Musica Seraphianica et Musica Diabolica

Another post that falls under the auspices of "Random Creativity!"  Imagine that!

I think I've mentioned a few times that I really enjoy playing music.  Primarily, the instrument I play is guitar.  I'm not great at it, but I enjoy it.  I played with a lot of different bands when I was growing up, but as everyone got older, priorities obviously changed - band members got married, had children, etc etc.

I've been fooling around here and there with a drummer.  It's been a few months since we have gotten together - I really should reach out to him again - he has a pretty extensive home recording studio and I think every February he cuts an album.  This time around perhaps I will join him (and if I do I will post results).

When I was playing very regularly in the 90's, studio time and/or equipment was prohibitively expensive for most aspiring musicians.  The model back then was that studios would let you book time by the hour, and you could go in and use their gear.  I cut a number of things in a 24-track ADAT studio; that technology was considered cutting edge at the time, and I think an hour of studio time went for something like 250 - 300 bucks.

Anyway, about ten years ago, starved for the chance to play, I realized that many companies just GIVE you software and capabilities that would have gone for 200+ an hour in the 90's.  I became interested in what I could do with what I had.  I fooled around a bit with GarageBand (which is an incredibly sophisticated program for something that the makers just give away), and I got into kind of a minimalist approach where I wanted to see what I could do with just my phone and nothing else.  It turns out quite a lot!

I had a bit of a drive the other day and revisited some of this and was like "oh!  that's not half bad!" so I wanted to share a few of the tracks I composed.  I would call this stuff EDM, or probably more accurately just electronica.  I like electronic music (along with every other kind) but I came up playing punk rock more than anything else, so all of this was a learning experience for me - the type of music, the instruments used, and the recording / engineering part of things.  I realize this is extremely unlikely to be everyone's cup of tea, but I figured what the hell, so I am sharing a few tracks from that project that got the most plays.

The first four of these were done using Nanostudio and its expansion to 16 tracks (a grand total of I think about 20 bucks) on an iPhone 3 and absolutely nothing else.  The last two were created using GarageBand on an old iMac.  I am not displeased with the results, and I hope anyone who takes the time to listen will enjoy it.  I believe I set all of these up so that they can be downloaded, and there's a bunch more of this stuff on Soundcloud, but if anyone has trouble and wants one of these, let me know.  A couple of the files are really big - I didn't use any compression on them when I didn't have to, so I think one of these is like 150 MB or something - not huge but big for a digitized song.  At the time, Soundcloud limited how much space any one user could have, so there are two different accounts associated with these pieces - Silica Animus and Bloodthirsty.  Unfortunately, I've lost the passwords to basically ALL the accounts involved - including the email addresses associated with them!  At some point maybe I'll work up the chutzpah to make someone at Soundcloud help me retrieve everything.  At the moment, it's immaterial.  I've included some notes just for fun.

 Silica Animus · Wolf On The Radar (FENRIS MIX)

0:00 Simple kickoff, one synth, a couple other instruments join and build.
0:36 backwards sample from Hellraiser
0:48 main theme established
1:36 I like this bit! alternates between super staccato and legato for a drunken master style guitar lead. It staggers around like it wants to fight something but can't see
2:24 one of the basslines takes over the guitar part
2:48 slight variation on main theme
4:00 70's Prog rock vibe!
4:24 From here out building to climax.

ßLΘΘÐTНIRکTצ · Project Trinity

0:00 I wanted to try something in a minor key. This is probably one of the more complicated progressions I have done working with synths - I know exactly jack shit when it comes to playing keyboards
1:27 Intensity UP a notch, I like the Wah / Woh sounds out of this synth.  There's a Hammond B-3 type sound in here too.
2:17 introduction of a descending scale. There's actually some kind of sneaky fast things going on with the hi-hats here
2:27 drums doubletime
2:32 descending scale doubletimes, then deepens, then doubletimes again, resulting eventually into a kind of harp sweep
2:54 takeoff!
3:38 main theme reprised, this time in a major key
4:22 As it begins so it ends

ßLΘΘÐTНIRکTצ · The Blood of Lions

0:00 An attempt to blend electronica, blues, and punk rock
0:47 I have always, always wanted to wield a theremin like a sorcerer on stage. This is probably as close as I will get.
2:13 A little change up
3:27 There's a bit from the theremin right here that I wish I had stuck on a little more, I find it kind of haunting
3:33 This is just a straight up punk rock rile-up.

ßLΘΘÐTНIRکTצ · Metatron (Ohr Ein Sof Mix)

0:00 ok the "drop" for this takes a while to get to, but I think it's worth it. Very simple drum and bass beginning.
0:21 I like the big square bass in this
0:42 and onward, this is a a very long build
1:37 more build, introduction of some higher, kind of ethereal bits
2:40 very quiet bit panned left that sounds like someone plucking a guitar's strings up at the headstock
3:01 FINALLY SWEET RELEASE! Things finally start kickin' - drums and bass both go doubletime. I think the payoff is worth it, happy with how this turned out.
4:05 A little bridge, playing around with a ride cymbal
4:58 Heavier bits fade out. It's quiet but you can hear the bass and drums slow back to normal time if you listen carefully.
5:09 and on, I wanted to go for something that was ethereal and kind of glittering, but also ghostly, trying to capture the infinite light of Ohr Ein Sof

ßLΘΘÐTНIRکTצ · Bloodthirsty feat. Raiye - Sacred and Profane

0:00  OK, this one wasn't made with the iPhone.  This is an earlier thing that I used GarageBand for, and I had some guitar help from a guy I've played with a lot named Rick, who had at that point evolved into a more skillful and complete guitarist than me.  Also, I really wanted to work with a female vocalist. Almost all the music I have played since about 1997 - 98 has been instrumental. I cut a few tracks with Raiye Rosado, the singer on this. She has a wonderful voice. I didn't write the lyrics; her husband did.
0:48 a touch of autotune and bitcruncher on the vocal sample here
1:33 I like the bass sound in this, it's a nasty counterpoint to the clean vocals and piano.  Also, I am a sucker for divebombs.

2:07 I'm really proud of this bridge.  The kind of wavery, hypnotic single note you hear is a snip from Raiye's vocal line that I stretched and looped.  I haven't done anything else like the drum bit here, I don't think, and I was very happy with the way it turned out.  Rick's guitarwork in this part fits really well; it's the kind of thing I would never have come up with on my own and why I like collaborating so much when it comes to music.

2:39 This is less a divebomb and more the gaze of a giant slowly directed downwards, or something very very large landing.  Raiye's vocal harmonies (there are multiple tracks of her) are glorious (IMO of course)

3:58 last chorus, Rick goes hard on the guitar at the end here and it reminds me a little of The Ecstasy of Gold or something.

ßLΘΘÐTНIRکTצ · Magneto

0:00 This is one other thing made with GarageBand, and again Rick helped me out, as did a bass player I have worked with named Scott. I fucking love Rick's guitar swells at the beginning of this. It gives it a really lonesome feel, full of longing. At least for me.
0:57 Synth bass kicks in. I like how this turned out, it's SO low. If you have it up loud enough you can almost feel it more than you can hear it.
1:55 Drop. This piece follows the conventions for EDM more than a lot of the others. I got a wobble bass out of GarageBand but I forget how, only that it was a fucking challenge. I really like the keyboard sound here too, the tone reminds me a little of something maybe Bernie Worrell would use.
3:24 This is the bass player.  There's some rhythm guitar as well, but the "solo" you are hearing is a bass.

4:20 Intro keys come back.

4:48 This is why this thing is called Magneto - the sample is something Ian McKellen said in that role.  It was originally meant to be a working title, but it just stuck.

5:04 Rick takes a lead.  I think it's really pretty.


Again, I hope very much you enjoy this stuff. If you do, let me know -  there is plenty more where this came from, though little of it is of the same quality in terms of the sound. But if there is interest (and maybe even if there isn't) I'll post some old jams!

Adeptus Titanicus - Terrain

I'm a long way from being finished, but I wanted to post some pictures of the terrain I've done for Adeptus Titanicus games up to this point.  I really want to start doing more homemade / kitbashed type terrain using found objects, but I started out with a mat and two (of the four) tiles that Forge World makes.  I was lucky enough to get two of the tiles before they sold out, as well as at least one copy of the different loose terrain kits they made (which is also sold out).  I also picked up some of the Aeronautica terrain from FW.

I also got a bunch of the Civitas Imperialis sets (at least five, but it might be as much as seven), a set of the Manufactorum Imperialis, and I think two sets of the Civitas Imperialis Spires.

Basically at this point, every terrain kit has been sold out for months EXCEPT for Manufactorum and the Spires.  And I still feel like I don't have enough to really make the board work.

The reason I've been sticking with GW / FW terrain though now is so I don't get any flak if I go into a Warhammer store to play but there are some GREAT alternatives to FW and GW, and I have looked at these.  At one point a seller on Etsy was going to print some stuff for me - they were supposed to give me a price, but never did.  I waited a week for the price, emailed her again, got a "sorry very busy," waited another couple of weeks, emailed again and got the same thing, so I just dropped the matter.  Still some of it is really compelling and cool.  I love the stuff from Grimdark Terrain so I might get some of that.

The tiles are 2x2.  The mat is 4x4.  A regular game of Titanicus is 4x4.  I have the option right now to put the tiles flush against an edge of the mat to get a 6x4 battlefield, to use just the mat, or to put the tile on top of the mat - both of these latter configurations give me a 4x4 playing field.

I do not like having the "lip" showing on the tiles (they are slightly taller than the mat).  So at some point I either need to get city walls, or I could also make some "ramps" that slope up to the high edge of the tiles.  Either solves the aesthetic problem for me, and I might do both just to be able to switch it up in different games.

At any rate, here are some pretty (I hope)  pictures to look at!

I used some Aeronautica Imperialis models as well

This is probably my favorite piece of terrain, kitbashed from a 40k model and a prescription bottle, lol.

You can see one of the other Aeronautica models in this.

Well. That's it for now.  But lately I have been wanting to paint again!  I'm far from being a great painter, but I like doing it.  I have not really had time recently as most of my free time is going to writing (and I really do not want to slack off on that) but I kind of want to do a few more models for my Legio Solis - either some of the more esoteric knights like the Atropos or the Styrix, or maybe a single massive one like a Warmaster.  I'd also like to get a second mat or perhaps do a couple more 2x2 tiles myself and stick with an urban theme throughout the entire board instead of part urban, part cratered wasteland.

A World With No Extras II - Dungeon 23 Edition

Link to First Post

I’ve heard and seen a lot about Dungeon 23 recently. Someone asked me if I was going to do anything with regards to the idea. Here are the basics of  Dungeon 23:

12 Months – One Level each month
52 Weeks – One Theme each week
365 Days – One Room each day.

Some rooms are empty. Descriptions need not be complex. That is, keep it simple.


At first I was thinking I would take a pass on this. I’ll be up front here, I’m just not a huge fan of mega-dungeons. I’m running one right now and I want to get my players OUT of it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they can be cool. For example, I can see where something like a mega-dungeon might fit or work out very well if the entire campaign was focused on just the one place – kind of like some of the oldest D&D related computer games, like Wizardy, where it’s just one massive maze the whole way through. I was also tempted at one point to do something inspired by Blame! or House of Leaves or Piranesi’s Carceri) but I found another way to handle that which I liked better.  My main gripe is one of pacing, which absolutely CAN be overcome - perhaps I am just not creative enough to figure out how to solve that problem.  The people who set up the challenge have it right that doing 365 rooms in one style would be too much – the themes and levels really serve a purpose with a project like that, and would help keep it from bogging down in same-old after the first twenty rooms..

However, I then thought that the idea of Dungeon 23 actually fits pretty nicely into the idea of the World With No Extras (linked above). Instead of doing rooms, I am going to try doing characters. At first I thought about trying to do four people a day, but while this will probably be fairly easy to start off with, I think it is likely to get more and more difficult and time consuming as the project goes on and the webs of relationship and interconnectivity begin to develop.

So here’s my thought:

12 Months – One Neighborhood each month
52 Weeks – One Family each week
365 Days – One Person each day.


In this case, Family need not be actual blood relations (though they certainly could be and in many cases will be) – rather, during that week, I’ll be focused on the most important relationships those seven people have. And I am also using the terms Family and  Neighborhood loosely – a Family could be something like "Police" or "UAW 144" and a neighborhood could also be “The Command Deck” “Gunnery Deck 1” “Enginarium” etc. though of course in many cases I will use the literal meaning of the word.

I don’t have everything quite fleshed out yet, but right now I am thinking I will dump them into an spreadsheet, one character per tab, with the tabs organized alphabetically by name. I may find a different system is more useful or easier to access / play with, and if I do, I will change my methodology. I feel like there is probably some way to create hyperlinks in excel so that it’s easy to jump around between characters.

I'd like for each character to have at least four important relationships, if not more.   

Here are a couple of examples, not totally fleshed out, but enough so you get the idea:

 

The above are not perfect - I need to change things a little to take Robert's low CHA into account, and figure out exactly which cell I want to put the occupation in, for example, but hopefully they give you an idea of how I am going to start out.

I’d like each character to have at least four important relationships, if not more.  I imagine as I get deeper into this, I may have to find or develop some new tools or organizational methods to keep it all together, but for staters, I'm just going to create stuff.

Alongside this, I am also posting another generator.  This one is to be used to determine the current mindset of the NPC.  Are they distracted?  If so, what by?  And what kind of mood are they in?  With permission, I am using the Table of Miens/ States / Emotions that kyana at noise sans signal came up with the other day.  I have also added a couple of other items to tell the DM more about what is going on in their mind.

So here is the Mood & Distraction generator for use on the fly which, again, may be revised as this project develops!  Once again I have decided to show the tables for transparency, and once again I'm open to suggestions for other things to be distracted by or ways to do this more efficiently!

This post is not about gaming…

…so please feel free to skip it if that’s what you are here for. No harm, no foul!  Also, there is a homophobic slur used in this piece; it is an artifact of the time period, in my opinion, and I want to be clear that I do not endorse homophobia or hatred.

OK, with that out of the way:

For the last week or so I’ve been in a really bad headspace. I had a birthday in early December. To date myself, I am closing in rapidly on 50. When you get to this age, a couple of years seems like a couple of months, so even though I’m not quite there yet, I feel like I may as well be. I have actually forgotten my exact age a few times so it makes things easier as well to just remember 50. I have been feeling ancient and irrelevant.

The day I turned twenty five, I woke up incredibly hungover to the phone ringing. An old girlfriend was calling to tell me that my best friend had committed suicide. It had actually happened a few days earlier and she had not been able to get through; at that time, fast internet was expensive, and I had a single land line which shared duties both as a home phone and as an internet connection. I had left the modem on for the last week, not expecting any calls, probably downloading some files that at the time were considered huge. I had only turned off the connection because I thought my mom and dad might worry if they couldn’t get in touch with me on my birthday.

That day was a total clusterfuck from beginning to end, but that was the worst of it right there. And I want to / need to talk about it. About him. About them.

I think we were fourteen maybe when we first met. We played music together. He sang and played bass. I played guitar. Music is the True Language of the Ineffable, and through it we came to understand things about each other that could never be said, could never even be articulated. He didn’t start off this way but as he aged he began to possess an indefinable quality that people call “it.” The thing a young Marlon Brando had. The thing young Elvis and Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop and Kurt Cobain and Mick Jagger all had, like a natural 18 CHA. He wasn’t a great speechmaker or anything like that. But by the time he was seventeen he had come into his own entirely and on stage he was in his full glory, a young god. In one of the Discworld books, Nanny Ogg’s cat Greebo is transformed into a human. When I read that bit it immediately made me think of my friend. The way the eyes and the smile are described is just dead on.

Here's a passage from the discworld wiki:

Despite the scars and the bad eye, the human Greebo's other eye glitters like the sins of angels, and his lazy smile is the downfall of saints. Female saints, anyway. He appears as a dastardly buccaneer ready to unbuckle any amount of swash; a six-foot, well-muscled, grinning bully who radiates a greasy aura of raw sexual energy that can be felt several rooms away. Despite everything they see, women are still attracted to him.

I’m a straight male and even I picked up on that “greasy aura of raw sexual energy."  Women threw themselves at this guy.

Jesus, I just looked up pictures of Greebo as a human and the general artistic consensus even LOOKS like him a little:

He even had a vest like that.

Had things gone differently, I think it’s quite possible he would have become a household name like the others mentioned above.

At one point we traveled to Indiana to play a show, and we were in some small town, and they didn’t like us, and he made some ill-considered remarks that implied the best things going there were incestuous sexual relationships. The mood got ugly. When we were breaking down and packing up, he went outside to smoke or something, I’m not sure what, and suddenly I realized he was gone and I got a Bad Feeling and grabbed our drummer and went to go find him.

He was in the back of the parking lot surrounded by like ten good old boys – I say ten, but the actual number was probably somewhere between eight and twelve. They were about to kick the ever-living fuck out of him. As I came up on this Situation, this is what I heard him say to this group of men:

“You guys are a bunch of cumswilling fatherfucking faggots and the only reason you came tonight is because your little sisters wouldn’t let you touch them.”

In hindsight, there is a lot wrong with this statement, but this was the 1990’s and challenging another young man’s sexuality if you were not friendly with him was the one of the main du jour ways to show him your displeasure.

It was also a really good way to get into a fight.  It probably still is, but I haven't used those terms or gotten into a fight in such a long time I'm not really sure.

His utter lack of fear is one of the things I will never, ever forget as long as I am of sound mind. He was not a fighter, in spite of oozing danger. The drummer and I were the band badasses. I had been working in construction labor for a couple of years. I had done a decent amount of training in boxing and martial arts and had been on the wrestling team, though I didn’t like my teammates and quit after the first year. And when I wasn’t doing those things I was hauling musical gear around. I was in shape. But I also had enough rough and tumble experience to know that ten vs. one or even two or three only has one result in the real world. I am certain that without any intervention, these guys would have at the very least put him in the fucking hospital. And that’s assuming that none of those guys were packing and willing to bring a gun into the mix. Even without that I think it is quite possible that they might have killed him. I had visions of him being chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the streets.

But I did intervene, and I managed to talk these guys down, apologizing profusely while our drummer pulled him away and I explained he didn’t mean any of it, it was all just part of the stage show (absolute bullshit, he meant every word, but it worked). However, the fact that he was ready to fight, that he wouldn’t back down, that he had said this thing and was not only sticking by it, he was doubling down on it in spite of the circumstances: I respected that so much. I’m not justifying his behavior or what he said, please understand – it was a dumb fucking thing to say, and it was ungracious and ugly to come into this little town and insult them, never mind that they didn’t care for our music. And by today’s standards it’s hateful as well, which I do not endorse in any way. But having said it, he was NOT backing down, and that was beautiful to me. He had no fear whatsoever. Instead, I backed down for him, like some kind of fucked-up Subotai to his Conan.

I think what I am trying to say here is that I loved him. Yes, in a platonic way, as a friend, but in hindsight there was a romantic component to it as well that is incredibly rare in relationships between straight men. Not a sexual component, no, but a romantic one. We instinctively understood how the other was feeling.  We were absolutely united by the pursuit of genius and the desire to experience the sublime through excess. We shared everything from books and music to girls. And we also shared an addiction to opiates.

About a week, maybe two after I got that phone call, I gathered everything I had ever written to that point, every scrap of paper, every disk, every journal, I even got copies back from people who I had given them too, and I took it all out into the backyard and burned it. I was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa at the time. I dropped out the next semester and never finished. I didn’t write anything creatively again until 2021 – a space of a little more than twenty years.

Before I left for school, lives had begun to become undone by addiction. For whatever reason, at the time, I could see what was coming down the pipe at us and that it was Not Fucking Good. Maybe I made a WIS save they failed, I don’t know. But I began to try to fight my way through to some kind of sobriety, or at least non dependence. When I did that, the girlfriend I mentioned above started dating my friend instead of me. For reference, this was the first girl I ever actually fell head-over-heels in real-deal Capital-L Love with. She was ferociously intelligent, and wild, and physically beautiful, a punk rock princess with dazzling, vibrant purple hair. And her eyes, oh my god. She had the slightest touch of heterochromia, and they were this deep, glazed blue-green with tiny golden brown sunbursts around her pupils. And in spite of being drop-dead gorgeous, she was NICE to me. This was very, very unusual for me, to have such a pretty girl be nice to me and that I felt at ease around. I had managed to punch way, way above my weight class, something that has happened to me consistently with women; I don’t know why that should be but some things you just shut up and be grateful for.

Anyway, when I decided to bow out, just like that situation with the ten good old boys, instead of backing down, my friend, seeing the same thing I was I have no doubt, doubled down. He accelerated into addiction, and he took my former girlfriend with him. And unlike some of the other girls we'd both seen, I cared about this one, so as much as I loved my friend, I also hated him for that, hated them both a little I think. But it also made sense in its own weird fucking way. They were both gorgeous, and fey, and kind of otherworldly to me. That didn't stop it from hurting me, though.

I'm off-track here. The point is that I managed to step away. They did not, and eventually wound up on the run from police for strongarm robbery and when they were arrested I was actually glad because I knew it meant they would have to kick, and maybe things would go back to How They Used to Be. I was pretty naïve.

My friend did three years in prison, and it changed him, but not in the way you might expect. He didn’t come out of it a hardass or a gangbanger, or anything like that. He came out with a timidity that had never ever been in him before. The first week or so he was out, we were crossing a semi-busy street, going to a record store I think. There was plenty of time to cross, but he saw a car coming and gasped and grabbed my hand, and pulled me back up on the sidewalk. It took probably 30 seconds for the car to reach us, and we would have been able to cross in seven. He looked kind of sheepish afterwards, but it actually really touched me that he had pulled me back like that. He had become totally acclimated to the pace of prison, which is incredibly slow. I have never been to prison, but I have spent a few nights in county lockups, and there is an awful timelessness about it, especially if you are in withdrawal. He never really got used to the speed with which things moved outside of prison ever again, I don’t think.

While he was doing time, I finally cleaned up some (not really truly all the way, but enough to not have to devote myself mind body heart spirit wallet and everything else to the fucking needle) and went back to school.

At some point after he had been out for a while, he started drinking very, very heavily. I think maybe he was trying to recapture that old swagger that he had lost and when he was drunk he felt invincible. This was never anything he told me. He wound up with a DUI. After the first one, the cops in his neighborhood started looking for him and pulled him over every time they saw his car, and he, like an idiot, refused to stop driving, and so the charges for both DUIs and Driving Without a License just piled up and it got so he was looking at additional prison time. And when I saw him or talked to him I did my best not to be furious with him because I could see the despair in his eyes.  It was 1999, and still JUST possible to kind of start fresh if you moved far enough away geographically. I moved to Iowa City for school. He ran off to San Diego without saying goodbye to anyone to escape doing more prison time, and I never spoke to him or saw him again.

A few months later I got that call on my birthday. His parents were very religious and insisted it had been just a mistake, that he screwed up and took too much, but I knew that it had been On Purpose, and I knew why: it was because he could never go back, never recapture the intensity. I wish so, so much I could have pulled him back from that street the way he did for me.

I feel responsible for his death. That’s probably dumb. But you see, I was the one who introduced him to the thing that wound up killing him. I knew a guy in the city who was selling Mexican tar. My friend was a type one diabetic with easy access to needles and no phobia of them, which meant we started off right away by mainlining the drug, rather than something slightly tamer (if such a thing can be said to exist with regards to heroin). Rationally, I know that it would have wound up the same way, no matter what I did. He was actively seeking this thing out, consumed with dreams of being like Mick Jagger or Uncle Al Jourgensen or something, just like me except I was maybe thinking more like I’d be Billy Boroughs. Idiotic in hindsight, but we were only seventeen, an age when most young men are idiotic. And there were so, so many vectors it could have come from, if it had not been me, it would have been someone else. But I can’t seem to internalize that it’s not my fault, and instead what I have is a hollow, painful place that opens in my chest like a black hole in the pre-dawn darkness when I am by myself, before my wife wakes up.

I want to talk a little about my wife as well. She grew up in Japan and never had to deal with any of this stupid shit before she came here. She is a Good Person untainted by this kind of corruption. I am incredibly lucky to have her, and have once again punched way, way above my weight class. I feel quite certain that without knowing and staying close to her, I would be dead or in prison myself. When we started dating, I never told her about this shit because I knew that as a rational, reasonable human being, she would look the situation over and decide she wanted no part of it. There was one night she came back to the US from Japan and crashed out in my bed all jet lagged and I and a bunch of my friends stayed up all night shooting dope, smoking crack, and even doing the occasional speedball, and she never knew.

I finally had to come clean with her one day when we walked in to my place coming back from dinner or something and found the friend I am talking about and my roommate at the time (a guy I have stayed close to, basically the only other "survivor" as it were) literally on the floor with the needles still in their fucking arms. She thought they were both dead and they looked like they might be. Having been through OD situations a few times, I checked and could see they were breathing, but for her sake I woke them up – dragging them one by one to the bathroom, running the tub cold, and splashing it all over them – they were too heavy for me to actually get them into the tub without hurting them. They were pissed at me for having done this. I did not care. Even though, or perhaps because she is a good person, my wife has something in her like steel.  Or maybe because she has something in her like steel she is a good person.  Either way, I can count the number of times I have seen her cry since 1998 on one hand: when her grandpa died, when her grandma died, when our pet fish died, when our cat Biscotti died, and when we walked in on those two assholes passed out. Because they are so infrequent, when the tears do come, they are amazingly effective. Should it be within my power, there is nothing I would not do to halt them.

I try to keep her front and center in my thoughts, but sometimes I forget how lucky I am. I think entitlement is probably the natural state of human beings unless we very consciously remind ourselves of just how much more fucked-up things could be. Or at least that’s how it seems to be for me. The thing I need to remember, to keep ever first and foremost in my mind, is that by any measurement, my life is really, really good. In spite of a rocky start to the marriage (neither of us were really ready to live together or be married, but her visa expired and we were even less ready to never see each other again), we were both willing to put in the work and it evened out.  I have been moderately successful financially, and our needs are simple and we do not lack. My parents are both still alive, and I have a remarkably good relationship with them these days. I have a generally very good relationship with my wife. I do not have children or many close friends left, and this last is I think the biggest thing that brings me down sometimes. I miss very much the easy authenticity I had with my friends, especially those two, and the lack of any need to explain things to each other, especially difficult-to-explain things. They knew and understood. I think I probably have a touch of seasonal depression anyway, but it’s particularly bad at this time of year because I cannot help but think back to that phone call and it sets up a spiral that can be difficult to get out of.

The other day I was in the Loop for work. Right by the river. It was one of those bleak, cold Chicago days where everything is the same grey color, the buildings, the asphalt, the oppressive sky that feels like its clouds are no more than ten feet over your head. The wind was bitter enough to bring tears to my eyes and then freeze them to my cheeks. I went up to the railing at the river and I looked down into it.

And I had this sudden and eidetic memory of a summer night he drove us over to K town to cop and afterwards we were sitting in the car parked and my girlfriend straddled me, facing me in the passenger seat and all of us were turned on in every way possible, she was careful and gentle, she was almost never so gentle and she found a vein on me when I couldn’t and I remember just before she pushed the plunger down she bumped her forehead against mine, on purpose, and a lock of her hair, beautiful, deep, and violet, brushed against my cheek and tickled it, and her smile was full of promise and she smelled so good, like clean rain, and she looked me full in the eyes and she kissed me deeply and the faint flush at her throat, and my friend was laughing at us, with us, in the seat next to me, a joyful, clear, contagious laugh like bells, and the plumes of blood, and the overwhelming, unbearable pleasure of all of it. The intensity of it. And I know that I can never, ever go back, those times are done and that intensity is gone forever, and that if I were to try to get it back it would kill me and before that it would destroy me and those I love, and in spite of that I miss it in a way that I feel I cannot begin to make other people understand no matter how hard I try.

The river was grey-green like a dead thing, sluggish and turgid, swollen with flat chunks of ice. It looked so cold and dark and suddenly I had this almost unstoppable urge to just… jump in. How long would it take? Looking down at the frigid, grey water, I don’t think it would take that long. I don’t think it would even hurt that much. Not the way going on hurts, anyway.

And then I thought about my wife, and I did my best to snap out of it. She needs me. She depends on me. But.

They haunt me. I think this is maybe what ghosts actually are. In my mind and soul, they are unquiet spirits that come back over and over again in the dark mornings to stir that hollow place and make my face and throat feel hot and tight and like my heart is a bird trapped in my ribcage and the blood is pulsing behind my eyes, a mild headache. Sometimes they don’t or won’t wait until I am alone and I come close to breaking down in public. I’ll catch a little whiff of vinegar, or I’ll just picture the plume of blood comingling with the junk in the barrel of the needle and the ghosts visit and I start to salivate and my fingers shake and I want to weep. Sometimes it’s so close to the surface that someone will notice something and ask me:

Are you ok?

This is not typically a question people ask me and sometimes it catches me off guard and I’ll find I’m rubbing my teeth together hard enough that other people can actually hear it and my shoulders have bunched up to my ears and my forehead is creased and I will very consciously release all the tension in my shoulders and jaw and head and smile a little and reply with a lie made glib and simple and above all believable through long practice:

Yes, of course. I am fine.

Blackmouth prowled along the crimson travertine panels,

a glaucous shadow pressed against the exterior wall of the palazzo. This was his favorite part of the thing, when he knew he was nearly upon his quarry. He moved naturally, brushing the façade with his shoulder occasionally. So many killers were undone by their own minds, their own racing thoughts, when they got so close. The key now was flow. No thinking. Doing.

The Duke had passed sentence on these people for the crime of fomenting rebellion. Others would be made into examples, brought in front of the Mammoth and tortured until they were dead or useless. But for these particular traitors, financiers rather than participants, the judgement was quiet assassination; the family was to be annihilated excepting the very youngest member, who would be brought to the Duke and converted, made into a tool of his will, a fanatic to be unleashed on the rebels of the future just as Blackmouth was the Duke’s weapon of choice today.

He turned the corner of the carmine palazzo and continued along to the frame of the exterior door. The sword made a sibilant whisper as it slid out of the scabbard. He tried the handle. It opened smoothly.

Clearly the men inside had not truly been expecting trouble. As the first turned towards him he brought his blade down, sundering the man’s face. It disintegrated in a tangled spray of blood and hair that mixed with the russet striations of the walls and floor, red against red.

The second had gone for his own weapon and was pulling it free when Blackmouth thrust the tip of the sword just under the xiphoid process at the base of the man’s sternum. His would-be opponent bent in agony, his sword clattering to the floor as he clasped his hands to his chest. Blackmouth reversed his grip, holding the blade like an oar, and let the edge ride against the bottom of the ribcage through the liver, kidney, spleen, and intestines, ripping the sword out through the man’s side in a shower of gore.

He scanned the foyer. Doorways on either side and straight ahead. He took a moment to intuit where she might be in the house and then he moved directly towards the door at the opposite end of the room and slipped through. He was in a hallway which led towards the back of the house and had a staircase going up. He cupped his free hand to his mouth and called up the stairs.

“Come quick! Solitude Spire has sent assassins!”

He strode to the back of the staircase, positioned such that those descending the staircase would do so with their backs to him. Her father charged down, a pistol in one hand and a dagger in the other. Predictable. Blackmouth took the man’s head off as he rounded the newel post, the stump of his neck spraying blood in arcing pulses as his beheaded body stumbled blindly about and his heart continued to beat for a few seconds. The man’s head had rolled face up and he beheld his own lurching form taking jerky steps for a moment or two before the decapitated thing sunk suddenly to its knees and the eyes in its separated skull glazed over, like grapes suddenly covered with bloom: dusty, frigid, and vacant.

Blackmouth paused for a beat to see if any others were coming, and when it was clear they were not, he ascended the staircase quickly and took the door to his right.

Her mother stood in front of her, a karambit in each hand, point down and edge out, eyes wide and expression solemn. Blackmouth smiled kindly at her and accelerated toward her, giving her mixed signals and no time to think. She managed to deflect his first two blows, not blocking but using the hooked knives to redirect his attacks away, and she sidestepped a thrust. After the sidestep, she was at his left. She almost caught his throat with a pulling slash which split the skin on his neck and shoulder, opening a long cut that was only superficial because it had bounced off his clavicle. Somewhere along the way, she’d flipped one of the knives to a point-up, edge-in position and he hadn’t even seen it. The cut was so fine it took a moment before the skin opened and the blood welled out. He felt the heat of it and it made his heart sing with joy. Even as the blood began to trickle down his breast she aimed a blow at his throat, leading with the steel ring on the karambit around her index finger.

He managed to tuck his chin in just in time to protect his vulnerable neck. Had her fist landed cleanly it would have crushed his windpipe, he had no doubt. As it was, she split the skin again and the blow rocked his brain so he saw small white sparks streak randomly before his eyes. He broke to his rear, arching his spine and bending backward at the knees in an improbable angle to avoid the follow-through slash to the face he knew must come after the punch.

He hadn't been wounded in months. With newfound respect, he resolved to end the fight as quickly as possible. Now he understood the order; this woman moved beautifully, filled with the casual grace of a feral feline.  If the girl had her mother's reflexes, she would be quite formidable.

His backward dodge has taken his spine to within a foot of the floor and it took all the strength he had to force himself upward and forward, fighting gravity the whole way to regain a standing position, and use the momentum to feint a downward cut at a forty-five degree angle to his opponent’s knee.  When she brought her leg up and out of the way, he abruptly changed the direction of his blade and brought it ascending in a huge sweeping movement, a gross motion so totally out of character with the economy he had displayed in the fight so far that she wouldn’t believe it was real. It worked – the edge was delivered into her groin. The blade slid effortlessly upward through her flesh, through the pelvis and vertebrae, splitting the stomach, slicing through the sternum and into the throat, turning her scream into a ghastly gurgle, and still it rose, halving the mandible and maxilla, crushing and displacing teeth, dividing the eyes, and finally exploding out of the top of her skull.

The two pieces of her fell away from each other, fully bisected, disgorging their contents on the polished stone floor.

The girl who had stood behind her, perhaps five years old, was shaking and covered in her mother’s cruor. Blackmouth knelt down so that he was eye level with her, laid his blade on the ground, and extended his hand. He smiled gently and gestured for her to come to him.

“Ah, little one, bathed once again in your mother’s blood. You are being born a second time. It is painful to be born, I know. Pay it no mind,” He said softly.

She hesitated, then crossed the room to place her tiny hand in his, stepping over the corpse as she did so. She did not cry; perhaps the lack of tears was simple shock, but Blackmouth’s intuition told him otherwise.  The girl's eyes were clear.

Formidable indeed, he thought.

A World With No Extras

A few things converged creatively for me recently.

The other day I picked up the 1st edition AD&D DMG for the first time in a long long while and while I was paging through it I came across the section on NPC generation. It brought to mind this post where the author describes creating a town for Boot Hill alongside some of the great generators to be found over at Archons March On.

I was recently discussing Infinite Jest with an acquaintance and I was trying to remember the bit about figurants from that novel. At one point in Infinite Jest, the ghost of James Incandenza discusses the “myriad thespian extras” in the background of sitcoms and films with recovering drug addict Don Gately. You know them: those extras that sit at tables in sitcom restaurants and move their mouths and hands as if they are engaging in conversation even though we do not hear what they are saying. DFW calls these “concessions to realism, always relegated to back- and foreground; and always having utterly silent conversations: their faces would animate and mouths move realistically, but without sound." Incandenza's success as an avant-garde filmmaker was in giving a voice to these “figurants” (a piece of terminology I gather comes from ballet), and this is something the book itself mirrors, introducing fully fleshed out and realized characters even nine hundred plus pages in - the point being, in life, there really is no such thing as a figurant, though we sometimes treat others as if they were mere extras. We are surrounded by people with their own dreams and worries and lives.

Another topic of discussion recently was the incredible sense of distance that Cormac McCarthy manages to convey in his work. In contrast to and in light of the Infinite Jest discussion, I had a sudden realization that the way McCarthy achieves this is by divorcing his characters of any inner life whatsoever (at least in some of his earlier work). We get only their mechanics - what they say, what they do, etc., never what they are thinking or feeling. Probably I am a bit slow on the uptake, but this was revelatory for me.

All of these things converged for me and I thought I might like to create a framework for a village that could easily be dropped into any setting, from the medieval to the futuristic. I say "village" but it need not be an actual village. This could be a spaceship, an aircraft carrier, a border town, an isolated village, a self-contained fortress, etc. The main thing that I would like to try to craft or capture is a population comprised of individuals with their own inner lives that players can interact with. From a player perspective, the inhabitants of this place would be something along the lines of McCarthy - described by the DM in terms of what they say and what they do, never what they are thinking or feeling. But from a DM perspective, they would be more like DFW's creations, their actions informed by incredibly rich inner lives, interests, dreams, and feelings.

I think the first step to that is probably going to be something very similar to what is described in the Boot Hill post I mentioned above, the random generation of lots and lots of characters. So, I have decided to create a generator and I thought it might be useful to others. This is a living document; I may change it at some point in the future, and I welcome suggestions for additions or revisions. To create families, the simplest thing to do is to simply reuse the same last name a few times. Where there are apparent contradictions, this may be the difference between the appearance of the character and their inner life.  This table is meant to define the basic long-term tendencies of a character; I believe the next thing I do will be tables for current mood, preoccupation, etc, the transitory things that might impact an interaction with a character.

The tables are mostly adapted verbatim from pages 100-101 of the Dungeon Master's Guide, with some insertions of my own. The generator HTML was created using the Slight Adjustments blog. For transparency, I have included the option to see the tables, but some of them are quite long and not very pretty!

Here's the generator: