18. December 2009 by Samldanach.

I ran across an odd statement this morning:  “Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe.”

I think that might be true.   I’ve done quite a bit of reading on and off over the years, attempting to really capture the medieval mindset.  One thing that is radically different is that very few people in medieval times were taught to question.  This is the way the world is, and you just have to deal with that.  But, as a consequence of that, people were very willing to let mysteries be mysterious.  You didn’t have to work out how the magician does his trick, or uncover the hidden meanings behind the storyteller’s tales, or know the lengths that a king must go to to provide for his people.

Things just happened.  And that was awesome.

People were allowed to just sit back and marvel in the simple wonder of the experience, whether that be religious, fantastic, or more prosaic.  A thunderstorm was powerful and emotionally moving.  This was not just because it spoke to the tiny hindbrain that still hadn’t caught up to the evolution of safe and snug shelter.  But, because no one, no one, knew what was actually making all the sounds, or where the winds came from.  Mysterious beings venting their frustrations made as much sense as any other explanation.

These days, it is much harder to simply revere the world around us.  We know too much.  We are given warning of the thunderstorm days in advance, often along with a description of why it is forming.  It blunts the emotional punch.  Further, we are now conditioned from a young age to ask questions.  Especially here in the US, we are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that it is right to challenge authority and tradition.  That to sit on our butts and not try to learn about the world around us is lazy and wrong.  As much as I respect and cherish that attitude, I think that it does get in the way of simple reverence.  The person who has a garden filled with flowers “just because they’re pretty” is often mocked for not thinking more deeply about her choices.

What is wrong with appreciating things on a simple level?  Can we accept the beauty, power, or ability of a person or thing without having to dig deeper?  I think that we can.  And, I think that it is occasionally good to do so.  But, I think that for us poor modern sods, reverence is now something that takes conscious effort.  We have to decide to allow our jaded brains to relax, and just soak in the experience.

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10. December 2009 by Samldanach.

I have a bunch of things pinging around in my head currently.  So, maybe the month of blogging was good for me.  I think I’m about ready to start writing pretty frequently again.

So, I’m still kind of digging the system concept I was working on before.  I still need to post up a few more thoughts on it before they flit away.  I also want to make sure that I pare the system down pretty ruthlessly.  I have a tendency to want to add more and more complexity to a system, just to have nifty toys to play with.  In this case, I explicitly want a game that is not heavily detailed.  That’s going to be a real challenge for me.

OTOH, I am currently very enamored with FantasyCraft.  It’s an awesome system.  And, it does have a huge number of fiddly bits.  So, I would like to pour my tendencies towards detail into that.

The basic problem is that it’s hard to work on both at the same time.  I’m not sure my brain will split that way.  It would be easier if I had a setting to work with.

Hmm, I still have 7 Kingdoms kicking around.  Maybe I’ll try to apply FantasyCraft to it as a “generic fantasy” setting.   I’ll also apply my new system to it as a “Renaissance-era supers” setting.

I have a Rifts clone that I’m working on.  I really want to use FantasyCraft (or, more correctly, MasterCraft, the base rules) to do that.  Especially as I already did a bunch of work to convert Spycraft 1.0 to work with Rifts.  And, the more I look at it, the more I don’t feel I can adequately model the world with the looseness of my new system.  (That may be a flaw with the system, or it may be a flaw with my thinking.)

Day before yesterday, though, I had a braingasm.  I’ve started reading Doc Savage, which has my pulp tendencies flaring up again.  A setting that has been percolating in the back of my head for years suddenly had a lightning bolt flash through it.  Actually, I should say Flash through it.  It is heavily based on the Flash Gordon universe, especially as depicted in the 1980 movie.  Not coincidentally, one of the first D&D campaigns I was ever in was based on it in a very similar way.

Elevator pitch:  A slightly mad and ludicrously powerful Emperor rules an entire reality as very nearly a god.  He “collects” other worlds.  He smashes the planet apart, then takes the best bits and sets them floating in the vast nothingness of his realm.  His Empire has combined the best that each world has to offer, creating a fusion of science, magic, and other forces that powers his civilization.  His subjects include an inconceivable variety of beings.  The PCs are the usual band of misfits, trying to carve out a niche for themselves in this decadent jigsaw madhouse of a realm.

It will have a very strong pulp sci-fi flavor to it.   Fortune favors the bold.  Anything you can imagine is out there somewhere, both for good and for ill.  The PCs can be literally anything they want to be, from cyborgs to barbarians, from Jedi to faeries, from superhero to devil.  Magic, religion, super-science, psionics, genetic engineering, and more will all get mashed up together in a marvelous kitchen sink.

This will work exceptionally well with my new system.  Once I flesh it out, I might also do alternative write-ups for using FATE 3.0 and PDQ# (which just published a space opera variant, handily enough).  Both would also work well for it.

See what I mean?  All kinds of ideas going on up there.  And that’s just the gaming stuff I want to write about…

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