The Death of Imagination

Today's depression caught me even more off guard by coming on the heels of a delightful weekend. Sure, Sunday I was moody and draggy, but that's typical when I've been out late. It usually doesn't carry over into the week.

It was also a beautiful day, so I wasn't the least surprised to find that I'd managed to schedule a four-hour RPG session for the heart of it. This was JB's idea, and I was looking forward to it. He told us to scare up some players, so I asked Sad Cub, who initially agreed, but never asked me the time and then informed me that he had to run errands.

I find it ironic that JB initially objected to him because he'd thought he'd be "dull" given that the player he did invite didn't seem to contribute much. To be fair, I don't think any of us was at our best. I even dozed off at one point. (In my defence, it was after the homemade apple pie with homemade ice cream.) The game itself was another PbtA, Zombie World, with the twist that it used cards as a mechanic rather than dice.

We ended with about an hour of fading sunlight left so I got to fit in a bit of a stroll. I suspected the leaves would be particularly striking after having been washed clean but the previous day's storms and I was right. Any doubts I had about how pretty this fall would be have been laid to rest.

It was a marked contrast to my stroll along many of the same streets the day before. Then it was pouring rain and so, despite being the same time of day, quite dark out. I was too stubborn to call a ride, a decision I came to regret almost immediately. Thankfully, I wasn't completely soaked when I got home and my friends came to pick me up for the next event.

The afternoon get-together was another wine-tasting at mikiedoggie's. It was one of the best yet: everyone agreed that there wasn't a stinker in the pack and the final tally was very closed. Yet again, I placed near the bottom, so I think my faith in Independent Spirits may be wavering. After the prize was awarded, I inadvertently started a run on Mikie's 12 year-old Yamazaki (which I would feel worse about if he hadn't been going around himself giving generous pours).

However, the most interesting feature of the tasting from my point of view was a beefy daddy from Boston. He and his husband were friends of the organisers and in fact spearheaded a similar club in Boston. At first, I tried to be subtle in my appreciation, balancing my time between chatting him up and chatting up his husband. But after tasting a dozen wines, that caution went by the wayside.

Just before our outrageous flirting got too out of hand, I discovered that he was going to be at the same Halloween party that evening. I didn't know quite what to expect from it; I knew the crowd was mixed, so there would have to be some breaks on lewd behaviour. But I also knew how to get away with quite a lot even in an environment like that.

So I showed up ready, but even I wasn't ready for the Bostonians to arrive in TERRYCLOTH BATHROBES. It was only a wig party, but apparently their friends thought they needed to put in a little more effort. Although I appreciated the easy access this afforded, it did make it rather difficult to pretend to care about making conversation with everyone else.

Finally, after a couple hours, I invited Beefy to "tour the upstairs", which I'd seen once before. After a bit of Feydeau-esque comedy, we finally slipped out onto the upper deck for some hanky-panky in the cold rain which had thankfully slowed to a mere drizzle. He urged us back in before we got too carried away, but he connived with me to engineer a couple more opportunities over the course of evening. It probably ended up being more fun than a straightforward hookup would have been.

I ended up mooning over him a bit the next day. Besides being sexy and very into me, he was also smart and interesting, a prison psychologist who was happy to talk wine and gay media and probably a bunch more topics if only there'd been the opportunity. I was left with that familiar melancholy of being reminded how many supremely attractive men there are out there and, at the same time, how I don't have one to come home to.

At least I found a temporary respite from that in a three-way with my hosts. I'd had it in my head as a possibility ever since meeting them, so when it unfolded it did so very naturally. Given how drunk and exhausted we were, it was surprised we had as much fun as we did and we agreed to pick up again at more convenient time.

Last night I had dinner with a fellow widow and we brought the conversation to a close talking about visitation dreams. He had an odd one recently where his husband returned and let him know he approved of his new boyfriend. Of course, a discussion like that so close to bedtime is inviting my subconscious to send me another. In fact, I got at least two. One is some vaguely-remembered claptrap bout the Isle of Bute (which happened to come up in conversation Saturday). The other was much odder: a Monshu dream without Monshu.

I'd just gotten back to my one-bedroom apartment and was sitting in the living room taking off my shoes when I was struck anew by the fact that Monshu wasn't there and wouldn't ever be there. I looked around at the cluttered space and the phrase "the walls reflected back his loneliness" drifted through my head while I considered the fact that I really needed to clean up some of the clutter that had accumulated since Monshu's death--despite being simultaneously aware that this was not an apartment we'd ever shared. Then I woke up.

The widow is someone I've vaguely known for years, probably through the Square Dance Cult. He only opened up to me about the death of his partner very recently and it sure is instructive to know that, fourteen years on, he's still dealing with some of the same things I am. Running to him at the beach was very fortuitous, because he happened to be with an online friend from last October who I hadn't yet met in person. He didn't join us for dinner, but he did give me a ride to the restaurant, which gave us more time to chat about Delaney.

The beach was busy but light on bears; I had to widen my gyre to find these. They were camped next to Campfire Daddy, who was with a few friends of his own. I made out with one of them, which was an unfortunate decision for multiple reasons, not least of which was that his beach towel was soaked with light beer. I blame the absence of Pasillero, who's spending a week in Toronto for his birthday.

It may have been there were more people I knew there earlier, but I'd committed to games with the gang and special guests (an out-of-town friend and a fuckbud) and didn't get there until nearly 6 p.m. They managed to pick two of my least-favourite games--One Night Werewolf and Seven Wonders. When it was my turn to pick, I chose "Superfight" based on the name, but it proved to be something much dumber than I expected. (I should've known JB wouldn't play a game that actually had mechanics for fighting.)

The final session of The Watch was anticlimactic in something of a good way. I don't think any of us doubted that we'd succeed in the final battle, so it was more about tying up narrative loose ends: We knew Lufu wanted to die dramatically, and she did. Dalu had already declared her love for Pylldu so more than anything it was a question of what sort of arrangement they'd end up with at the end. And Corporal Grandma, well, I guess we all just hoped she'd stay out of the way but she actually proved of some worth in the fight, so yay.

I just started looking at the materials for Nahual in earnest yesterday and I'm feeling a surge of enthusiasm I haven't felt in forever. I'm realising just how very much I've missed playing with rich real-world settings instead of cities and countries we just cobble together on the fly and I plan to stretch everyone's limited patience with my pedantry until it frays. I know what neighbourhood I want our changarro to be in, I know what I want it to be called, I know what pictures are on the wall, I know what our specialty is--and I don't care if you don't care about any of this.

When JB chose the incredibly promising setting of the Castro in the 70s, I held back and waited to see what he would make of it. The answer was, "Not much." So I'm not waiting; I'm insisting. We're capping the campaign at only three sessions so I figure everyone will be able to simply grit their teeth for a while. Plus there'll be a new player so I expect everyone to be on their best behaviour. What's the worst that could happen?

Last night's game was a colourful mix of highs and lows. JB, who had previously wanted to wrap it all up before his next trip abroad, decided instead to play the full arc. It was the right choice. Although it was a good session overall, it would have been disappointing if it had been our last.

We started out on the strong dramatic choice of letting my character get captured by the enemy. I don't regret it, but it had the downside of alternating storylines, which always creates some restlessness. I think JB recognised the problem because he did as much as he could to support my attempted escape, but the dice were fatally against me. (I rolled something like four 5s in a row on 2d6.) It was great for the narrative--I very nearly made it only to get snatched by the Big Bad at the last moment--but frustrating from a role-playing perspective.

What really mucked things up, however, was Acting Pixy's choice to retire their character in the previous session. He had so much trouble finding his feet that we had to halt the main plot for 20 minutes to give him not one but two opportunities to establish links with the other characters, one of which went so badly that it devolved into a counseling session, with JB all but begging him to play a character capable of having normal human conversations with other normal humans.

It also hurt that the rest of us were all a little mentally compromised. I'd slept badly and was trying not to be a grump despite mildly resenting having to host. (When JB said he was bringing ice cream--homemade lemon blueberry cheesecake ice cream, mind you--I bitched to a friend "motherfucker better have cones".) JB himself is having some travel anxiety and Acting Pixy's ex, who missed last sessions due to flu, probably shouldn't have been there at all. He was remarkably solicitous, however, and helped me keep my cool.

It's hard to know what to do with this group. On the one hand, the internal tensions aren't going away (and have been exacerbated by the breakup). But, on the other, we've all shown a dedication to being present every week, which can't be said for every group I've played with, and we are genuinely fond of each other. I hate to make it sound like AP is the problem, since we all have our annoying quirks, but he does seem to be the focus almost any time we have a breakdown.

I'm trying to do what I can to make sure this doesn't go down in my memory as the Weekend I Missed C2E2. (Rather counterproductive, I suppose, committing that to writing here.) Last year, I cared not a jot, but monshu's relations were in town late in the summer exhibiting at Wizard World and that was a lark, so when they said they'd be back again, I made plans to stop by. But then we heard nothing from them until late Friday evening I got a message from his niece offering me passes.

But it'd been a long week and I'd already made plans to sleep in. I still felt like going, just...not then. But Sunday was set aside for gaming. As the hours crept by on Saturday, it became apparent that I'd made my choice and it was in direct opposition to my recent resolution to Do The Thing instead of sitting at home questioning whether I should've Done The Thing.

Still, I'd made my peace with this. Then Sunday came around, I walked to JB's...and found that as I was ordering my torta de pescado at the place on the corner, the only other player slated to be there had cancelled. At that moment, I considered cancelling, too, and making a desperate effort to see if I could still line up pass and make the long trek to McCormick. But JB was saying, "We'll find a game to play, don't you worry!" and it was too easy to avoid saying "no".

Ironically, the game he chose was a "two-player LARP" called 183, which is based on a short story about two clairvoyants falling in love. One can see several possible futures; the other only one--and it's one in which the couple separates 183 days after their first date. It makes for an intense two hours. There's a warm-up phase in which you discuss your past loves, and then you collaborate on a series of five scenes which together sketch the arch of the relationship from beginning to end.

Was it a better way to spend the afternoon than in a noisy hall surrounded by cosplayers and hawkers? I'd have to be the character who can see many futures to answer that, but I played the other. Honestly, the chief difference between the two possibilities is that with more stimulation around me I would've been less distracted by the notion of what the other choice would've been like. Maybe I'd be less melancholy-tired now and more plumb exhausted. Who's to say?

I'm going to chalk down the limpness of last session to a combination of the absence of vianegativa and everyone's need to reacquaint ourselves with the system and setting after such a long break, because today's session was terrific. I still feel like I'm not quite holding my own with the other players, but two of their characters are so OTT that I feel a certain responsibility to play someone, well, responsible. This has left me casting about a bit for a story arc, but now I'm thinking it could be Dante's in Clerks: the realisation that not everything rests on your shoulders just because you claim it does.

A few days ago, it had occurred to me that, at about this point in Necessary Evil, vianegativa had found a way to make my skin crawl with he'd done with a character of mine whereas JB hasn't come close to that, so I began to question whether he really had that in him. I think I have my answer now, and I didn't have to wait for my character to get screwed over in order to find it. Enjoy your new body, Boo! Hope it suits you better than your last one.

After the better part of a year, the end of Necessary Evil was, to say the least, anticlimactic. We seemed all primed for a final showdown which would determine the fate of the world when the GM suddenly changed his mind, brought in literally the biggest Deus Ex Machina available to him, and ended with a basically pointless combat that was as badly mismatched as anything could be.

For reasons mysterious to all, he pitted the three non-combat characters against an egregiously overpowered (someone figured out just how broken the rules were and exploited that to the hilt) and then seemed surprised when we were all killed in short order. ("You don't have Fighting at all?") In the end, it was one player playing their original character against two others reading stats off sheets with all the investment of someone watching the finale of a tv series they never followed.

JB was as put out by this turn of events as I was, but even so he admitted that it had been a good game up until then, with some surprising reveals and the resolution of several character arcs. Grergory shocked everyone with a completely unforeseen murder-suicide and one of the villains basically took over the world. Which made it all the more disappointing that vianegativa pronounced it "the worst game I've ever run". He later hedged that a bit, but all my attempts to talk up our accomplishments fell flat before him.

Looking back, I had exactly the problems with my character that I foresaw at the beginning: she was a Dark Age persona in a Four-Color setting. I ignored this for as long as I could in the interests of group harmony and with the assumption that we were heading into a gory free-for-all at the end anyway. But then the GM forced a Heroic Redemption on everyone except for the character who became the Big Bad and there was no room for an independent actor to make her mark.

So it's a relief to leave behind a milieu I've never really embraced and get back to the gritty moral ambiguity of a street-level post-apocalyptic setting. JB will be running and everyone has signed on to play. There's no preset campaign goal, no "sides", and--best of all--no giant omnipotent alien intelligence waiting just outside frame to intervene at the last moment!

This was a banner weekend for gaming. First there was JB's one-shot on Friday night. He's been eager to run a game of something called Apocalypse World with this group and persevered despite lack of sleep and more players than he'd bargained for. Only one member of the six-person alternate Sundays group couldn't make it, but Grergory roped in two young friends, making it a mercy that both his and vianegativa's partners ultimately took a pass.

I'll admit, I suppressed an eye-roll at the fact that we all started out in a bar. I cut JB slack since, after all, one-shots don't exactly leave a lot of time for the characters to get to know each other. The Powered by the Apocalypse system actually allows for an extensive amount of cooperative character-creation, but with time so short we skipped this stage and folded it into play.

I should know by now to have more confidence in this group. I learned a great deal playing with princeofcairo, but one of the most important lessons is that, when you have good players, you can trust them with a lot of the creative work. Hmm, that comes across as a bit of a slam on players who are less skilled at improvisation. Let's say "the right kind of players" then. Munchkinism (or, to be polite about it, "powergaming") is a legitimate style of play. But it's boring to me compared to the mindset which first asks the question, "What would my character do?" and only then considers whether this is advantageous in the context of gameplay or not.

We actually had a terrific example of that in Sunday's game, where dedos acquiesced to having his Atlantean lord possessed by demons because it furthered his goal of becoming Emperor of Atlantis. Of course, now he's in the difficult position of deciding whether or not to continue with the character (thus obligating all the other players to find some means of exorcising him and bringing him back to the fold) or switch to a new one halfway through. But that's how it works: the interesting choices spawn more interesting choices.

But back to AW. Within short order, we'd figured out that Grergory's go-go dancer was the bar's primary draw, that my bouncer and Bigboy's onsite healer (incongruously using a template named "Angel") had an organ-harvesting sideline, and that vianegativa's florid Capote-esque mentalist was as ubiquitous as he was hated. The new boys, being both mercenaries, had a certain rapport with my character, a rapport which blossomed into the session's most unexpected romance. Oh, and JB had determined that the whole shebang was located on a former oil platform about to be attacked by marauders with jetskis.

There was at least one moment during play of pure magic (involving the touching apotheosis of dedos's stammering vegatable-pedlar), aside from countless moments of hilarity. I honestly can't remember the last time I've laughed so much in such a compressed span of time. I encouraged Grergory to act out bits of his big dance number, and he not only obliged but sang snatches of the cub DJ's mix. "This is a world where Smashmouth is the greatest band ever," he informed us. After a moment of spectacular denseness on his part, one of the other players blurted out, "Oh my god, so basically, you're playing Zoolander."

Of course, this only made it harder to readjust to the unengaging unidimensionality of his character in Necessary Evil. I initially had the impression that our group divided naturally into half powergamers and half deep roleplayers. Now I see that, really, everyone has good roleplaying chops, some just haven't been exercising them as much. vianegativa acknowledged as much in our post-game discussion of the next game. "This is a group that really likes character development," he said before suggesting perhaps something in the Storyteller range next time. If it brings out the full range of what the players are capable of, I'm all for it.

He did reassure us, however, that he wasn't getting bored yet with the current game thanks to our ingenuity at confounding his expectations. "As long as you guys keep doing things like possessing one of the other PCs with demons, I won't get tired of running this." Will I get tired of playing it, though? My character isn't much like I conceived of her and she's accomplished both more than she set out to do and much less. For the first several sessions, I was always bracing for the cutthroat endgame when the PCs inevitably turn on each other. It's still not clear that bloody climax will ever come.

The one thing I can say for my disturbed sleep these days is that it's yielding some memorable dreams. Last night, for instance, I had a three-parter about vianegativa's next RPG, which was a space game. I was a little late to our meeting spot, which seemed to be a poorly-lit quarry somewhere, and as I approached I overheard everyone speculating about what had become of me and wondering if they should send out a search party. "Or you could just, you know, call me," I thought. Then I looked at my phone and saw 65 unread text messages. Oops.

The oddest aspect to the whole affair is that we were LARPing with whole-body holograms. Somehow I'd missed a make-up session and arrived in media res to a surprise inspection of our Serenity-esque spaceship by this universe's answer to the Alliance. On top of that, vianegativa was introducing two new players into the group. One was easily the ugliest woman I've ever seen in my life and her hologram wasn't working because she'd left it on too long in a game the day before. She was supposed to be playing an alien character of Hobbit-like cuteness.

And this was a game with a heavy slash element. From the start, two of my fellow players were already poised to make out. So I nervously made the rounds trying to establish the hierarchy of the ship. I knew I was the engineer and VN was the captain, but I knew we didn't have enough members to fill all the usual roles so I was trying to figure out who was doubling up as what. And the more I asked, the more confused I became.

The last part of the dream was a kind of epilogue during my last half-hour of sleep. I don't remember much beyond the realisation that vianegativa's character was Trotsky to our friend JB's Lenin, and that made me Stalin. So I naturally began wondering who I should select as my Beria.

Rain wasn't forecast to begin until 3 p.m., but no sooner had I left the house than large cold drops start to fall. I got to the bus stop just as the Clark 22 did; a woman waiting even remarked on it. Middle Eastern Bakery seemed less full than usual, but the counterman was in the back making falafel, so the proprietor had his hands full running from the register to the back of the house and back. I waited only five minutes for the bus home but the driver ignored my signal and I walked an extra block in the frigid drizzle. At home, monshu, who'd completed his own trip to Mariano's and back before I left the house, deplored the crappiness of the weather. I suggested he put the fire on and regretted that I couldn't simply stretch out in the bath reading a bad novel.

Today was a game day, but with two of the party out of town, we decided against having an RPG session and instead played other games--a streamlined, dice-based version of Pandemic and a deck-building superhero combat game. The latter seemed too easy after our struggle to beat the former. The dice were against us in the first two games, and remained against JB in the last, which landed him squarely in the barrel. He embraced it. At the end, it was all going to come down to his roll until we wisely took it out of the hands and passed it to the Ewok, who succeeded handsomely. JB insisted on having a roll anyway, to see what he would've gotten, and failed in a fashion so stunning I literally fell to the floor laughing.