Reminder: Pirates are not funny

Two posts in one day may seem a little excessive, but since I have formally adopted "Pirate Queen" as my self-referential title, I couldn't help but share. Besides, I thought this would be interesting to those who know why someone once called me the Pirate Queen. Some of these folks probably know that I think highwaymen are "cooler", but that's irrelevant. I'm the Pirate Queen. (In rpg's) I didn't quite make it as the Highway Robber Queen, but I kicked ass as the Pirate Queen.

Still, I find the storybook, role playing game, and folk tale pirates quite entertaining, and do so delight in telling their tales, even if when they're horrible. The real life thing is an entirely different creature. One who is NOT funny.

We should be concerned that pirate attacks rose 10% in 2007. Yo ho ho...No thanks.

Even still, I have to ask: What would Abyssinia do?

M'Alice Works!

Tonight we playtested M'Alice, and what I have so far works! The mechanics do what I want them to do, character creation works, the story telling was fun. I'm all abuzz with joy! We just did a few scenes to test out the mechanics and character creation, but I got to see how the dynamics between the PC's could change. The game is fun, too!

Anyway, here's quick description the characters and how character creation goes. I'm afraid I'm making it sound more complicated than it really is, but here goes.

There are 3 types of PC's: children, adults, and a doll. There is no GM. Each character gets 3 dice to roll in a conflict. The doll has extra dice, but I'll explain that in a sec. The first die never changes ("Fantasy" for children, "Mental State" for adults, and "Type" for dolls. The second die depends on who owns the truth. The third die is one of 3 powers, attributes, gifts, or in the case of adults, authority. In a conflict, you decide which one of your 3 descriptive attributes you use as your third die.

It was Meg, Vincent, and me playing. Meg played the child (Charlie, age 7), Vincent played the adult (Ed, an older man, caretaker of a cluster of cabins up in the backwoods of Maine), and I played the doll (Cosmo, a teddy bear made of real bear fur).

Die 1: Fantasy, Mental State, and Type of Doll
So Meg's character, the child Charlie, was 7. So her Fantasy was a d10. A child's fantasy lever is determined by their age. Ages 2-6 are d12, ages 7-12 are d10, ages 13-18 are d8.

Adult characters get this fun little thing to determine their mental state where another player reads a list of words for their mental state: d12 words, d10 words, and d8 words .The adult writes all words that apply to him. Your die is determined by the die size of most of your words. Here are the words Vincent chose:
d12's: dictator, step-parent.
d10's: shady past, citizen, friend, addicted to porn, clairvoyant, mood disorder, arrogant.
d8's: drug addict, poor, ugly, in denial.
I love the list. I'll post it sometime soon. It's one of my favorite things about the game so far. So Ed's mental state was d10. (All the words apply to the character, even if they aren't of the majority die.) I'm gonna have to make something similar for the child.

Dolls also have a list, but they can only choose one term. Other terms on the list may describe the doll, but the doll player chooses one. I chose "Teddy Bear". Cosmo was made of bear fur, and was hand made (which is on the list as well). Teddy bears are d12's.

Die 2: Gifts, Authority, Powers
Each character type writes 3, and each one has a die size. Children have gifts (d12, d8, d6), adults have authority (d12, d8, d6), dolls have powers or weapons (d10, d10, d8). Cosmo had other powers, like he could teleport himself, and he bled when shot, but they couldn't be used in a conflict, only in narrative. We had a tricky thing where Ed wasn't necessarily using any of his listed authority, so I have to think about how to work with that.

Charlie's gifts were "resourceful" (d12), "agile" (d8), and "charming" (d6).
Ed's authorities were "scaring" (d12), "belittling" (d8), and "teaching" (d6).
Cosmo's powers were "I whisper things in your ear" (d10), "soothing" (d10), and "made of bear fur" (d8).
I'm wondering if 3 for each character is enough. We'll see.

Die 3: The truth and loyalty
At the beginning of the game, children write out the original truth. It's a a statement that implicates one character. It doesn't have to declare whether another character is good or evil. When you win a conflict, you can alter this original truth, or completely replace it, or characters write a truth about other characters. Since children own the truth in the beginning, they get a d12. Adults start at d8. In conflicts, you can win the chance to alter or completely replace that original truth or create or modify a truth about another character. The truth at the beginning of the game was "Ed knows where the treasure is." Vincent modified that with "what's left of it". Vincent and I wrote the following truths about each other's characters:
"Ed got away with murder" and "Cosmo flinches at gunfire".

Dolls cannot modify or replace the original truth. What's more important to them is loyalty. When in a conflict against a player who plays the doll's shadow ally (I'll explain that in a sec), they roll a d12. If the conflict is against their child, the doll rolls a d10, and if the doll isn't in the scene, but wants to jump into the conflict (which all players can do) they roll d6.

Shadow allies
So NPCs can come and go, and can be played by whoever speaks up. Shadow allies are characters that only show up in flashbacks. They essentially write their PC's past, and they are always played by the player whose PC is in conflict with that character. So Ed's shadow ally was Hal, his step son. I played Hal. Charlie's shadow ally was Nancy, a girl from home, played by Vincent. Cosmo's shadow ally was Fred, the man who shot the bear and made Cosmo. Vincent played Fred.

We did one flashback scene, where it was revealed that the buried treasure was cash, drugs, and a gun, left by some drug dealers who were staying in Cabin #5, but took off mysteriously. Hal left the money and drugs for his step-father. What I didn't know in making up this thing about Ed's past was that Vincent wrote "drug addict" on his character sheet. It's so fun when things work out like that!

Malice
At the beginning of each scene, the doll rolls a d4 to determine the malice. When a conflict comes up, a doll can opt into the conflict or change the dice of the child in the conflict. So if a doll is acting out of malice and decides not to opt into the conflict, it rolls 2 d4's, and replaces those dice with 2 of the child's higher dice. If the doll is acting out of benevolence, it rolls 2 d12's and switches the child's lower dice for those. There's temporary malice and benevolence and permanent malice and benevolence. If a doll rolls a permanent malice or benevolence she still rolls the malice die, and can still act benevolently for a scene even if she's malicious. Make sense? As it turned out, I rolled temporary malice once and then ever other roll was permanent malice. Cosmo was out to get poor Charlie.

I'll save the story and mechanics for another day. I'm really happy about how well this game is turning out! It's inspired by horror flicks from the 70's and 80's, particularly ones that feature evil dolls (like Dolls), evil adults (The Shining), and bad children (The Omen). Not just the notion that there are evil beings in these movies, but also the relationship dynamics and how it can be difficult to tell just who is the bad guy. The research for this game is terribly fun, too. Horror movies from the era I'm working leave so much more to the imagination, they're creepier without being graphic.

I plan to have an ashcan of this for GenCon, which seems totally possible at the rate it's going. Yay!

Note: M'Alice is short for "My Alice", and of course, a play on the word "Malice". Alice is the doll who will be on the cover. Ingrid is very fond of Alice. Bea is afraid of her.

Alice

Based on a true story, and only slightly embellished. The names have not been changed.

The moment she saw the baby doll, Ingrid fell in love with her. She loved her musty old house smell, the crazing and cracking on her composition finish, her frayed red cotton dress, and even the voice box that sounded more like a death rattle. The doll was older than her grandmother. Mama wouldn't tell her where she got it. It didn't matter. Ingrid named her Alice and she loved her dearly. She swaddled Alice in a fabric scrap that mama gave her and supported her neck so her head wouldn't fall off.

Her big sister, Bea, on the other hand, would not go near Alice. She smelled like the creepy basement, she looked dead, possibly evil. Where Ingrid saw a loving gaze in Alice's hand painted eyes, Bea saw malice--towards her. "Keep that thing away from me!" cried Bea when Ingrid held Alice up to her to adore. "She's scary!"

At last, Ingrid had something that Bea didn't want. She had something that kept Bea away from her. Ingrid loved Alice, and Alice loved Ingrid. She didn't even notice that the cats hissed at the baby doll. Alice was special. By the end of the day, Ingrid and Alice were inseparable. Mama tucked both Ingrid and Alice into Ingrid's toddler bed. Ingrid snuggled up to her old new friend, and whispered secrets in her ear.

That night, something startled Bea awake. Something lurked in her room, and it wasn't a cat. Something crept up on to her bed. Something hard and cold touched her foot. She turned on the light. There sat Alice at the foot of her bed staring at Bea with those dead painted eyes.

I Scared My Daughter!

This is a picture of one of my scary doll project dolls. I got another one today, and four more are on their way. That will be all for now. I asked my mom to send me the doll I was originally afraid of, but she couldn't find it. It wasn't where I last left it when I visited them!

So when Bea came home today from school--Proud mama moment: Bea rode her bike to and from school. I just happened to be getting the mail when she cruised up with her little black corduroy messenger bag, in her black yoga pants, on her black Electra bike with the pink flames details. Bea is just so much cooler than I ever was in school. I mean, at eight years old she's got more cool in her dirty little finger nails than I did in my size 9 1/2 army surplus combat boots that I wore with my cheerleading uniform my senior year of high school. Even better, she's so cool, she's not embarrassed that she's wicked smart. And not only that, she's cool, smart, and disturbingly beautiful. Chris and I have our work cut out for us in 5 or so years. And it won't let up, because Ingrid follows in her sister's skateboard tracks.

Anyway, so I just happened to be getting the mail when she cruised up on her bike, and there was a package on the porch. "Oooh It's another scary doll!" I said.
"You mean, like a Living Dead Doll?" Bea asked. She was fishing to see if it was for her.
"No, it's an old creepy looking doll I'm using for a project."
"Can I see it?"
So I spent the next 10 minutes trying to open the damn package. (I'm not really cool in action.) All the while, I explained to Bea why I wanted scary dolls, where the other scary dolls were, and did she want to see them?
"NO!" She yelled. "I'm scared!"
"I can show you pictures..."
She settled on pictures on the computer. She would not let me bring the dolls upstairs, or even pick up the bag. After she saw the pictures (and was sufficiently freaked out), she asked me over and over again where I left the dolls, because she wanted to go downstairs and get a snack. HA! I scared my "I collect Living Dead Dolls, I love to wear black, scary movies don't bother me, so why can't I stay up late and watch them with you and papa" daughter. A small but significant victory.

I'll post more photos of my new acquisitions very soon.

In the works!

I'm working on a supplement to Steal Away Jordan which will be set in Brazil, where the PC's will attempt to escape to Quilombo de Palmares. It will be the uplifting sequel. But I'm brainstorming another game. This one's a little more fun, horrific, and unnerving, but in the fictional could-never-happen-or-could-it way. Today I started jotting down ideas for Doll: Tales of Love and Horror. I've mentioned it a few times here, I love dolls. And I've had some scary ones in my life. So this game will be a love and horror story to ti-bonanj (or petit bon ange, New Orleans style), the smirking Barbie, the bubbly Kewpie, that lives in our room or toybox, whom we love and fear, and to whom we reveal our deepest darkest secrets. And these dolls love us, keep our confidences, and hold nasty grudges because we are children and treat them like toys and don't give them the respect they deserve.

So each player will create a two characters: a child and a doll. The child has a secret, something she's done or has been done to her. It can be truly horrible, even to adults, or truly horrible as perceived by a child. Stats I'm playing with are secret, age, imagination, and fear (Child's stats). But each player also creates a a doll character, with the stats, love, malice, life, loyalty, and movement. So the players look at the doll characters and each one chooses one as her very own. The person who created the doll, plays that doll to the player's child who chose it. The child confesses the secret to the doll, and so play begins.

I'm trying to go for scary, intimate, and deliciously terrible. At first I wanted it to be pure scary story telling with no allegory of relationships, but I realize that's inevitable. Que sera sera. I want the game to be like children sitting around a camp fire or at a slumber party, telling each other horror stories, trying to out-scare each other, trying to decipher what was real and what was not real in the story.

I have in mind a complimentary project for this game, though. I'm scouring ebay for old dolls in disrepair (like the one you see above. I'm bidding on it, for sure!) to fashion into nightmareish looking dolls for artwork for the finished project.

Anyone want to join me in the Scary Doll Project? Gather your old dolls, and make them evil looking, send me a photo. Here are some examples and inspiration:

Cute Little Threat
Demon Kidz (kinda like Living Dead Dolls) I'm really going for a more subtle, organic look, but I can certainly appreciate a scary doll, as can Bea, my little punk rock/goth chick in training. (She's certainly one of my muses for this game!)
Yikes!
Creepy Dolls!

Stone Babies

This is from William Buck's translation/interpretation of the Mahabharata:
"Dhritarashtra lost his sorrow in Gandhari's love, as a river is lost in the sea. She became pregnant by Dhritarashtra, but a full year passed by without her giving birth, and longer, until Dhritarashtra sent for Vyasa in dismay.

"Vyasa came to the king and said, 'Gandhari carries one hundred sons. She will give birth at the end of two years. Be patient and know that there is no danger to her, and I will return when it is time.'

"Vyasa then spoke with Bhishma, so that when Gandhari gave birth there were a hundred bronze jars filled with clear butter, ready and hidden in the palace garden. From her womb came a hard ball of flesh that Vyasa took from her and washed in cool water.
"'Here are your hundred sons,' he told Gandhari, 'but there is more to do before they are formed.'

"Vyasa divided that ball of flesh into pieces. As he worked in the garden, Bhishma put each piece into a jar and sealed it. At the end there was an extra piece. Bhishma brought another jar and Vyasa said, 'There are now one hundred sons and one daughter. See that the jars are not opened for two more years; then they will be born.'"

Warning: not for the faint of heart, or for people who don't like to read about fetal abnormalities used as plot devices. I had a hard time finding an accompanying picture that wouldn't completely turn people off.

The word of the day is Lithopedion. I found out about them at the Human Marvels website under "Pickled punks." No this isn't going to be a happy post, but you were warned.
Last night I described the lithopedions to my fellow gamers, after we played our game for the night. It's always fun to share the freaky and strange things you learn about on the internet. Emily said, "It's like the baby you found in your attic."
"There are no babies in my attic, what are you talking about?" I said.
In Shizuka's attic, she meant. Oh yeah. There are no babies in my attic. What are you talking about?

Stone Babies are character and plot device jewels. They're like trichobezoars. Creepy and freaky, they require pathological behavior from the character. In order to create a stone baby, you need a fetus to die in utero, and a mother to neglect or forget or otherwise ignore the fact that labor comes to no fruition or labor never comes. Then the fetus ossifies, calcifies, undected for years before the mother begins to feel discomfort or pain.

Gandhari's seed born children, (stone baby cousins?), the Kaurava, were the antagonists of the Pandavas in Mahabharata. The first born, Duryodhana, is an avatar (incarnation) of the demon Kali (not the goddess).

Anyway, I had no idea what a Lithopedion was until Tuesday night, but I've read Williams Buck's version of The Mahabharata about four times, and parts of the whole poem (translated into English) when I was in college. I love it when things click subconsciously like that.

Here are my two bad haiku about Stone Babies:

Lithopedion
Conceived, forgotten, dead child.
Now we are both old.

You died in my womb
I forgot to give you birth
Now you're a stone child.

Another Mahabharata translation.
Much better Haiku
More Anatomical/Physical Items of Note

I'm Okay, You're Not Okay, but That's Okay, Because You Don't Exist.

A few years ago I came to a crossroads in my academic pursuit at the time, and due to circumstances both within and beyond my control, I veered off the academic road. This translates to: a few years ago, I was in nursing school. I'd wanted to be a nurse for many years, and while the time wasn't ideal, it was as good a time as any to be in school. But I took a semester off due to financial reasons and burnout from my work schedule, parenting, and heavy courseload. During that semester off, we had to buy a house (another story with another moral) and I got pregnant with Ingrid (already talked about). So I didn't finish nursing school, and it's doubtful I will before my kids are all in grade school. Which in a way is a shame, because I was really close to finishing, and I like to complete things I start. But not finishing was also a good decision in the long run.

Psych nursing was my thing. Talking to people about their shit, being able to balance empathy and detachment, all came naturally to me. I'm pretty good at listening to what people say and don't say. I'm not afraid of silence in a conversation. There's not much that shocks me so I didn't look surprised when clients admitted to doing fucked up things. And like my dad, I'm a people person with a dash of introversion, which apparently is comforting to some people. Incidentally, we also did a great deal of role playing in my psych rotation. My instructor said I played a very convincing drug addict. That was a complement. Better to be able to play one than actually be one.

So for better or worse, I psychoanalyze people a lot. Friends, family, co-workers, random people I observe in cafes, people that don't really exist. Primo does it, too, and we share our observations. Imagine Marion Woodman and Carl Jung sitting down with a glass of wine or a pot of tea and chatting about who they know. Okay not that high brow, but you get the picture. We're both people watchers, and people analyzers. In high school and college I wrote more short stories, and really focused on character development as a way to help propel action and plot. That way, my characters really brought their problems and conflicts on to themselves, and I just wrote about it. I generally drew from people I knew or had people watched. Same goes for role playing games. I tend to think of minute character details for RPG characters, ponder specific motivations for actions, and when all is said and done, I open them up, and pick them apart. There's always more there than there was in the first place. And that is so cool! It's like baking bread!

I had great fun psychoanalyzing my current favorite non-existent people/demon family unit. There's a little here. And poor Shizuka just developed even more after that. She baked well. I kept asking myself throughout the game, "Is she really as messed up as her actions indicate." I'd say yes, but I can also see her rationale. There's a neat dicussion on the Forge about our game.

I had a psych patient who was coming out of a really bad place, after hundreds of bad places. I believed that he sincerely believed he was going to stay clean this time, that this stint in rehab stuck, even though the odds were squarely against him. He was in his late 40's, a lifelong addict with multiple dependencies, he had a history of physical and possible other forms abuse at the hands of family members, facing hard time in prison, and had lost his support systems: church, family, home. I was haunted by his story, because it really sucked. He'd done some stupid things--really stupid because of a heroin or cocaine binge, or both. But I had empathy for him, and I hoped he could beat the odds. Writing his nursing care plan--essentially picking him apart and describing what could help him, helped me to let him go.

Here's a little of what I didn't write about Shizuka at the Forge. I had typed it up as a response to Ron's questions and thought it better not to post it. It hits a little close to home, and I felt it had a better place here (go figure). Thus, Shizuka gets no nursing care plan, but she was analyzed and picked apart suffiently this past week.
So I'd like to speak for my character, Shizuka, one of the totally
fucked up wives. I had so much fun playing her, but on many levels I found it difficult to play her. I felt like I had to make bad choices for her in order for her actions to remain in character. With her kicker, she believed that Tai, whom she more or less trusted and probably loved, betrayed her in a really awful way: she thought he was the one who left a dead baby in the attic. She knew he was lying about how it got there. And so she was emotionally unstable, depressed, and already prone to substance abuse. Not a fun person to be around or pretend to be. She didn't come from happy place.

I got my inspiration for her from personal darkness, and from patients I had cared for during my psych rotation in nursing school. A lot of these people were at some of the lowest points of their lives. They had hurt people they loved to feed their addiction, made unhealthy choices for themselves, and did just really stupid things. Still, my psych patients were likable people. I think all of our PC's and NPC's were likable people and demons in their own way. Even Prometheus, despite Joshua's attempt to make him otherwise. Even Tai. Even Sophie, who piled on the lies to protect herself and to keep from justifying the morally objectionable action of putting a demon into her dying husband--because she couldn't deal with him dying. [See the Forge post about how I liked Harriet]. I didn't like Shizuka's mother so much.

Anyhow, fucked up as it was, Shizuka and Tai reconciled. Shizuka's mother sent Tai back to her contained in a teapot. (Here's something odd: for Christmas, both my mother and mother-in-law gave me teapots!) At first she pretended to have forgotten everything that had happened up to the night before she found the dead baby in the attic--as if to say, "I'll forget what you've done so we can go back to the way things were before I found out what you'd done". Tai didn't seem to believe her, so she confessed that she remembered everything. Her price was large gap memory loss--which she tried to use to her advantage to no avail. I imagined that she had a file cabinet of things she knew she'd forget, but she never read what she wrote. Then *she* apologized for being disagreeable, promised to be more agreeable, begged him to stay, and they were once again bound. She accepted all responsibility for Tai leaving her.

Up until the very last minute, I couldn't decide if Shizuka would rebind or banish Tai. The healthiest choice obviously was banishment. Shizuka, however, was not a healthy person who was able to form and grow healthy relationships. In one scene, Harriet asked Shizuka why she wanted Tai back, and Shizuka admitted that she liked "bad boys". (This is something that someone once pointed out to me when I young and self absorbed. I did not deny it then, but years later, when marriage material presented himself, he was refreshingly not a total bad boy, but he was bad enough without being sociopathic or otherwise dangerous.) Tai's need was to make her happy, and other than the low level but constant bickering between them, I assumed that he usually made her happy, even with missing babies. So, in Shizuka's mind, there was marriage to Tai, which could be a happy endeavor as long as she ignored/forgot his transgressions. And it would be filled with good food, a nice garden, other pursuits of sensual gratification, and seeing the world, vs. no Tai. And from the glimpse she got of no Tai, that was dreadful, with the fingertip getting chopped off, the opium binge, being alone, etc. It was creepy and wrong, but reconciliation was the logical choice.
Marion Woodman
Carl Jung
Sigmund Freud
Pacifica Graduate Institute One of the places I'd apply to attend when it's time to go back to school.

Ingrid and the Bad Cat

A few years ago, Primo found what we believe to be a cat's skull while he was hiking around Poet's Seat Tower/Greenfield Mountain with our late dog Kaya. I'm probably the only one in the house who likes this thing, but I like anatomy and bones and bodily functions and biology-type things. Every time the discussion arises as to whether we should throw it away, I am the loud lone dissenter. And the cat skull now resides atop our CD rack, where the dog can't get it.

A few weeks ago, annoyed and exasperated by Sal, our male cat who still sprays despite being neutered, I threatened him with the skull. I stuck the skull in his face and I probably said something like "If you don't stop spraying, you evil cat, this will be what's left of you." Then I probably muttered on and on about how Sal is evil and bad. It hasn't helped at all. I can accept that all cats are essentially evil, but even evil cats can avoid spraying in the house. As much as it pains me, because he is technically my cat and I otherwise adore him, I've considered finding a new home for him.

Ingrid witnessed the whole thing, and has become fascinated with, if not a little afraid of the skull. After dinner this evening, she climbed into my lap and said, with the conviction of a 23 month old, "I want to see the bad cat." We weren't sure what she was talking about at first, but she kept on pointing to the CD rack. I asked her if she wanted to see the cat skull and pointed to it, and she said, "Yes! Cat skull. I want to see the bad cat." So Primo handed her the bad cat, and at first she recoiled. But he said that it was the bad cat, and happily she took it and carried it around singing "bad cat! Bad cat!" Her older sister, who is into Living Dead Dolls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, won't touch it.

I bet I can get Ingrid to eat a waterbug.

The Attic is Still a Scary Place

So we finished our Sorcerer game. Shizuka and Tai reconciled. She discovered that Tai had not killed one of their kids, and he (Taiichi) was living in the attic. This made her happy. When she and Tai re-binded she suggested that they send Taiichi to live with her mother in Kyoto. Tai had reservations, fearing mom might not be pleased, but Shizuka reminded him that Taiichi was mom's grandson. And grandchildren are all mom wanted. I think everyone lived happily ever after--at least in Shizuka's story. Meg started a hilarious journal from Harriet's POV at The Forge. Hopefully Joshua and Emily will give their reports, too. Me, too.

So why is the attic still a scary place? Because every time I go up there I end up bringing more stuff down than I intended. I was just looking for a couple of books. I came down with many more than a couple--more like 25. There were the rare fragile books that needed to be kept elsewhere, the books that I will need to work on my game, the books on Japanese tattooing I'll need to finish designing the tattoo on my arm, the game books, the books I've already read, but like to have around, the graphic novel I'd started reading before we bought our house and misplaced (Blade of the Immortal, book 2 I think), a book I thought Joshua would be interested in reading, and Bea's Waldorf doll, Millie Cookie. I was really just looking for my Japanese tattooing books. Now that the half sleeve is well underway again, it's time to plan ahead to making it a 3/4 sleeve, which I'd like to have done in the next two years. I needed some inspiration, although I know what I'd like to have done.

We have many many boxes of books that we have yet to unpack. I cannot bring myself to get rid of a book, but I know the time will come where I'll have to do it, otherwise we'll never be able to finish the attic. We need to get rid some stuff. Anyway, last night I had an interesting dream where I was looking for the two Japanese tattooing books, but all I could find was Summer Sisters by Judy Blume. Guess where I found the books in question: in the same box as that Judy Blume book! I had other dreams last night that were weird, if not a little geeky. I dreamed of a recipe for a mojo bag I'd been thinking of putting together but have not been able to figure out what I needed, and I also dreamed that there was a strange, but friendly being who lived in the walls of our house and wore a black mask, who knew my "true nature as the one who gives the marks." I had a little too much to drink last night, I think.

I think I also have a kidney infection again. I had one this summer, and was totally miserable. I don't even remember getting the initial UTI. Everyone in my house has had a cold with a nasty gooey nose and a sore throat, except me. I get a kidney infection. Life is unfair.

Happy New Year. Gotta go cook some black eyed peas, or my mom will have my head on a frying pan, or we'll have bad luck, or both.

Other cool Noh Masks!

Your Favorite RPG Character

I'd like to know, gentle reader, if you have a favorite RPG character of your creation. Last night I found mine, Shizuka from our Sorcerer game.
It doesn't take much for me to cry at movies or in dramatic moments on books or TV, so it's no surprise that I'm really sad for my Sorcerer character Shizuka. At first I thought she was just a nervous wreck, near a breakdown, but I realized this morning, after pondering what transpired last night, that perhaps she just enjoys pain, arguing, and being unhappy. That really sucks for her, because her demon's need was that he needed to make her happy. And we all know that not even the funniest clown can make someone who wants to be unhappy become happy. She wasn't feeding his need, so her homicidal demon husband left her. The last straw was that after he admitted to killing their children, she asked him to get a demon vasectomy, which seemed to be a logical request at the time, but probably not something one should ask if you and your partner are not getting along, or when you're both high on opium. After I said it, Vincent, the GM, flipped through the book to clarify demon rebellion and unbinding. I thought, aw, crap. Shizuka is screwed. Even my husband, who has very little to say about my gaming experiences because I tend to talk to him about it when I come home and he's geekin' over his Think Tanks game quickly chimed in that it was a bad thing to say. It's a bad thing to say when I mention the V word between us. But every time I say "let's have another baby", he gets all prickly and grimacy, too. I don't get it, but I digress...
The kicker started out as something just to be scary: She finds a dead baby in a beautiful wooden box. But her reaction to it was the kiss of death for the marriage. She didn't trust Tai (demon husband) anymore. She thought he had something to do with the appearance of the box (I'm still unclear of how it appeared), and that maybe he put it where she would see it to be cruel. She's touchy about babies, having had 5 that just disappeared, and she overreacted.
Speaking of babies, at first I thought she was all about having the babies, but also came to see her mother wanted grandchildren much more than Shizuka wanted to make them.
Her price is that she has large gap memory loss (and I play it that she conveniently forgets painful things as well, and remembers things incorrectly, or just enough not to have an accurate account of what happened) So all these years she's relied on Tai to tell her the truth about what's happened, since she can't or won't remember. She doesn't trust him, and her denial and desire to forget a succession of traumas (the husband killing all 5 of their children mere weeks after they were born, year after year), caused her not to ask the all-important "why?" When she got the answer (they would have turned into really horrible demons) Tai was on the way out the door. Sad. (And still the Shizuka in me thinks, would they really go evil? Tai's not that evil and he's the father.)
I love it when you think you've formed something about your character that ends up only being true on the surface. While your initial statements about your character may be X, their reactions and expereinces show that Y is truer. Like the baby in the box thing. Since her cover is that she's an ethnobotanist, I've explored that maybe she tends to abuse opium, which can also account for a lot of memory loss, mental confusion, hallucination, delusions, etc.
I've found it great fun to play characters whose inspiration comes from a part of me I'm not comfortable with, and I had to get past the fact that I was exposing my own bad sides. I got inspiration for Shizuka from me....
~Ages 19-22, when I not-so-secretly enjoyed being unhappy.
~Ages 22-24, when I was very unfortuneately romantically involved in two toxic relationships and cared very much for both people. (one of whom I'm still friends with, but the toxicity is all cleaned up)
~On those days when I wake up in the morning and am just looking to pick a fight with anyone who crosses my path (and it tends to be the husband)
~That phase before I met the husband when I loved the Bad Boys.
~That part of me that can be really passive aggressive to the husband, even though I know it's wrong.
~The part of me that has nightmares of the husband leaving me without any explanation or contact afterwards. And that came through in play in an eerie scene. Shizuka tried to summon Tai. She wrote in her own blood a long letter of contrition [My beloved Tai, I'm sorry I've been such a bitch lately...Perhaps a vasectomy is not a good idea at this time...If you come back, I'll laugh at your jokes, praise your superior cooking, work at being a better wife who is attentive to your needs...], begging for forgiveness, did her ritual summoning of placing the letter in water, chanted, burned inscence, surrounded herself in Tai's possessions. Due to my crappy roll of the dice, the summoning failed, and Tai did not show. That he did not respond in the least was beautiful. Horribly beautiful. I've had that nightmare before--where the husband and I have a fight, he walks out, and I can't talk to him. That scene gave me chills.
Everyone else's stories are intense and depressing. There isn't much of an emotional reprieve, except for the fact that Shizuka has only interacted with Harriet, Meg's character, whom Tai tried to brain with a hammer. I get to sit and listen to Joshua and Emily do their story-telling. Amazingly, Harriet agreed to help Shizuka locate Tai. It could have been a light moment in the whole game, but Shizuka willingly cut off the tip of her pinkie to feed to Harriet's knick knack making, bone eating well demon, as retribution for Tai's attempted murder of Harriet, and clogging her well with 6 yen pieces. We've stayed consistently dark, even darkly funny.

So there's mine. What's yours? What was (even if so far) your favorite scene? What inspired their formation? How did they evolve? Where did your characters end and you begin, and round the other way?
I've only been doing role playing games for less than a year. I have been really lucky to have played with wickedly imaginative GM's too! Growing up I played lots of pretend, and in high school I had a couple of friends that I did a free form kind of role playing-story telling thing. In nursing school we did lots of role playing to gain perspective on patient/nurse relations. And I do SCA here and there, love to dress in Renaissance and Faire garb. I like to play pretend, but my "formal" role playing experience is pretty limited. (Shhhh....I've never played D&D, and don't really plan to...) I'm amazed how drawn into a story and how attached to a character one can get. So I'm curious to hear other people's experiences with characters that really stuck to them or haunted them.

Julia's Dream

Thursday night (Thanksgiving), I had a terrible dream. It started out as a standard post graduate anxiety nightmare, where I was back at school, and forgot to attend a crucial class. Had that part of the dream continued, I eventually would have discovered that I never attended the class and thus couldn't graduate. But this one was a little different. When I got to class I saw my mom standing in the doorway, and I went over to talk to her. She was dreamily cryptic, telling me I knew why she was here, smiling but sad looking. Then I heard her mumble something, which my dreaming brain interpreted as "I have Cardiac Amorphism." I tried to remember what I had learned about Cardiac Amorphism in nursing school, and I didn't think it was a good thing. So I asked her what she was going to do. She said there a surgery that might help, but it had an incredibly low survival rate ("One Tenth of One percent"). She was not going to have the surgery. She would live with the illness and die from it soon. I cried, she cried, and she told me had accepted this, so I should, too. The rest of the dream is a little sketchy. I woke up incredibly sad and heavy hearted.

So this part is real and not a dream: Yesterday my mom had an EKG at her appointment with a cardiologist. The EKG detected an abnormal heart sound, and given my mom's family history of heart disease, the cardiologist recommended she go in for a cardiac catheterization, to see if the abnormal heart sound indicated a blockage or other defect. She asked if I thought she should have the catheterization done. I told her yes.

I dream in color, I have vivid dreams, and I remember a great many of my dreams. When I was growing up, I frequently had nightmares (Bea does, too). As an adolescent I learned how to alter the course of my dreams. Basically I realize I'm dreaming and then I can do what I want, like fly, make the bad things go away, etc. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I frequently have deja vu, so much so that I don't pay much attention to it. Dead relatives visit me in my dreams all the time, although they generally don't have much to say. They just kinda check in. And I've had dreams that seemed to tap into real events. In 1995, I had a dream that I was in an elevator, looking out a building across the street, and that building suddenly exploded and collapsed. I woke that morning to news that someone had detonated a bomb in a building in Oklahoma City. In 2001, I had a similar dream, where I saw people jumping out of a building and the building exploded and collapsed. That was a couple of days before Sept 11. I've had similar disaster dreams before high casualty earthquakes. I assume this happens to all of us, and some of us are more open or tuned in to it.

And I scare easily through visual stimulation, much to my husband's chagrin (he loves horror movies). If he gets me to watch a scary movie--one with angry ghosts or evil spirits--I watch it through a screen of my fingers. Scary movies give me nightmares 80% of the time, and I already have a nice little collection of recurring nightmare themes. I don't need any more.

11/29/06--Edit: I'm having an easier time processing the wierd and freaky cardiac amorphism dream as it relates to the reality of my mother's abnormal ECG than I am the uncertainty of the significance of the abnormal ECG. So I hope the 3 or 4 people who actually read this will think of or pray for my mom that her cardiac catheterization goes smoothly.

Must Be the Season of the Living Dead Doll

Halloween preview!!
Let's get in touch with our darkness, shall we?
Here is my beautiful daughter Bea as Inferno.
And here's Ingrid as a duck. Ducks can be very dark, especially if you're 21 months old.
Round here, the ladies of the house take Halloween very seriously. I am possibly more excited about Bea's costume than she is.
I'm going to be a highwaywoman. (photo to come on Halloween)