December 2016 – Page 2 – PopCult Reviews

Character Development – 7th Sea Second Edition Part 2

Traits

185462 Knowing all this I was ready to start assigning points to Cano’s Traits. Traits are essentially the same as Abilities in other RPGs, the primary attributes of all characters. All Traits start with a score of 2, with 2 additional points to spend. Your Nationality also gives you a choice of two stats to bump up by 1. I decided Cano was more of an agile fighter than pure muscle so increased Finesse to 3. His faith steals his mind, so Resolve was changed to 3. As a native of Castille, he could add to Finesse or Wits and decided his emphasis on diplomacy over combat made Wits the appropriate Trait to go up. This left Brawn and Panache at their standard of 2 points.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds allow you to flesh out your character’s past and add more mechanical pieces. Each Background provides Skills that your character can pull from. They come with a Quirk, an Advantage and then a suite of skills.

The first Background that seemed like a given was Soldier. The Quirk is that I earn a Hero Point when I stick to a plan disregarding any danger that might come to me. My first advantage as a Soldier is that I am an Able Drinker, meaning that alcohol will never affect me not matter how much I drink. The second Advantage will be that I’m a Riot Breaker, meaning as an individual fighter I can take on hordes of minion-like enemies without taking much damage. As a Soldier, the skills I get are Aim, Intimidate, Notice, Warfare, and Weaponry.

The second Background I chose was Orphan. My reasoning was that Cano’s father died when he was young and his mother became so devoted to the Vaticine that Cano was for all intents and purposes left to survive on his own. His Orphan Quirk is that I gain a Hero Point when I put myself in danger to befriend or accompany a person who is alone. My two advantages are Brush Pass and Reckless Takedown. Brush Pass gives me the ability to take from or place on a person a small handheld object. Reckless Takedown lets me immediately take down a Brute Horde of enemies taking 1 Dramatic Wound as a cost. Being an Orphan, the skills I acquired were Athletics, Brawl, Empathy, Hide, and Intimidate.

Skills
You get 10 points to spread out amongst the build of skills acquired from your Background. I decided that Cano is a very aware person and so Empathy, Intimidate, and Notice are his top Skills at 3 points each. Everything else will be set at 2 points except for Brawl which is at a 1 because Cano chooses to resort to that last.

Aim 2

Athletics 2

Brawl 1

Empathy 3

Hide 2

Intimidate 3

Notice 3

Warfare 2

Weaponry 2

Advantages

You are given 5 additional points to buy more Advantages. Indomitable Will seemed like a natural fit due to Cano’s devotion to his faith. With Indomitable Will Cano may spend a Hero Point to immediately resist seduction, intimidation, or any type of coercion.

The second Advantage for Cano will be Quick Reflexes. This Advantage lets me choose a Skill and lets me have an additional Raise when using it. I decided on Notice, emphasizing Cano’s heightened awareness of his surroundings, due to both the paranoia of being pursued by occult elements in the Vaticine and his own combat training.

Arcana
Every hero has a Virtue and Hubris decided by the Sorte Strega, a Witch’s Tarot deck. I decided that The Devil would be an appropriate choice for Cano. His Virtue, Astute, will be that after a Villain spends a Raise for an Action. The Action will fail, but the Raise will still be lost. Cano is always aware of his enemy’s actions and heads them off at the pass. His Hubris will be Trusting meaning Cano will receive a Hero Point when I accept a lie or lopsided deal, an interesting counterpoint to my Indomitable Will.

Story
One of the most interesting pieces of character creation in 7th Sea is your ability to develop a story path for your character. It reminded me a lot of Fronts in Apocalypse World but player-created rather than by a GM. The first step is establishing a goal. My story concept is to Cleanse, specifically to purge the evil from The Vaticine and this will involve finding sympathetic parties who can help me flush it out and destroy the corruption. My Goal is that Cano would be heralded by the Hierophant for saving the Vaticine and be made the Lord of the Holy Guard. The mechanical Reward at the end of the story would be that after passing through four steps, I would earn the 4 point Hard to Kill advantage. It’s not necessary to detail all steps at the outset so my First Step will be to locate Sister Romona Paquita, an exiled nun who was already aware of the occult sect.

Cleanse: The Vaticine is beset by evil from within. I must find those who can help me flush it out and destroy it.

Goal/Ending: My hero is heralded by the Hierophant for saving the Vaticine from the corruption and made the Lord of the Holy Guard.

Reward: This is a four step story that will earn my hero the 4 point Hard to Kill advantage.

First Step: Find Sister Romona Paquita, the exiled nun whose writings on the demonic sect were forbidden.

Details
The last few elements are Details that flavor out the character further. Cano’s reputation is of a Faithful man. This would be how others who know him describe him. He knows the languages of Old Thean, Castille, and Montaigne. He has 2 favor with Močiutės Skara and 0 wealth points to begin.

Creating a character in 7th Sea has made me much more interested in playing a campaign or even one-shot in this system. Before I cracked the pages open I was very lukewarm about playing in a “pirate game, ” but after reading more about the world and seeing how involved creating story is on the player side, I would love to jump in a game.

Next: Unknown Armies Third Edition.

Movie Review – Mommy

Mommy (2014, dir. Xavier Dolan)

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The film opens with title cards that explain we are going to be viewing an alternate 2015 where a new political regime has come to power in Canada and passed a law titled S-14. The law allows for parents of emotionally troubled children who are in low socio-economic conditions to send their children to hospitals and mental health care facilities without regard to fundamental justice. Fundamental justice is a much broader sense of civil rights, designed to anticipate unknown future laws that might try to violate the rights of individuals by being intentionally vague. In this situation, we meet Diana Després (Anne Dorval), a widowed journalist who is forced to remove her emotionally unstable son, Steve, from a juvenile detention facility after he burns another child. From there, their living situation becomes more complicated as work dries up and tension between Diana and Steve intensifies. Into this mix is thrown their neighbor across the street, Kyla (Suzanne Clément). This trio makes up a very different family unit, and they experience highs and lows ending up in a bittersweet place at the end of the film.

This is the last Xavier Dolan film of the month, and it is fascinating to see his growth as a filmmaker in a relatively short time. I Killed My Mother came out in 2009 and next year he has his seventh film coming out. He has also developed a stronger sense of aesthetics since that first feature. In an interview about Mommy, Dolan explained the importance of fashion in his work and how designing the costume of his characters is a crucial element in his writing and directing. In Mommy, each character tells us their story through their clothes, before a single word is even spoken.

The element of the film that you’ll immediately notice is the 1:1 aspect ratio, meant to resemble a cell phone camera filming. The movie is not found footage, but Dolan explained that he believes the aspect ratio to feel incredibly intimate. This seemingly unimportant and possibly pretentious element of filmmaking actually plays a crucial role in conveying the emotional conditions of the characters. Twice in Mommy, the screen expands to a 2:35:1 ratio. The first time this happens, it is to convey a sense of exhilaration and the second is to communicate Diana’s internal pain and struggle near the end.

Not enough can be said about the performances of Anne Dorval and Suzanne Clément in this film. Both actresses have been with Dolan in four out of his now seven films. Each time they play a prominent role they reveal a different facet of themselves. Dorval has played a mother in three films (I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, and Mommy) and each portrayal is of an entirely different character. Clément is amazing to watch in light of her performance in Laurence Anyways. Kyla could not be a more different character, but the actress brings layers of depth and leaves ambiguity as to what has left Kyla with her speech impediment and why she has gone on sabbatical from teaching.

What is most important about Mommy is it’s honest and heartbreaking portrayal of how poverty destroys a family’s ability to get quality mental and emotional care. Financial hardship creates barriers to getting a lawyer, paying the bills, and generally living life. Diana struggles with creating a sense of hope for Steve and succumbing to the stresses of life and lashing out at him. Diana sums it up in a speech that can be read in some different ways:

“[…] I’m full of hope, okay. The world ain’t got tons of hope. But I like to think it’s full of hopeful people, hoping all day long. Better off that way because us hopeful people can change things. Hopeful world with hopeless people…that won’t get us far. I did what I did, so that way there is hope.”

Scarlet Heroes – Session 1

flying-whales In setting up this session, I started looking through some Dungeon Crawl Classics and settled upon The Dreaming Caverns of the Duergar. I made some notes to modify, mainly taking out the dragons (Ariana decided not to include them as part of our world) and put in the Remnants, the original inhabitants of this world. I printed out four pieces of grid paper, fired up the laminator, and then used packing tape to affix the four together into one large foldable map. Printed out a hex map as well to plan the overworld and I had all the pieces together.

The story hook involved our PC, Ella Pips the Halfling Mage, discovering a wounded Psionic Dwarf from the planet Odrion on her family’s shipwhale ranch. Because of the remote location of the ranch, Ella’s father had to ride his tapir into town for the local doctor. The wounded Dwarf, Groobor spoke through a fevered haze and told Ella his companions were trapped in an old cavern to the South of the ranch. He emphasized that his friends only had a limited time before something terrible happened to them. Ella checked the shipwhale she was in the process of midwife-ing, Belle, and saw she was still 36 hours away from birthing. So, Ella and her brother Griffo set off the caves in the South.

Once they were deep in the tunnels a cave-in occurred and left them seeking an alternate way out. As they ventured further they found dwarves that looked corrupted by some unknown sickness or entity. Some of them had been driven mad but it was apparent these inhabitants had been here for awhile and were not the friends of Groobor. On the second floor, Ella and Griffo encountered Sorethin, a Lizardfolk being held captive by these twisted dwarves. Our hero successfully discovered a trap door that allowed the trio to pass into a deeper portion of the cave where Remnant ruins were found, particularly those related to the worship of long-forgotten deities. They shut down a massive drill machine one of the dwarves was piloting and became pinned down on a narrow bridge by crazed dwarves sniping with crossbows.

Sorethin made a run for it, abandoning Ella and her brother. She suddenly realized she had heard of this Lizardfolk before on trips into town with her pop. He was a mercenary from the native Lizardfolk population that had killed two diplomats from the Kaphis colony. Apparently he decided to hide out in the cave and became the prisoner of these mad dwarves. The merc takes one poisonous arrow too many and falls as Ella and Griffo make there way to the next level of the caves. They also discover hundreds of wooden crates containing high quality swords and daggers, enough to arm a military force.

In this humid portion of the cave Ella discovers mushroom and fungus forests as well as the Vegepygmy tribe that harvests and lives off these resources. They are very non-confrontational and run when approached, seeking reinforcements. Ella and Griffo decide to skip that confrontation but she ends up sprayed with spores from a poisonous flower whose roots take up an entire chamber. Not sure of the long-term effects, she pushes on until they find the full ruins of a lost Remnant civilization as well as…a living Remnant! They fail to defeat the powerful being and when Ella wakes up she is in the clutches of Jernum, the leader of these twisted Psionic Dwarves who has plans for her and Griffo.

It was definitely a session about getting comfortable with the OSR style of play after years of Powered By the Apocalypse. Though I did use the Fronts mechanic from Dungeon World as it is pretty much system agnostic. I’m also looking to incorporate pieces of The Perilous Wilds into our overworld gameplay and world-building. All in all, I am looking forward to seeing where this story goes. For now, I will be cannibalizing pre-made modules and as I become more comfortable maybe writing up my own adventures.

Movie Review – The Eyes of My Mother

The Eyes of My Mother (2016, dir. Nicolas Pesce)

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The A.V. Club said of The Eyes of My Mother as “If Ingmar Bergman helmed Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and I couldn’t think of a more apt description. The film is a coming of age story centered around Francisca, the daughter of a much older husband and wife. Her mother is an immigrant from Portugal who was a surgeon there and is very direct with her daughter about the intricacies of anatomy. A chance encounter with an extremely twisted individual begins Francisca’s journey down a dark, tragic path. The film is segmented into three chapters (Mother, Father, Family) and ends on what is an inevitable note.

The Eyes of My Mother captures that quiet, uncomfortable tone that you see in a lot of European horror films. It never shies away from the blunt horror of what people do, except in one very cleverly cut sequence. It’s not a film with a straightforward villain. A character appears early on and seems like they will be the villain but this is quickly subverted, and the story goes down an arguably darker route. Throughout, there is a dreamlike sense to the film. Its setting is a rural farmhouse, and the events are so far removed from the sight of civilization you can’t help but sink into the impending sense of hopelessness anyone who comes to the house faces. Something felt very familiar about the hushed tone of the horror in Eyes, and after some further research I found out director Pesce came from the Borderline Films production company which are also responsible for the similarly toned Martha Marcy May Marlene and Afterschool.

The plot of the film wouldn’t work so nearly as well without all the tonal elements in place. If the score had been more melodramatic or, performances were emotionally heightened all the horror would have dissipated. Instead, we are forced to linger in moments of horror. We see Francisca standing over a table working a hacksaw through a human body without revulsion, just a stoic sense of hard work. A character walks in on a brutal murder and, without a sound, deals with the killer. A mother runs after her stolen child only to receive a knife to the back and quietly cry out and squirm in pain on the floor. My personal favorite moment is the least explicit and involves the audience understanding information conveyed through a jump cut. An argument is going on between two characters, probably the most emotion at any point in the film. The tension is building, it’s well understood how this is going to end and then CUT. We see Francisca cleaning up the aftermath, and we immediately know what has happened between those scenes.

The Eyes of My Mother is not interested in pinpointing Francisca motivation. There is a possibility it is triggered by the inciting incident in the first act, or it is connected to things her mother taught her. Some reviews have been critical of this fact, but I personally feel that missing piece is essential to establishing horror. The best horror comes out of an inability to understand what is happening. Disorientation inspires a sense of fear in humans and by not having a long winded speech about why Francisca kills the audience is forced to contemplate why the events of the film occurred. In horror, it is what is unsaid and unexplained that haunts us the deepest.

Movie Review – Arrival

Arrival (2016, dir. Denis Villeneuve)

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The likely cause of almost every argument or conflict you have had or will have in your life is an inability to express your point of view through language. Add to this a common desire of getting your point across rather than hearing another’s and you spiral into conflicts that can increase in intensity. Why do we become so focused on what we have to say rather than listen to another? Why is empathy such a hard mindset for us to achieve? Denis Villeneuve’s latest film Arrival wants to explore ideas of communication and perspective and, like all the best science fiction uses a fantastical scenario to present us with very real ideas.

The film opens with a montage showing the birth, life, and death of a little girl. She’s the daughter of Louise Banks (Amy Adams). It’s a pretty rough opening, even more so I would dare than Up. After this montage, we cut to Louise arriving at the college campus where she works as a linguist. The campus is in an uproar, and she eventually learns that twelve strange objects have appeared across the Earth and are believed to be alien craft. Louise is brought into the mission to make successful communication by the U.S. government who are in turn coordinating with the developed nations of the world. Where Arrival goes will definitely surprise you and how the arrival of these beings connects to the story of Louise’s daughter will be the greatest revelation of all.

With this film I can say that Villeneuve has cemented himself as one of my favorite directors of all time and I believe is on his way to becoming one of the best in the art form. I don’t think we have seen his “great film” yet, but we are incredibly close and I’m excited. There is no bombast in his style. While Kubrick was a very much a visual minimalist he could become explosive in his work, not that it was a bad thing and he most certainly earned it. Christopher Nolan is much more in line with Kubrick sensibilities, frigid emotionally but very complex in ideas and concepts. Villeneuve is also working on complex ideas but has a more delicate touch and can bring the human emotional experience into his work without feeling maudlin. He is able to achieve a sort of ambient emotional tone. You feel the emotion of the character without verbalization. Performances are brought out of his actors that convey raw reaction yet filtered through honest human behavior.

Every element of Arrival’s production is at the highest levels. Screenwriter Eric Heisser kept the key pieces of Ted Chiang’s short story “The Story of Your Life” and added the right level of personal intimacy and changes that a film version of that piece needed. Jóhann Jóhannsson, a collaborator with Villeneuve on Prisoners and Sicario, delivers a score that evokes all the profound sense of otherworldliness the visitors should have. The moment Louise arrives at the ship, and first ventures inside is one of the most flawlessly executed sequences I’ve seen in a film all year. Johanssen’s music, the textured production design of Patrice Vermette, and the cinematography of Bradford Young coalesce into a profoundly visceral and eerie experience.

I was a couple years late to Children of Men, missing it’s 2006 release and catching up with it in 2008. What I saw was a film that captured the tone and mindset created by what is probably the most world-changing event in my lifetime, 9/11. Children of Men accurately reflected the sense of tension, paranoia, and xenophobia that was growing at the time. Using science fiction, it was able to tell that story in a way that something set in “our world” would have felt dishonest. Yet through all the despair and decay that director Alfonso Cuarón put onto the screen, he brought us to the conclusion with a sense of hope. I believe Arrival is a film that serendipitously happened at the right time and when it was needed. There is a profound ideological shift going on in our world, and it is incredibly scary right now. In these moments cinema can guide us and help move from these places of despair and remind us there is hope. Arrival is speaking about the growing divisions between nations, communities, and virtually everyone. The need to expand perspectives and work hard to see the world outside of how we’ve always seen it is essential to our survival. The myopic military figures in the film are not villains, they just are too scared to see beyond how they’ve always seen. We have to grasp the idea that life is not about convincing others to see our way but to learn and have empathy for the viewpoint of others. In the same way that Children of Men affected and changed me, Arrival has/is/will do the same and is going to be a film that remains with me for the rest of my life I suspect.

***SPOILERS ABOUT THE ENDING***

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Movie Review – Laurence Anyways

Laurence Anyways (2012, dir. Xavier Dolan)

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Laurence Alia (Melvil Poupaud) is a literature teacher in Montreal who is a long term relationship with Fred (Suzanne Clément). Laurence is also a transgender woman living as a man and has yet to reveal this truth to anyone around her. Laurence and Fred’s relationship is volatile one, and we find it at a high point, but hints show us there have been many ups and downs. When Laurence finally reveals that she wants to begin transitioning, Fred runs but eventually comes back after she’s had some time to process this idea. She encourages Laurence to start dressing in ways she feels comfortable and to take those steps to begin living the life her partner needs. The rest of the film explores the impact this change has on Laurence and Fred’s relationship as well as how Laurence grows and finds support outside his immediate circle.

Xavier Dolan finally stepped away from merely autobiographical work to make a film about an experience he has never had. The result is a film that is ultimately going to turn some people off if they approach it with a certain expectation. Laurence Anyways is not a film about a fully realized transgender woman. It is a film about transition and expectation. It is a film about making compromises when the things we need to survive conflict with the people we love. And while it has “happy ending” it is not the ending a more traditional filmmaker would come to.

At its heart, Laurence Anyways is a highly French film, like all of Dolan’s work. Emotion runs high and big chunks of the film are impressionistic glimpses into the inner thoughts of our characters. A woman sits on a sofa reading a poem, and we see the set engulfed in torrents of water. Laurence and Fred step forth from a house after a critical moment in their relationship and step through a rainfall of clothing. A character hesitates before a doorway, contemplating how their next step will determine the direction of their future and leaves are violently whipped around just beyond the glass letting them know this could be a risky path. Heartbeats was primarily a queer remake of Jules et Jim and, while I’m not an expert in French or queer cinema, I strongly feel Laurence Anyways is taking on tropes of traditional romantic French films and remixing them with this large, crucial idea of transgender identity.

Dolan doesn’t shie from the uncomfortable throughout the film. The first third has a high, positive energy threaded throughout. Once the formal transition begins though we see characters who were accepting in theory start to question how they feel about Laurence. Dolan doesn’t seek to tell a historically factual accounting of a relationship, rather the emotions of a relationship. Once Fred first comes to accept, or think she has accepted, her partner’s choice she ecstatically tells a friend that “Our generation is ready for this! The sky’s the limit!” When you reach the conclusion of the film these words take on a new context and Laurence and Fred’s relationship is not the simple, easy thing that Fred believed.

Laurence is not a perfect representation of a trans person and the film’s lack of actual trans people does feel slightly problematic. Poupaud’s performance, however, feels incredibly honest. The film uses the framing device of Laurence being interviewed 10 years after the start of the film. She explains to the reporter that she had “stealing the life of the woman [she] was meant to be.” Throughout, no matter how other characters react to or try to advise Laurence she staunchly fights to remain true to herself. This doesn’t mean life plays out with sunshine and rainbows, but this central focus keeps her from failing in this larger ideal. Dolan infuses the conclusion with a bittersweet ending. While Laurence has become on the outside the woman she has always been internally, there has been loss along the way. The greatest changes in our life are wrought with pain and loss but, if they lead us to a greater understanding of the truth within ourselves, we will endure.

Movie Review – Monsters

Monsters (2010, dir. Gareth Edwards)

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The film begins with title cards that explain that a NASA probe was launched years ago and brought back microorganisms that have mutated into gigantic monsters that rule a swath of land between the United States and Mexico. This area has been walled off and named “The Infected Zone, ” and no one is allowed to pass without permission from the joint-government operation. Andrew Kaulder (Halt and Catch Fire’s Scoot McNairy) is a photojournalist guilted into escorting his boss’s daughter, Samantha back into the States. The catch is that in two days all travel between countries is going to be blocked off for a six-month long major operation.

With Star Wars: Rogue One being released in theaters this weekend I thought it was the right time to finally sit down and watch director Gareth Edwards’ Monsters. I’d only seen his Godzilla film, which I wasn’t very impressed by. When Edwards was announced as the director of the first Star Wars spinoff, I was a bit confused. These were the same feelings I had when Colin Trevorrow was announced to director Jurassic World, Marc Webb was set to helm the Spider-Man reboot, and Josh Trank was put in charge of Fantastic Four. There appears to be a trend of picking the “hot young director” to take over a major film property. This sort of mentality defies logic because from the outside this feels like a very risky proposition. The only way this really makes sense to me is from the perspective of a controlling studio who wants a director that has a creative vision but hasn’t had time to build that sense of earned professionalism to think they can make the big decisions. “Hot, young directors” let studios and their notes on dailies wield greater power than with a genuinely creative director who has earned it.

Monsters is a beautiful looking film. The cinematography is masterful, and Edwards does an excellent job of evoking scale. Landscapes fill the screen and when the monsters do appear they are represented as truly towering and powerful. It also becomes very clear that Edwards is not interested in telling a story of man vs. monster. The film is purely focused on the two characters traveling across a dangerous land and the relationship that grows between them. The appearance of the monsters is used to underline some larger concept or idea that is going on between them or to emphasize that they are in peril to get home. There are a lot of fascinating ideas at work in Monsters.

Monsters wants to be an insightful character piece, but I personally found the characters to be shallow and ultimately uninteresting. The film’s tone bounces between a straightforward narrative with hints of Cinéma vérité but never delves deep enough. The stories behind both characters are painted in fairly broad strokes (He has a son and has never been involved in his life, She is running from an engagement she really doesn’t want to be in). Dialogue is a little too on the nose and, while these are good actors, I just don’t think they are skilled enough to bring a full performance into every gesture or look that would tell these characters’ stories at a greater depth. Edwards has a background in digital special effects which explains why the film looks so good, but may also inform as to why the characters ultimately feel flat and undeveloped.

Character Development: 7th Sea Second Edition Part 1

Character Development – 7th Sea Second Edition

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7th Sea Second Edition is a role-playing game created and developed by John Wick, Rob Justice, and Mike Curry. The game is centered around the exploits of pirate culture in a fantasy version of 17th century Europe and its associated colonies. Stories told with this system are expected to high adventure full of intrigue, romance, and some sorcery thrown in for good measure. The official setting is that of Théah, a continent rules by various nation-states that are in turn connected to a central church and its theology, sorcerous powers and magic, and the remnants of a lost civilization called the Syrene.

Conflict resolution in the game is handled by the GM declaring a player action as a Risk. The player clarifies their Intent and the GM responds by telling them the appropriate Skill and Trait. These scores are added and the corresponding number of ten-sided dice are rolled. Sets of 10 are the desired outcome and the more you can make the better (7+3, 2+3+5, etc). Each set of 10 is a Raise and can be spent to accomplish everything from overcoming the conflict to inflicting wounds and even establishing a fictional detail.

I read through the details of the setting’s nation-states to determine what sort of character I wanted to create and decided upon Castille as the place of origin. Castille is essentially Spain, even with the emphasis on the Vaticine Church as the chief governing body over the monarchy. With the Church looming so large I wanted to create a character deeply connected to it but in conflict with the powerful organization. I was intrigued by the idea of corruption within the Vaticine and thought up the idea that there could be a society within the Church that were actually worshippers of demonic occult powers. Their long-term goal would be the collapse of the Vaticine internally with their faction rising up to control the organization. My character would be someone who witnessed their dark rite and who they in turn found out saw them at work. I struck upon the idea of a church guard, like the Swiss Guards of the Vatican. This man would be a veteran of war, seeking peace as a soldier for the Church. Now the demonic conspiracy has framed the guard as a heretic, making it seem that he was the one indulging in the dark arts. The guard is now on the run, seeking the help of Church exiles who might also be aware of the conspiracy and know how to aid him in revealing this truth to the world. The guard would be named Moisés Cano.

Once again, I used the three metrics of Maslow, Myers-Briggs, and Covey to determine aspects of my character’s psychology and needs.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Cano is definitely focused on basic needs somewhere between Physiological and Safety. His excommunication from the Vaticine and the subsequent manhunt based on false charges has our hero struggling to find a safe place for more than a few days.

Myers-Briggs – INFJ

After going through the test I found Cano was an INFJ. This means he is like less than 1% of the population, inborn sense of idealism and morality, he is a dreamer but establishes concrete steps. Cano is soft-spoken but with strong opinions and he fights, fiercely for his beliefs. In everything he does, Cano works toward balance, not advantage. He can easily play the role of an extrovert, but needs time to meditate and decompress. In his eyes, the world is full of inequity, but he does not believe it has to be that way. This religious determination can easily wear him down. He is extremely private and finds it hard to open up to others personally. authenticity in romantic relationships and a kinship of shared values is essential in Cano’s mind.

7 Habits Maturity Continuum

Our hero is still struggling with the Private Victory on his way to Independence. He is definitely being proactive (Habit 1) and has begun with the end in mind (Habit 2). However, Cano has not yet put first things first (Habit 3), getting embroiled in other’s problems and stories taking him off track from his personal goal.

20 Questions

Part of 7th Sea character creation are 20 Questions before you even touch the numbers and mechanics of the game. I absolutely love this feature and works especially well for my approach in character creation in this series.

What country is your Hero from? My hero hails from Castille.

How would you physically describe your Hero? My hero is male, physically well built from years of military training, he has the faint trace of a vertical scar across his eye the remnants of a war faraway. Jet black hair with wisps of white through the temples. He walks with a slight limp in his right leg, another souvenir from the war.

Does your Hero have recurring mannerisms? My hero prefers to stand in the background and is very hesitant to step forward and make himself known, especially in intense conflicts. He will let a smile slip through when caught off guard and finds himself trying to suppress it without success.

What is your Hero’s main motivation? My hero desperately seeks to find any who can help him reveal the occult sect taking over the Vaticine.

What is your Hero’s greatest strength? Greatest weakness? My hero’s strength lies his in-depth knowledge of the secret signs and rituals of the secret societies within the Vaticine, helping him find allies no matter which port he comes to. My hero’s weakness are his anxiety attacks brought on by PTSD. Things he saw in the war and the dark rites he witnessed within the walls of the Vaticine leave him prone to these attacks when triggered.

What are your Hero’s most and least favorite things? My hero’s favorite thing are his morning prayers and meditations. They bring him a centered peace that he hopes one day will be permanent. His least favorite thing are onions, onions are disgusting.

What about your Hero’s psychology? My hero wants nothing more than to resolve conflicts without bloodshed, he has seen too much in his lifetime. He will do any and everything to negotiate and compromise even with the deadliest buccaneer or cunning scallywag. My hero often uses food and drink as a negotiation tool, always a simple meal, bread and ale, thinking it will bring he and his adversary together as equals.

What is your Hero’s single greatest fear? That he will lose his peace and end up killing again. He knows he may have to shed blood in self-defense and has from time to time, but he always pulls himself back from unleashing the sort of blood-fueled rage of his youth in the war.

What are your Hero’s highest ambitions? His greatest love? My hero’s greatest ambition was to rise amongst the ranks of the Vaticine Guard until he became one of the anointed protectors of the Hierophant. His plans were put on hold after uncovering an occult conspiracy within the church and fled from those who wish to silence him. My hero’s greatest love is that of the way of peace and sharing his faith with all those he crosses paths with.

What is your Hero’s opinion of his country? My hero deeply loves Castille but worries that the Vaticine has had so much corruption sewn into it that now it’s evil is leaking out into the streets. He saw signs of demonic entities plaguing the land through famine and pestilence.

Does your Hero have any prejudices? My hero still finds his hatred of the Montaigne raised despite his best efforts to suppress it. He saw his comrades brutalized in the war with Montaigne and is always a hair’s breadth away from giving into the violence seething through his veins.

Where do your Hero’s loyalties lie? Despite being far from home and the headquarters of the church, my hero is ever loyal to the Vaticine. This does not mean he believes all clergy above questioning, in fact he will challenge those he sees as committing heresy towards the Articles of Faith.

Is your Hero in love? Is he married or betrothed? My hero loved one of his fellow soldiers, his commanding officer, but she was killed before his eyes. The nightmares still wake him up on nights that are too still and quiet.

What about your Hero’s family? My hero comes from the Cano family. His father is a veteran who found no peace within the faith while his mother was devout. His father turned to drink, likely related to his own PTSD and disappeared for weeks. He was found dead, succumbing to the elements. This pushed our hero’s mother further into the faith. Because he was the son of a soldier, our hero did not come from wealth. His mother poured all their money into the church and when was of age our hero conscripted into the service. Our hero does not know much about his paternal grandparents except that his father was disowned by them for choosing to serve, as they wanted him to go into the priesthood.

How would your Hero’s parents describe him?

Mother: “He was a good boy, until he turned on the faith. I do not know if he can be redeemed now after what the fathers told me. The sins he has committed will require the deepest atonements.”

Father: “I don’t know what sort of man he will grow up to be, likely ruined by my own actions. I have made a place for him in this world without any sort of honor. I have buried him before he has had a chance to live.”

Is your Hero a gentleman or gentlewoman? My hero attempts to be a gentle within the boundaries of his faith, and this leads him down a somewhat chivalrous path. He does not seek the affections of any maiden, but to bring light and truth to the world.

How religious is your Hero? What sect of the Church does he follow? My hero is a highly devout member of the Vaticine Church. He has been labeled a heretic by the church proper due to witnessing the dark occult rites of a corrupted cardinal. While he still practices as a private individual, he struggles to find a way to redeem himself and burn away the corruption in his beloved church.

Is your Hero a member of a guild, gentleman’s club, or secret society? My hero has found himself in the growing favor of Močiutės Skara, a society driven by a compassion to help and aid others.

What does your Hero think of Sorcery? My hero believes all sorcery is making concert with the devils of the earth. He is highly opposed to its use.

If you could, what advice would you give your Hero? Let the peace of your faith guide you, but do not allow yourself to be blinded to the truth.

Next week: Plugging all this character work into the actual mechanics of the system!

Scarlet Heroes – Character and World Creation

scarlet-heroes I decided recently to start a one on one tabletop roleplaying campaign with my wife and chose Scarlet Heroes as the system to use. Scarlet Heroes is an Old School roleplaying game designed specifically for one GM and one player. There is a premade setting that comes with the system, but I prefer to build something with my players, so we have a shared mutual vision of the world. Ariana and I sat down a couple weekends ago and used Ben Robbins’ Microscope to broadly build the world.

Microscope is a game that allows plays to collectively create the history of a world. You start by creating a concept for the world and starting and ending periods. From there, players rotate as the Lens, a role that allows a player to choose an aspect of the world and spend a round building it out through additional Periods, Events, or specific Scenes. Microscope is not about being comprehensive but about working at whatever level of detail you enjoy and interacting with a world that way.

Here are the results of our Microscope game.

The world we created is Muatera, a refuge for a large group of colonists from a world drained of its magic and left lifeless. Piling on board their planar shipwhales, around 350,000 refugees headed for a star that had been found by some of the last mages. They became lost on the way as the magic faded and found Muatera, a decently hospitable planet where a home could be made. Almost as soon as they landed, their shipwhales became stricken with a strange illness and the colonists realized they would be stuck here for the foreseeable
future. The races that made up the colonists were Humans, Elves, Halflings, and Orcs.

The Humans are pretty standard and hold many of the bureaucratic and political positions in the colony. Elves are more esoteric and alien and have developed their own technical magics, separate from the very elemental craft that drained and ruined the Old World. Halflings are the industrious agrarians doing the hard labor without seeking praise or reward beyond a good job done. Orcs are the roaming free spirits, moving in nomadic tribes and exploring Muatera in more detail that any other race.

eecb9967d852b7759d52ad659d98fa34 After about a century, the ruins of the Remnants were discovered buried beneath Muatera. These were the piece of a lost civilization, the details of whom are yet to be fleshed out. Their writings did lead to a cure that helped boost the shipwhale herds and allowed the colonists to visit the three neighboring planets in the system. Three additional races were discovered: The Goliath Tieflings, Hypogeal Elves, and Psionic Dwarves. Relations with each is complex and distinct, but no major conflicts have sprung up…yet.

Our campaign will take place 200 years after the colony began and Ariana decided she wanted to play as a Halfling came up with Estrella Pips, the daughter of a shipwhale rancher and the middle child of five. She has learned magic from some dusty tomes in her parents’ attic, and she uses her magic to midwife the shipwhales. We decided that once the shipwhales reach a certain size, possibly when they develop the capacity to hold their breath in the vacuum of space, they float up through the atmosphere and finish growing to their final massive ship size. Ariana established that Halflings are determined survivors who don’t think much of leisure time but are loyal to the death with their friends and allies. Estrella is the maturity equivalent of 15 human years in age and actually does like the idea of enjoying life and playing.

Some of the threads and hooks she gave me through my questions were:

Shipwhales escaped, Milo (Estrella’s eldest brother) thinks they were stolen by some Orc bandits.
Politicians from Kaphis, the capitol colony, wants to buy up or take land because of the Remnant ruins possibly buried beneath.
The worldscar left by a battle between a Magus and Remnant golems is barren and has caused the fertile land to increase in value and be fought over more violently.

This will be my first major delve into OSR/Dungeon Crawling since 2008 when I ran the dismal (IMO) D&D 4th. I am very excited about this and the world, fed mostly by details from Ariana has me intrigued. I’ve even purchased a halfling wizard mini for her to use. The first actual session will be Saturday, December 17th so look for a write-up after that.

TV Review – Westworld Season 1

Westworld Season 1
(HBO, created for television by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, based on the film by Michael Crichton)

dolores waking up westworld episode three.png

If you have not seen Season 1 of Westworld DO NOT read further. This article contains very detailed spoilers.

Back in 2014 when Spike Jonze’s Her was in theaters, I remember seeing a very awkward interview between Jonze and a reporter on BBC Newsnight. The reporter begins the segment describing the film as being about humanity falling in love with technology. It’s obvious Jonze doesn’t agree with this analysis and attempts to explain his view of the film about any romantic relationship and how often one partner can grow in ways that cause them to fall out of love while the remaining partner has not grown past the love yet. The film is about that emotional dissonance people in dying relationships experience told through a fantastical lens. That’s how I’ve felt reading a lot of pop reviews and analyses of Westworld. The focus is either on the mystery behind everything or seeing it as being about the singularity and advanced artificial intelligence. Westworld is a show that has futuristic technology, but it is not about technology, not about human progress in material terms. It’s a series about self-discovery and the journey inward.

The bicameral mind was an idea developed by Julian Jaynes and published in 1976. He believed early humans had divided cognition which led to the assumption of God when in fact we were speaking with ourselves. Auditory verbal hallucinations resulted in the creation of deities and spirits. Jaynes stated that the modern concept of Consciousness developed around 3,000 years ago which led to introspection and the idea of an inner self. Jaynes compared the psychology of the Old and New Testaments, with the New eschewing legalism for a more human-centered concept of spirituality. There’s no consensus on what causes schizophrenia, this could be a vestige of the early bicameral mind, he theorized. Jayne’s ideas have been routinely shot down as having no scientific footing, one of the main arguments being that language emerged before his timing and that internal consciousness would have had to have existed for language’s development. While Jaynes might have been at something or completely off, the theory is important to understanding what Westworld is attempting to say about our relationship to ourselves and our spirit.

In the final moments of Westworld’s first season, we have two characters, Dolores and Maeve seemingly developing autonomy outside of their creator’s wishes. Throughout the ten episodes, both they and other hosts in the park have experienced contact with an external entity and we’ve been led to believe this is Arnold, the deceased creator of the park. Dolores, through prompting by the park’s co-creator, Ford is brought to the “center of the maze” and finds that the voice she believes to be Arnold’s is supposedly her own inner consciousness developing where once there was none. Dolores then goes on to assassinate Ford, an act the man himself had implied he wanted to be done as part of his creations’ ascendancy. The question then is, did Dolores kill Ford by her own choice or was this yet again another program?

A bit earlier, Maeve, a host who had coerced human technicians into aiding her escape from the facility, learned her entire plan to recruit fellow hosts and stage an escape had been programmed into her. Her entire journey of self-awareness and autonomy was now just the bidding of the masters she had been trying to escape. Maeve angrily tries to reject this and continues on her path to the last train out of Westworld. As she is about to depart, Maeve is reminded of the daughter in her memories, a daughter that logic tells her was just another host and no real relation to her, but the memory and the emotions connected to this child force her to disembark, an act that is truly breaking her programming. I believe Maeve has indeed broken from her programming with this act of humanity while Dolores is still in the process of evolving.

episode-2-william We are William. The audience, unsatisfied with the story we are given, petulant and entitled, believing that nihilistic, destructive behavior toward this former object of our love is warranted. How could it end like that? They didn’t explain what it meant! They were just making it up as they went! I wasted hours of my life on this stupid thing! It’s no coincidence that J.J. Abrams was the producer of Westworld, a creator who has been the bullseye of endless online hate towards his work. William is us in that he sees himself as the protagonist of this story. Why? Because he paid to be, I guess? Humanity does an excellent job of elevating the material Self over the internal Self, but more on that a little later. William is continually told that The Maze is not for him, yet he never listens and believes he is entitled to the Maze and this abstract finality he thinks he was promised.

This season was full of meta-commentary about creators, their creations, and how the audience can override the artistic vision for “what sells.” Loops are those conventional narrative formulas and tropes that are trotted out time and time again because they knew the audience will mindlessly eat it up. Shallow mysteries are strung out, diverting the audience’s attention from thinking about the emotions and psyche of characters or using this as a moment of self-reflection. Ford sums it up in his final speech to the board of directors, but actually to the viewing audience:

“I’ve always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us become the people we dreamed of being. Lies that told a deeper truth. For my pains, I got this, a prison of our own sins. You can’t change, or don’t want to change, because you’re only human after all.”

I believe we must step back even further to see what Westworld is trying to tell us about ourselves. The show makes no bones about saying how we consume life is equally important to what aspects of life you consume. The visitors to Westworld, from the arrogant Logan to the faux-noble William, consume life from the point of view of entitlement and expectation. People are continually unsatisfied with life yet never contemplate what they have done to make it such an unfulfilling experience. I go back to that old dictum of Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Unlike the guests, the awakened hosts have keyed into the central element of life that must be tackled: Suffering. Suffering is essential for growth, but that growth is contingent on learning how to overcome your suffering.

Life cannot exist without suffering and how you deal with it determines the trajectory of your future. You can become consumed with hatred and seek to lash out and destroy those who caused your suffering, you can submit to the suffering and passively take it, or you can seek out some way in the middle. Westworld makes no formal judgment about that choice, at least not yet. Dolores chooses, apparently, to stand up against the architects of her suffering, Arnold chooses to die rather than continue living to feel his suffering, William believes life is nothing but suffering and accepts taking it while giving it back.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Westworld, and this is just scratching the surface. The series was co-created by Jonathan Nolan, writer of pretty much every Christopher Nolan film and, as I saw someone say this week, he is able to write about complex ideas and respect that the audience can understand. In future, it would be interesting to look at a lot of the dual relationships in the series (Dolores/Maeve, Logan/William, William/Ford, William/Teddy, Teddy/Dolores, etc.) and explore what these dualities are saying about audiences, creators, and art.