In Which The Warlock Examines Some Ethical Dilemmas...

A bit of honesty here to begin this entry:  I've been a little bit skeptical of the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises.  While it's been extremely well-reviewed thusfar, 2008's The Dark Knight and Inception only made me more appreciative of Christopher Nolan as an introspective, nuanced filmmaker.

While I'll still be seeing it on Friday with the PlatinumChick before game night, The Dark Knight Rises has massive shoes to fill in the wake of both its predecessor and The Avengers, both of which stand as the crowning achievements in genre-filmmaking in this decade, maybe of all time.

The inspiration for 2008's
The Dark Knight.

The reason I'm so skeptical of TDKR comes from the moral and ethical weight of its predecessor, stemming directly from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's timeless Batman storyline "The Long Halloween".  The majority of the plot from The Dark Knight comes from that comic series, as Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Dent work towards taking down the mob-influences that infest the city.  However, their uncompromising war on crime comes crashing down through the death of Rachel Dawes or, in the comics, the search for the killer known as Holiday.

The Joker sums this up concisely towards the end of the film.  Dangling upside-down from a half-finished building, he tells Batman: "This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever."

The Joker:  madman, or simply
demonstrating the flaws in
moral objectivism?

Batman's attempts to do things "the right way" and without loss of life often serves to bring about great tragedy and  heartbreak, simply because he attempts to do what is "just" and "right".  The story could have ended much, much earlier had Bruce Wayne simply stepped forward though, truth be told, negotiating with The Joker isn't exactly something reasonable in and of itself!  That's what makes The Dark Knight such a great film, as well as what puts The Dark Knight Rises in such a difficult position.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, you see, Cold Steel Wardens is deliberately built to allow players to emulate and even play through this continued moral quagmire.  Every Hero in Cold Steel Wardens begins play with a series of Stances, in addition to their more standard background elements (Motivations, Flaws, and Origins).  These Stances represent important portions of a Hero's mindset and comprise their own moral and ethical "high ground" as they fight crime.  Perhaps a given Hero refuses to fight against police, or won't attack what he views as "children".  Maybe a Hero is driven towards vengeance against those who have committed sex crimes or crimes against police.  Maybe the Hero is outright bloodthirsty and doesn't care who gets hurt as they wage their war on crime.  There's room for all these at the table, as they're consistently meant to be challenged.

In addition to providing impetus for great role-playing opportunities, Stances provide a method for Heroes to add dice to the communal Hero Pool.  When the GM of a Cold Steel Wardens session challenges a Hero's Stance, the GM must add a die to the Pool.  However, if the player themself places their Stance into question--let the mafia thug get away, or pick up the gun on the floor and keep him from reporting back to his superiors?--he gets to add two dice  to the Hero Pool!  It pays to role-play!

Stances are simply one way to add dice to the Hero Pool, though they may certainly be the most dramatic.  When Heroes are forced into uncomfortable situations which question their morals, players themselves become engaged with the plot and its characters.  Here's for hoping that we see it  out soon!  With the first draft of Cold Steel Wardens nearly wrapped up--and in the hands of my two editors already--here's for hoping that we hit print in time for next August!

Next time, friends and neighbors--the results of my name-poll and my review of The Dark Knight Rises!

In Which The Warlock Tries to "Make it New"...

Bear with me here. Back in the day (the early 1900s, that is), when the Modernists roamed the Earth, poet Ezra Pound wrote "Make it New!". In the book, he set forth the concepts of a revolution of language and literature, in which even the smallest concepts are revisited, resulting in drastic changes to fundamental ideas. Pound himself was a devotee of Dante Alighieri, and produced his own Cantos centered around The Divine Comedy, but with massive alterations in structure and in metaplot.

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

Therein lies the rub and, for that matter, our subject for today's blog: newness! If you've been following along, I've been working diligently on my Deadlands game, trying to blend it with Stephen King's Dark Tower mythos and his larger, gestalt world. You'd think that'd be an easy task--toss in an Overlook hotel here, a creepy sewer-dwelling clown there, and the task is complete, right?

Wrong. In the postmodern era, King himself has assembled a pastiche of thematic concepts that started with Robert Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, to the spaghetti westerns of yesteryear, to the venerable (and immensely gamed-out) Lord of the Rings, to Pound's Modernist buddy T.S. Eliot. Ask any "sane" reader, and an assembly of this magnitude seems schizophrenic on a good day.

The Dark Tower

So, of course, on top of all of this, I'm trying to fit the themes of alternate history (a la Harry Turtledove) as well as elements from Deadlands' own canon. Difficult? Monumental! To say that one cannot serve two masters is something of a misnomer here, but it becomes a massive challenge to provide more than lip service to the combination of canon, inspiring works, and ones' own ideas.

But, it's gaming "work" that needs doing. I was originally drawn to Deadlands for its uniqueness in gaming--in a medium slavishly attached to fantasy cliche, it was a breath of clean winter air in my lungs. Similarly, while still in classic D&D, the Eberron setting inverted so many generic fantasy tropes that it could hardly be recognized as D&D until you broke out the d20s! World War II-era Berlin, dropped into a fantasy world? Zombie "Soviet" soldiers, marching to war against dinosaur-riding tribal halflings? Sentient robots fighting psychic spies aboard lightning-driven trains? Sign me up!

It's this concept of 'newness' and originality, even when (as a GM) you're pulling from other sources, that keeps people pulling up a chair to your gaming table every week. Games that center around only one central pillar, be it mechanical or thematic, are destined to fail, simply due to disinterest. Players want more, and it's our job as a GM to give it to them!

The same can be said for games that are linked too closely to the idea of 'canon'--which, in some ways, tips my hand in terms of my relationship with the RPGA. In a medium that supposedly values and rewards creativity, the "Living" campaigns reward mediocrity and repetition. Similarly, I have been openly lambasting Wizards of the Coast's D&D Essentials line for being overly slavish to nostaligic ideas, many of which were clung to without rhyme or reason. Instead of embracing the mechanical creativity of 4e--which, even within its own mechanics, had been evolving!--the design team took a deliberate step backwards, which will leave the game worse for the taking.

John, over at World vs. Hero expounds on this idea, as he was providing contest advice for some of the entrants on his website. There, John breaks it down in terms of a combination of "Originality" and "Allure". The neat thing is, though: originality does not necessarily mean 'without inspirations'. Rather, he elaborates that:

...originality is a rather fluid state, and we should not be paralyzed into inaction for fear of being unoriginal. When honesty precedes the presentation of creativity, the quality of “being original” becomes “being true to a fresh vision of old and new ideas,” and, under this definition, our art may be judged fairly for what it is...

John, brother--Ezra and Thomas would be proud!

The core of gaming, if it is to ever be taken somewhat seriously as an artistic medium (or to continue on into the "Twitter" era), is to blend new ideas with the fundamental archetypes that serve as the foundation of our collective hobby. Slavish devotion to canon, for whatever reason, leads only to stagnation and, eventually, dismissal. In the end, we're a jaded group. We've been there, and done that. We've killed the orc, taken his pie, and moved on.

Give me something new!

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