.
However, I’ve had a few people ask what it means for Once & Future.
In short: we’ve planned for it, and we’re planning to have nine issue of O&F in 2021, which includes kicking off the fourth arc. We’ll confirm the schedule down the line, but I suspect it’s going to end up being a gap between the third and fourth arcs.
Basically, lots of Dan for everyone. Hurrah.
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I often think of this bit of Red Dwarf.
It’s where Rimmer is describing his great victories in Risk, much to Lister’s annoyance. And endless string of “And then I rolled a 6!” The joke being, that no-one is interested in hearing about people’s gaming adventures.
I spent basically fifteen years of my life trying to prove that wrong, and get people excited about that time I rolled a 6.
Or a 1.
In short: skip to the next section if you’re feeling your inner Lister growl. Also, spoilers for DIE: Fantasy Heartbreaker.
The DIE Campaign I was running ended a handful of weeks ago. It’s been one of the backbones of the year. It was thirty-five sessions, which was the longest game of my adult life. The DIE rules released so far have primarily been for a single-scenario game, lasting a handful of sessions. Sure, you can stretch it further if you like, but there’s nothing like – say – Character Advancement, and it’s much more about a repeatable shorter experience than marching off into the horizon.
But I wanted to have DIE be able to march into the horizon, and decided the best way to do that was to just run a campaign with my rough concepts in place, and then try and build in front of the players as the game continued, making notes about what was working and what wasn’t working, reach the end, see how it ends and use the experience as the core of what I write up.
Mainly, I was hoping that it would work. The surprise was that it worked so well.
I think that last session may have been my favourite game of all time. This is partially because of emotional investment - you live with players and characters for a year, and it becomes something else. It’s also partially as the end just landed. It’s everything I could have hoped for.
The persona were all people with went to the University of East Anglia, and were in a writing group together, ran by a somewhat distant Professor. A decade later, with a mixture of successes and failures, they’re gathered together by Alice – the somewhat bitter gothic children’s literature obsessive (“I always loved Wonderland. She even had my name.”). Playing some old 1990s rpg, she was running a game which dragged them into a fantasy world made of the detritus of their lives and the corners of their imagination.
As they explore further, the larger picture is revealed. Their Professor is also in the game – lover of two of the persona, clearly immoral, and the absent father of Alice – and has been manipulating everyone as part of some awful research. Alice’s form had been shattered , and her various aspects of personalities hunted them (or mourned for them, or helped them). After a certain point, the persona realised they could leave… if they left Alice behind. They decided to stay and fight for their friend, who was clearly in an awful place. This is the whole last third of the campaign and, eventually, in the final session they manage to merge the strands of Alice, teach her, improve her, heal her. They help themselves too – I’ll spare you the mile-high constructs made of Shane’s Shame, the HMH Steven Fletcher’s AI-brother, the Somme-Wraiths and Optimo, Crayon-Wizard, Lord of Hell.
But now the end is here. DIE is falling apart. Time is ticking.
But instead of a final confrontation, Alice has captured the Professor. He is tied up, defenceless. They can go home, if they just say the magic words: the Game Is Over.
Now, there’s one problem. One of the players has died, and is a Fallen. If the players leave, all the Fallen remain in undeath. A Fallen has to kill another Persona to live again. The Fallen was, until recently, Shane. Shane would absolutely murder the Professor. The players were thinking that’s how it’d go – they’d kill the professor in a fight, Shane would be alive, and then they’d go home and leave the undead Professor. The shit really deserved it.
They weren’t expecting it to be this cold. A man, tied up is different from an action act at the end of a movie
There was a bigger problem. For reasons connected to the aforementioned mile-high shame construct, Shane had recently fed upon the hopelessly in-love-with-Shane Will. Now Will was Fallen.
Will was a sweetheart. He was the group’s Fool, but rather than the monster that is Chuck, Will was basically a nerdy Bertie Wooster.
He couldn’t kill the professor. He couldn’t kill anyone. If they left, he’d be staying out here.
It stretches out with some frankly painfully brilliant role-play the group. Trying to talk Will into doing it. Will just not being able to do it. He’d rather stay here. He can’t be a murderer. Just go. They refuse. The world crumbles…
Eventually, Will asks Alice if there’s anything else they can do.
Alice says that there is another option. She’s a Master. Her most powerful ability means that she can cheat and bend the rules. She could try to cheat so that rules mean that Fallen go home to Earth too.
Everyone knows how this kind of Master cheating works by now. The Master player ( i.e. me) holds out the Dice to the players, in my two closes hands. One hand is empty, the other has the dice. Another player picks a hand. If they don’t find the dice, the Master gets away with it. If the dice is in that hand, the forces of reality has noticed the cheating, and there’s consequences proportionate to the level of cheating.
Cheating the fundamental rules of the game is one of the worst things as Master can do. It would be awful for Alice. She would be better off dead.
Cue more heartfelt arguments as reality starts to crumble. Will doesn’t want Alice to do this for her. Alice understands, but notes it’s not his call. He makes his decision. She will make hers. And she will not leave him after everything he and everyone else did to save her.
“The problem with changing to be a better person,” she notes, “is having to be a better person. It’s most annoying.”
The ritual begins.
I hold out my hands, one containing the dice. Will’s player volunteers to make the pick. I ask if they’re sure. This is already deeply emotionally charged. They don’t have to. The player agrees – it has to be them. Will has to pick. It’s appropriate.
They pick a hand.
If it’s the dice, Alice is doomed. If it’s empty, they’re all going home.
I don’t open my hand.
Everyone does the ritual, and the chant around the circle. The Game Is Over, the Game is over…
They’re all back in reality.
I open the hand that was picked.
It’s the dice.
They’re back in reality, but Alice is slumped in her chair, eyes wide open, stone cold dead.
I call a break, as everyone is clearly shattered, me included. We come back and do the epilogue. I soften the awfulness of that moment a little in a final image, but that moment of the return to Earth was a moment of absolute horror born of a year of effort and what amounted to a flip of a coin.
Hell of a medium, RPGs. Especially when you roll a 1.
We unpacked after the game, which turned into a micro-christmas. I had no idea the players were doing this, and everyone got everyone else stuff. Here I am in the campaign T-shirt, as drawn by our friend, the artist Timothy Winchester.
More gifts, for everyone. It’s hugely touching. The morning after, I woke up and made the players a playlist…
I don’t know if it’ll mean anything to you, but it means the world to me.
Anyway – if you’re a DIE player, you may be wondering what the future plans are. Firstly, writing up everything I made up to get through this game, including tightening up the character advancement stuff for the players. Here’s a teaser, showing the cast’s maps at the end of the game.
Basically whenever you go up a level, you get to pick a new region, adjacent to what you’ve already picked. I’m not sure about barely any of the abilities, but the core concept certainly worked.
After that – developing up the mechanics which I need to try a second, likely shorter campaign. There’s some things I wanted to do which I only had in a vestigial form, and I want to turn up the volume on them a little.
I also need to – to quote one of the players – mourn this game a bit. I’m playing a lot of other games now, as this game was a lot. The joy of making something with friends is a blessing.
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The last newsletter of the year, which does leave the task of summing up the year. I normally do something personal in the tracks of the year list (which is normally in the first week of the following year) and something vaguely professional in this one.
I can’t, really. Either you write a book or you say something wholly too small for the task. The “I hope things are as well as they can be for you in this hell year” sign off to my mails says a lot. No-one’s having a good year. Everyone’s awful will have some similar notes. Everyone’s awful will have some notes that no-one else has struck. Many notes just a scream.
(As I write the above Black Country, New Road’s Science Fair is building to its first static wall of a climax just shy of 4 minutes. It is a very recognisable wail of distress.)
As I’ve said before, I have been playing Covid on a relatively easy mode. I am also aware that while the impact of Covid only made almost everything worse, even without it, this would be a year which borders on my all time terrible list (1997, 2006, 2013-2014). It’s been a painful mess on a lot of levels, requiring a lot of emotional and physical strain. With Covid as well, 2020 is very much on there.
But there’s also been love.
This year has focused attention on important things, often in their absence, often in the removal of everything else but what I cherish. While I don’t subscribe to What Does Not Kill You Makes You Stronger I’m aware that I feel significantly recalibrated. I hope I can carry this into 2021, because I don’t think I’ll be changing my Hell Year sign off to mails any time soon.
Work update? Towards Christmas, it’s the slow drift into the holidays and that liminal time before Jan 1st. Most of the US offices are closed by now, so there’s very few mails. I’m finishing the last script - got DIE 17 is a final-nose away from complete. There’s a pitch I want to do some more work on tomorrow. Then it’s Christmas, and fiddling on a personal project until new year.
I’ll see you there.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London.
23.12.2020